Website Support – What is Website Support as a Service?

Website support as a service refers to an outsourced service that offers technical website support. Support may be in the form of development, hosting, or security. This allows companies to focus on their primary goals .

Learn how website support as a service can help you.

Importance of website support for small business owners

Small business owners often lack the time or technical background to maintain their online presence effectively. Partnering with a dedicated web support company provides peace of mind. Comprehensive website support services handle complex security measures, critical plugin updates, and server optimizations so you can focus on driving business growth.

Benefits Of Website Support For Small Business Owners

There are many benefits of website support for small business owners. As with everything, there is a learning curve to website management but here are some of the benefits a small business owner could expect.

• Ensuring optimal website security from threats such as DDOS attacks or hacks.
• Improving overall Performance of the site through improved server spec and cache.
• Enhancing User Experience for the customer.
• Ensuring Compatibility and reducing conflicts with plugins, themes, etc.
• Ensuring consistent compliance with accessibility laws.
• Lastly, managing website hosting and uptime.

Types Of Web Support Services for Businesses

There are two main aspects of website support services. Both services may be ongoing or over a contracted period, these services can be regarded as regular maintenance and troubleshooting and issue resolving. 

These services are a necessity for most businesses as they help give the owner piece of mind.

Regular Maintenance

Regular maintenance of websites includes performing scheduled updates and checks. These are essential for preventing potential issues and security threats. Being proactive minimizes downtime and keeps your website running without a hitch.

This service should be a standard service for all businesses, as this may minimize issues later down the line and reduces the risk of larger problems becoming problematic.

Troubleshooting And Issue Resolving

Resolving of issues and troubleshooting websites would be classified as a “project basis”. In most cases, once the issue has been resolved the support stops. Some clients, however, would move to regular maintenance to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

These issues could be a website hack or another security vulnerability. There may also be accessibility issues through changes in legislation. These kinds of issues require troubleshooting and fixing in a time-sensitive manner.

What’s Included in Ongoing Website Support Services?

There are a variety of support services that are necessary for most websites and certainly for ongoing maintenance. These services will depend on which CMS you are using or if the site has been custom-coded – which language has been used. 

Here is a suggested list of support services you may expect.

Technical Support

Technical support involves assisting clients with various technical support solutions. The errors that a technical team may have to fix could be server-side caching errors, website loading problems, or server-related errors.

Examples of some technical errors that support may be required to fix can include the following:

• HTTP Error 400 (Bad Request)
• HTTP Error 401 (Unauthorized)
• 403 Forbidden/Access Denied
• Error 404 Page Not Found
• Error 408 Request Timeout
• 500 Internal Server Error
• Error 501 Not Implemented
• 502 Service Temporarily Overloaded
• 503 Service Unavailable
• Connection Refused by Host
• DNS Resolution Errors

As you can see by the list, it is an extensive list of server-related errors that may arise.

Security Vulnerabilities And Monitoring

Websites can be exploited by hackers. They may cause disruptions to your site or breaches that compromise the website and data as a whole. Common causes for the issues include unsecure hosting, weak passwords, plugins, and themes that have security vulnerabilities.

Monitoring all these variables is essential. The website would require regular scans for vulnerabilities as well as have consistent updates. Having a firewall such as a WAF is also a great idea. You should also have an SSL certificate installed along with the usual security applications. There are many of these available that handle different aspects of your security.

A regular security audit can help identify vulnerabilities before they are exploited and also may alert administrators of potential issues before it is exploited.

Fix Issues Such As Crashes Or Page Load

Fixing issues such as crashes or page load errors would help significantly improve user experience. The common reasons for websites crashing are server overloading, coding errors, or conflicts. Server-side repairs may be necessary in many cases.

Identifying the issues requires technical expertise. Overloaded servers need to either be scaled or diagnosed as to what is overloaded. In some cases, the website theme or plugins could be overloading it. There are cases where DDOS attacks overload servers.

Page load errors may occur from server-side issues or cache errors as well as plugin conflicts. Much like crashes, diagnosing the problem and fixing the cause is the only way to ensure the problem stops occurring.

Updates

Regularly updating your website is essential for security, site performance, and overall functionality. These updates include updating content management systems (CMS), plugins, and themes in order to ensure the site isn’t vulnerable to attacks.

Consistent updates also reduce the risk of incompatibility of plugins that can break sites. In most cases, safe updates might be a good idea. Implementing a scheduled update routine that is consistently monitored and tested to ensure site stability.

Being proactive with security and regular updates will give you peace of mind.

Backups And Site Restoration

Regular offsite backups are a critical measure to protect your site in the event of a hack or a crash. Backing up a site to Google Drive or Dropbox would help restore the website in a matter of minutes. You can set things up so that the updates are either manually or automatically updated.

Site restoration usually happens after a site or server has crashed. To restore the website, the offsite backup is used to re-upload the site. This may potentially be to another server. It may be wise to diagnose the issue to ensure it never happens again.

Implementing offsite backups can put your mind at ease knowing that if there is an issue, you have a solution and your downtime may only be long enough to change DNS settings.

Domain And Hosting Challenges

Domains and hosting impacts site performance and accessibility. Companies face challenges such as domain expiration, DNS misconfigurations such as DMARC or SPF records and hosting outages can lead to websites and email being down.

Regarding domains, expired or dropped domains can lead to loss of access to a website. This can lead to the loss of a website and the inability to get the domain back. In order to avoid this, it is best to set up an auto-renew function. Another issue that is all too common is DNS misconfigurations. As mentioned above, navigating authentication of a domain or adding SPF and DMARC records are a frustrating problem that requires the knowledge and skills necessary to fix.

Hosting outages result in downtime that affects User Experience and revenue. These are common during sales during Black Friday and the holiday seasons. Having reliable and reputable hosting with a good uptime SLA and support is the best solution for a company. 

Another really common problem we see is resource limitations on shared hosting plans. This equates to slow performance during high-traffic periods. In many cases, the servers may even crash. In a case like that, it may be best to have a scalable dedicated VPS server running your website.

Web Compliance such as Accessibility And GDPR

In order to avoid any legal issues businesses need to ensure they maintain web compliance for laws such as accessibility laws and legislation surrounding privacy and data collection.

Accessibility laws refer to compliance laws regarding individuals with disability accessing and using your website. Ensuring your site adheres to accessibility standards such as WCAG helps people with disabilities navigate and use your website. Changes that assist people using the site may be keyboard navigation, Alt text on images, and ensuring proper color contrast.

Regular accessibility audits and user testing can help identify errors and help you rectify them in a timely manner.

Migrations

A website migration involves the transferring of a website from one environment to another. This may be a staging environment for a hosting provider. It may also include changing hosting providers, changing domain service providers or changing the CMS. A successful migration ensures minimal or no downtime or data loss.

How to Choose the Right Web Support Company

Selecting the right web support company requires evaluating your technical stack, response time SLAs, and budgetary constraints. When hiring an agency for web support services, ensure they specialize in your platform (e.g., WordPress or custom platforms) and provide proactive monitoring rather than basic reactive fixes.

How much is your budget?

Starting with a budget will dictate what services you can afford as well as which potential companies are out of your reach. You should also evaluate the cost of the service in relation to the benefits and its impact on your business.

What is the scope of the service provided: 

Another important factor is determining the scope of the service provider. Sometimes the services on offer don’t relate to your needs. The service also needs to align with your specific business needs. Every service provider has a list of services, if they do not provide you with the necessary service you require it may be best to go elsewhere.

A great example of this is if the company can’t provide a service for a hacked website and your website has been hacked, it serves no use to you.

Does the company have the necessary expertise?

Having the necessary expertise to perform the necessary tasks is a no-brainer, but about highly technical issues you encounter? Navigating the complexities of GDPR or Accessibility laws is extremely important as there are legal consequences. 

There are also technical factors involved in website maintenance. If you have a custom-coded website in Node JS and has been hacked, the service provider needs to know not only how to fix a hacked site but also Node JS code in order to fix it.

So ask whether the prospective company is well versed in all matters of your website and the problems you need to fix and further ongoing maintenance if needed.

Conclusion

Web support is the foundation of a successful web presence and is especially important for small businesses. Prioritize this service. Always ensure you have a secure, high-performing website that contributes to your company’s growth. 

Learn about our website management and support services here!