Why do I need a website support contract?

When hosting a website with Granite 5, having a support contract is vital to maintaining the security, performance, and overall health of your site. Regular updates and maintenance significantly reduce the risk of security breaches and ensure your site operates smoothly. Without a support contract, outdated software can leave your website—and others on shared servers—exposed to vulnerabilities, making it an easy target for hackers.

A Granite 5 support contract includes time for applying necessary updates and fixes to WordPress, plugins, and the server itself. Regular maintenance ensures your website runs efficiently, preventing potential downtime and lowering the risk of cyberattacks, which could disrupt your business operations. Plus, it often covers backups, security monitoring, and serves as an insurance policy in case your website gets hacked.

A support contract typically includes essential maintenance tasks to keep your website secure and functional. It also allows time for fixing bugs, recovering from an attack, and using monitoring tools to maintain the server hosting your website. Additionally, support ensures your site and its connected services stay updated and secure.

Please note, our support contracts do not cover new feature requests or additional functionality changes—these are managed under our Continuous Improvement (CI) service. They also don’t cover the restoration of backups due to user error, or changes required because of third-party integrations. Keep in mind that support can only be provided for the services we supply. For example, changes to DNS or email services may fall outside the scope of your contract.

If WordPress says you have updates pending, don’t panic! This is usually normal. WordPress often releases updates, followed by a series of plugin updates that cascade afterwards. It’s not a sign that your site is being neglected.

It’s also common for hosts like Granite 5 to hold off on applying updates right away, unless there’s a known security risk. This is because updates sometimes introduce bugs that require quick fixes. By giving updates time to stabilise, we ensure the best possible performance for your site.

We encourage you to manage your website’s content. However, avoid adding, removing, or updating plugins on your own. Doing so can introduce conflicts that could harm your website, requiring additional time and effort to repair. Think of it like a “warranty void if broken” policy.

We carefully audit and test plugins to ensure they are well-maintained and won’t conflict with others installed on your site. We do this on a cloned version of your website to minimise any risk to your live site.

A staging site is a clone of your live website that we use to test updates and develop new features before applying them to your live site. It’s a crucial step to ensure that any changes made won’t negatively impact your website. However, because it’s a testing environment, any content you add to a staging site could get wiped without notice. It’s not meant for regular use, and there’s no automated way to transfer content from staging to live.

This lack of automation is intentional to avoid conflicts between the two environments. Any changes on the live site, such as new posts or customer data, could be overwritten if content was automatically transferred from staging. To protect your live data and ensure smooth operation, content updates should be made directly on the live site, while the staging site remains focused on testing technical changes.

Plugins add specialised functionality to your WordPress site. While many are free, some come with a cost—typically around £100 per year. Despite this, plugins often provide better value than building custom features from scratch, especially for complex requirements like payment management.

However, plugins should be used sparingly. Since they’re external projects, they can sometimes conflict with other plugins or slow down your website. Just like installing too many apps on your laptop can make it sluggish, adding too many plugins can have the same effect on your website’s performance.

A support contract is essential for maintaining your website’s security, stability, and performance. We won’t build your site without a Granite 5 support contract in place. It covers crucial updates, backups, and security measures, allowing you to focus on managing your content while leaving the technical side to us.

All of our clients have a support contract in place. Below are a few examples of businesses we’ve helped.

Granite 5 revitalised U3AC’s branding and developed a new website focused on enhancing the member experience. We integrated a custom-built membership management platform to streamline registration and course bookings, a more efficient and user-friendly process.

Since the website launch, we’ve also taken over the management and support of their back-end membership portal, delivering increased security, improved user experience, and reduced downtime through our support contract. This ensures smooth ongoing operations and provides members with a reliable, seamless experience.

Granite 5 partnered with The Association for Nutrition to deliver a full brand transformation, a redesigned website with an improved user experience, and seamless CRM integration with HubSpot. Dr. Glenys Jones, CEO of The Association for Nutrition, expressed her satisfaction with the process, noting that the team at Granite 5 guided them smoothly through the branding and website transformation. She added that stakeholders were delighted with the final results, reflecting the success of the project.