Most people judge a website by how it looks, which is fair enough. The design is the part you see every day, and the part your customers react to first. But a good design only does its job if the foundations underneath it are solid, and those foundations are the part nobody notices when they are working properly.
So here is a plain look at what we put in place on every build, and what the ongoing hosting and support actually covers.
Hosting built for speed and security
Every Redback website runs on enterprise-grade hosting, the kind of infrastructure larger organisations use. That is a deliberate choice. Basic shared hosting puts hundreds of websites on the same server, all competing for the same memory and processing power, and your website slows down when someone else’s gets busy.
Pages are cached, meaning ready-made copies are stored and served instantly, and they are delivered from locations physically close to the visitor rather than from one server far away. Both of those things shave real time off how quickly a page appears, which matters for how people experience your business and for how Google sees it. We covered that in more detail in our recent post on website speed.
Security is built into the hosting rather than bolted on afterwards:
- Two layers of firewall checking every request before it reaches your website, so suspicious traffic is stopped before it gets anywhere near it.
- Real-time malware scanning, which watches for malicious code rather than checking occasionally.
- Protection against DDoS attacks, where a website is hit with floods of fake traffic designed to overwhelm it and knock it offline.
- A free SSL certificate, which gives you the padlock and the secure connection in the browser address bar.
- Daily backups, stored off-site and kept for 14 days, so there is always a recent version to go back to.
On top of that, we carry out monthly updates and checks by hand as part of our support. Automated updates can quietly break something, so we would rather apply them ourselves and check that nothing has been affected.
The paid tools behind the build
A Redback website is built with professional tools, most of them paid for with annual licences. Between them they handle four jobs.
The first is design and layout, so we can build exactly what was agreed and you can edit your own content afterwards without breaking the design. The second is dynamic content: listings, filters and custom fields for things like products, jobs or events, so content that changes regularly is manageable rather than hand-built page by page. The third is automatic image compression, which keeps photos sharp while reducing the file size so pages are not slowed down by them. The fourth is caching, storing ready-made copies of pages so they load almost instantly.
We keep those licences active, updated and compatible with each other, so you never have to track renewal dates or wonder why something has stopped working. This is a big part of what the ongoing hosting and support costs cover. Active licences also mean security fixes and improvements keep arriving rather than stopping the day the licence lapses.
Making sure your enquiries arrive
Email has quietly become one of the harder things to get right. Inboxes filter far more aggressively than they used to, and a message sent automatically from a website contact form is exactly the kind of thing that can land in spam or go missing altogether.
To reduce that risk, we send contact form messages through a dedicated, paid email delivery service built for the job, rather than sending them from the website’s own server. Mail from a properly configured delivery service is far more likely to be treated as legitimate.
We will be honest: it is not perfect, and nobody can promise every email lands in every inbox, because filtering rules keep changing. It does make a real difference though.
As a safety net, every form submission is also saved in the back of your website admin. If an email is ever caught by a filter, the enquiry is still sitting there waiting for you.
Set up to be measured and found
Google Analytics and Google Search Console are set up and connected as part of the build, so useful information starts collecting from day one rather than from whenever someone thinks to add it. Analytics shows how many people visit, where they come from and what they do once they arrive. Search Console shows how your website appears in Google, which searches bring people to it, and anything Google has spotted that needs attention.
An SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) plugin is installed on every website. It handles the behind-the-scenes detail search engines read: page titles, descriptions, sitemaps and structured data, which is extra information that helps Google understand what a page is about. Depending on your website plan and any SEO work we are doing for you, this may be the free or the paid version.
Cookie consent that is set up properly
Analytics and other tools store small files called cookies in visitors’ browsers, and UK and EU rules say visitors should be told about them and given a choice.
We add a consent tool to every website and set it up properly rather than dropping in a generic banner. It scans the website to find the cookies actually in use, so what visitors see reflects what your website really does. We are not solicitors and this is not legal advice, but the technical side is done properly and you have something sensible in place.
Why we do it this way
None of this is flashy, and most clients never think about it. That is rather the point. When the hosting is solid, forms are arriving, data is collecting and the basics are covered, we can spend our time improving your website instead of fixing its foundations.
We have been building websites from our base in Coleraine since 1999, and the same people who design a website look after it afterwards, with no outsourcing and direct access to the designer. Ongoing support is simply part of how we work, and these quiet details are a big reason clients stay with us for years rather than months.
The best parts of a website are the ones you never see
A website that loads quickly, sends you enquiries and never falls over looks like nothing is happening at all. That is the version of success worth aiming for, and it comes from the parts nobody notices.
If you are not sure what is in place on your current website, or whether anything has lapsed, get in touch and we are happy to take a look and sort that for you.