Support Plans typically start from just 4 hours of billable time per month. We recommend all eCommerce clients opt-in to an on-going support plan, as it affords a greater degree of peace of mind and allows more time to focus on what really matters - driving sales, selling products and acquiring new leads.

We understand that running a business can be both challenging and time-consuming, so we’ve devised a flexible system to allow you to pre-plan a timely response for whatever may need to be urgently addressed, technical support queries, software & security updates, training, or help with creating graphics for example. A resource that offers peace of mind, helping you to maintain maximum return on investment by minimising downtime and improving the overall efficiency of your Magento website.

As an Adobe Bronze Business Solution Partner, we also provide free health-checks and can advise on your site’s status and any improvements required.

Overview

• Adobe Bronze Business Solution Partner
• Team of Magento Certified Developers & Solution Specialists
• In-depth maintenance checks routinely performed on your site once per month
• Priority critical incident response
• Dedicated Account Manager
• Dedicated client dashboard and ticket-based management & reporting system
• Platform monitoring via Pingdom
• Pro-active security updates
• Flexible budget management with reduced rate over-run.

Get in touch to find out how our Support Team can help you increase traffic and drive sales.

Support Plan Advantages 

• No 1 hour minimum charge – support work is billed in 15 minute increments - much more cost effective for smaller maintenance jobs
• Faster reaction times - we review our support schedule daily, so we can action client needs more quickly
• Same day response - we aim to respond to support tickets within 24hrs during the working week
• Full, live reporting on your project time & budget - we utilize a dedicated CRM system to estimate, track and update your plan
• Access to bug tracking software - to raise issues as they become apparent and track their progress
• Secure off-site cloud code storage - this allows us to track differing versions, protects against hardware failures and allows multiple developers to work on the codebase efficiently without causing conflicts
• No development outsourcing - we operate a team of thirteen developers and our policy is not to outsource any work; this makes for better coding, improved project management and efficient delivery.

Support Overview

Our support includes all of the below:

• Diagnosis and resolution of problems or performance deficiencies, billable in 15 minute increments
• Any upgrades to your Magento website or modules for which licenses are held, within the period of the Support Plan
• In-depth maintenance checks routinely performed on your site once per month
• Free telephone support for calls under 10 minutes duration.
• Immediate access to any SUPEE patches or bug repair releases for your Magento site
• Access to a dedicated account manager for any training needed on the Magento system.

Support Charges

Our support charges are as follows: Typically 4 hours per month (charged at £100 per hour) pre-billed at £400 per month. For example, we would bill at the beginning of December for a Support Plan month that runs through January. The next billing would then be invoiced at the beginning of January for the month of February.

All estimates are based on a blended hourly rate of £100p/hr +VAT, so you do not pay more for escalations or senior input.

The Process

In general, our support onboarding will follow the below process.

1/ Support Onboarding Process & Initial Site Audit

Site Audit - 5 hours

This allows us to supply a detailed report on the suitability of your site build in terms of ongoing support and will include a list of approved module vendors, raise any concerns with suggestions and inform of noticeable improvements e.g. Pagebuilder.

Dev site setup- Estimate: 4 hours
Dev site hosting- £25.00 per month (ongoing)

2/ Upgrade

We would treat the upgrade as a mini project in our project team, therefore you would have a dedicated Project Manager as your first point of contact by phone or email.

Your Project Manager would set up your Synergist job and Mantis board and as part of the onboarding process walk you through day to day management. Once set up on synergist we can produce official itemised estimates for approval and then invoicing based on the same. When a start date is established, we will schedule and provide you with an expected completion date with a dedicated Magento Certified Developer. To refine our upgrade estimate, we would perform the upgrade on the development site and determine the fallout requiring fixing as this is predominately where the time is spent.

3/ Security and Maintenance Report

This report allows us to check things like the database and Magento logs for any errors that should be rectified and report on areas of the site that could do with improvements or changes.

Below is a copy of the list of areas we run through as part of this report.

Our monthly maintenance checks

We perform the following checks every month to ensure your website is running as efficiently and securely as possible. Checks carried out:

• Review Magento Version
• Check PHP Version
• List modules (Outdated)
• List modules (no longer in use)
• List unwanted files in var/webroot
• Review DB Logs
• Review Site speed
• Review SSL Configuration
• Review Cron logs to ensure that cron jobs are executing correctly
• Archive and delete all log files (Magento, PHP, Apache/Nginx, MySQL) Delete archives older than 30 days.

Security

• Admin Login Security Check (Admin Path/IP Restiction)
• Review file permissions for Magento code, /var, /var/logs and /media. Ensure they are secure by Magento standards
• Review Wordpress version (If neccessary)
• GIT status review - Ensure that there are no files on the server modified as part of production hotfix and unchecked into GIT (Requires GIT tot be setup on server for development updates)
• Pen Test (6 Month Review).

Module Review

• Review versions of modules used on-site and update if necessary.

Estimate for this to be carried out is 1 hour support on a monthly (or quarterly) basis.

4/ Performance Audit: 4 hours

Performance is a crucial metric for improving SEO and conversions. It is an ongoing process and needs to be tailored to the specific goals of an individual website. There are many metrics available, some of these will be more meaningful to your goals than others, and many of them can vary depending on the testing scenario.

Popular tools for auditing performance such as Google’s Lighthouse, while giving valuable advice on optimisations to proceed with, should not be treated as a definitive overview of your site’s performance or how it will affect your SEO. For example, Google Lighthouse scores can vary dramatically between two tests on the same page. This is because depending on how and where you tests run, there are many variables at play, these include:

• Your local network - Local networks have several variables including packet loss and traffic prioritisation
• Your hardware
• Other applications running on your machine
• Your browser
• Web server variability - The web servers used can have a variable load and do not always respond with the same delay.

Some of these variables can be mitigated with throttling; however, this is not always the case. This means you can make tweaks to your website and testing environment to produce a perfect lighthouse score. However, it will not be indicative of a real user’s experience or your search engine rankings. The audit that we’ll conduct of your site will provide you with the following:

• An overview of current website optimisation
• Immediate actions to improve performance.

This audit is estimated at 4 hours and will be presented to you in a PDF format. Each audit is unique to the individual site and will include detailed estimates on any actions we recommend.
Please note: This work will be undertaken by a senior Magento specialist as opposed to being a 'bot' that generates a low level / standard report.

5/ User Experience Audit: 4hours

The aim of this review is for a dedicated frontend developer to analyse aspects of your website to highlight issues which may have a negative impact on both functionality and user experience, included with this service we will also outline solutions to mitigate or solve these problems.

From past case studies we have found that a UX review, along with implementing the suggested solutions can have a significant impact in conversions and revenue. In a single project, over a three-week period, our team at Absolute worked on several individual UX issues which resulted in a decreased page load time and an increase in conversion rate, overall the client saw an initial gain of 35% in sales revenue from the first week. The UX review consists of a 4-hour audit where the results will be presented in a PDF format. All audits are tailored to each individual website, so our clients are clear on the negatives and the improvements which if implemented, can make a key difference to customer conversion.

The UX review consists of a 4-hour audit where the results will be presented in a PDF format. All audits are tailored to each individual website, so our clients are clear on the negatives and the improvements which, if implemented, can make a key difference to customer conversion. 

Other specific actions include:  

• Review Google Analytics: looking at conversion rates, checkout abandonment and checkout drop-off. We'll also review overall metrics such as bounce rate and average session duration. Key areas such as the PLP and PDP will also be reviewed to identify UX issues. The basket/checkout will be a primary focus. 

• Common trends when a customer first lands on the homepage and how they navigate the site.  

• Review of the account sign up process and account dashboard. 

• Review into the mini cart interaction and navigation 

• Hotjar / Clarity will also be reviewed to identify UX holes or bottlenecks if available 

The performance and UX review can be conducted concurrently with the upgrade.

6/ User Interface / Design Audit : 8hrs 

We adopt a brief page-by-page look at the User Interface (UI) of your site. The audit is intended to offer suggestions that can be applied to improve the overall usability of the site without large scale redesign or long development times.

During the review, the site is 'sense checked' to see how the sites UI can be improved including the general styling of the site, since this is a key factor in the overall usability of the site which can then have an impact on conversions and customer journeys.

Furthermore, considerations such as functionality working well on small screens and touch devices are given significant attention in line with the continued trend of mobile devices being the primary way sites are viewed.

And an in-depth competitor analysis is also undertaken to see what else can be done to keep up with current trends.

7/ Ongoing Admin

When joining support, your account will arrange weekly/biweekly or a monthly call to discuss progress, tickets, or just a general catch up of your support board this can be arranged.

All clients that are in support have a monthly support plan; we recommended the minimum hours to be 4 hours per month or 12 hours per quarter. This secures you as a priority in support and allows us to schedule your work in as quickly as possible. However, if you would like to increase that amount, we can do this. Support hours can be used towards development, design or training for your team to use new features (for example if Pagebuilder was implemented). Our design team also are skilled in asset creation and video editing if required. All work will be estimated and will require approval before scheduling with one of our developers. You will have full visibility of what time we put in the schedule.

Estimates are purely just estimates but we try to be as accurate as we can on a best effort basis, sometimes tickets can be more complicated than they seem, therefore we will inform you as soon as that has been made aware to us. The time estimated is billed in 15 minute increments and you will only be charged for work carried out within those increments.

The work is scheduled on a week commencing (w/c) basis, this is to allow flexibility in the schedule with our developers in case any urgent tasks take precedence. There are exceptions for this, as we can provide dates for work scheduled in if you need to know the exact date because it requires external input. We also try and provide you the dates when any of the work is being deployed live.

Cancellation

If at any time you wish to cancel your support with us, we ask that you provide us 30 days’ notice that you are leaving. As your site is on a dedicated server there would be no transfer costs.

Out of hours support

Our support offering is currently restricted to office hours, but we do respond to tickets on a ‘best effort’ basis out of these hours (8:30 – 6:30). We also offer extended cover during the Christmas and New Year period by arrangement.

Get in touch to find out how our Support Team can help you increase traffic and drive sales.