Digital Ohana
"Will I be able to update it myself?" It's one of the first questions business owners ask us, and it's a fair one. Nobody wants to wait weeks or pay a lot to change their hours.
For years, the standard answer was a content management system, or CMS. That's the admin panel behind sites like WordPress, where you log in and edit pages yourself. It sounds like the obvious choice. But for many local businesses, it's worth stepping back and asking how often you'll really use it, and what it costs to keep it running.
What a CMS is
A CMS is software that sits behind your website and lets you edit content through a dashboard instead of code. You log in, change some text or swap a photo, click save, and the site updates.
For businesses that publish constantly, like news sites or companies with a large blog, that's genuinely useful. A CMS is a good tool. The question is whether it's the right tool for you.
The hidden cost of an admin panel
A traditional CMS doesn't just sit there quietly. It's running software, usually with a database and a collection of plugins, and all of it needs care:
- Regular updates. The CMS itself, its theme and each plugin get updates, often frequently. Skipping them can leave security holes.
- Things can break. Updates sometimes conflict with each other, and a contact form or layout stops working.
- Security upkeep. Popular admin panels are common targets, so the login page and plugins need watching.
- Speed costs. Pages built on the fly from a database, plus plugin code, tend to load slower than a custom-coded site.
None of that is a reason to panic. Lots of businesses run a CMS just fine. But someone has to look after it, and that someone is often the business owner, late at night, wondering why the site looks broken.
How often do you really update your site?
Here's what we see with most local businesses in Las Vegas and Hawaii. After launch, the changes are usually small and occasional:
- Updating hours, especially around holidays.
- Changing a price or adding a service.
- Swapping in new photos of recent work.
- Posting a seasonal special or announcement.
That's often a handful of changes a month, sometimes fewer. Keeping a full CMS updated and secure all year for that is a lot of overhead.
Option 1: Let us handle it with the care plan
This is the simplest option for most businesses. Our optional Site care plan is $79 a month and includes up to 30 minutes of changes each month, done within 2 business days. Growth sites and online stores have larger plans, $119 and $149 a month, with up to an hour of changes, and Store care covers adding and editing products for you. You send us a quick message with what you want changed, and we take care of it.
The plan also covers updates, monitoring, backups and a monthly leads report, so you can see the calls and form submissions your site is bringing in. It's month to month, with 30 days' notice to cancel.
For most businesses, this ends up easier than logging into a dashboard. You don't need to remember a password, learn an editor or worry about breaking the layout.
Option 2: Pay as you go
If you only need changes once in a while, you don't need a plan at all. Without the care plan, small updates are $50, an extra page is $150, and larger work is $75 an hour. You only pay when you need something.
Option 3: A simple editing setup for frequent editors
Some businesses really do update often. Maybe you post new listings every week, run a menu that changes daily, or want to write your own blog posts. In that case, being able to edit things yourself makes sense.
We can add a simple editing setup to a custom-coded site for the parts you change often, without turning the whole site into a plugin-heavy system. Because it depends on what you want to edit and how often, we quote this separately so you know the cost up front.
What about moving off an existing CMS?
If you're on WordPress, Wix or Squarespace now and the upkeep is wearing you down, moving is more straightforward than many people expect. We move your content and photos, set up redirects from every old URL so your search rankings carry over, and leave your business email untouched. Our website migration page explains the process.
Let's figure out what fits you
There's no single right answer here. It depends on how often you change things and how much you want to do yourself. If you're not sure, request a free site audit. We'll look at your current site and send a plain-English list of what's costing you calls and what to fix first, and we're happy to talk through how you'd like to handle updates. You can also see all the options on our pricing page.
