Significance of Laravel Maintenance & Support Services

When it comes to expanding your business, you must carry out maintenance and support services for your Laravel websites and web applications. The service is focused on updating the Laravel and PHP versions, optimizing the images and database, integrating with third-party services and others. This helps the business to offer consistently better user experience and continue to have a strong online presence.

Why Laravel Website Maintenance and Support Services are important?

In order to keep your customers engaged on the site, you need to offer them a consistently better experience. This is where website maintenance and support services come in. These services ensure that the Website will continue to offer new content and better browsing experience to the users on the Website. For a business, regular maintenance plays a very critical role. You need to understand that if the customers find your Website to be not easy-going and know that it does not offer much value, then they will stop using your site. This means you will experience fewer sales and the whole purpose of building such a website in the first place will get compromised.

There are a few benefits of carrying out website maintenance and support services and they are:

• Technical updates
• Fresh content
• Better customer experience
• Improved search rankings
• Saves effort and cost

How to choose a Laravel Developer to maintain your Website?

Building a business website is of foremost importance today. Apart from offering an online presence, web solutions when building in the right manner offers the power to rule the world market. When it comes to developing your Laravel site, the main thing that should concern you is the developers you hire for the job. However, you should also keep in mind the maintenance and support services that you will need to keep your Website running as per your business expectations. This means you should hire Laravel developer or developers who are capable enough to offer consistent maintenance services for a long time.

When you are choosing a Laravel developer for your website maintenance service, you need to look into certain things. They are like:

Have an idea about what you want

Before you set out on the task of finding the best Laravel developers for the job, you need to have an idea about what you want to get done. This means you need to be clear about your requirements and goals. This is important as Laravel developers are hired for a variety of works like custom development, module or extension development, Laravel app development and for support and maintenance services. Here, in this case, you are in search of finding someone who can take up the Laravel support and maintenance services and so should be clear about the same from the beginning itself. Such a step will prove to be much beneficial when you are trying to find a Laravel developer for your project.

Listen to what their clients have to say about them

Good words always matter, hence take some time to know what the past clients say about your prospect developers. Such client testimonials will give you an idea about the kind of work you can expect from them. It will also let you know how long it will take them to deliver the results that you expect from them. You will even know about the process they follow and the quality of work they deliver.

Learn about their years of experience

The credibility of a Laravel developer is defined by the years of experience they have acquired in the job. You can expect them to do well for you if they have more number of years of experience to boast of or have worked on a variety of projects. You need to know for how long they have been working on Laravel projects as it can help you guess the quality of work you can expect from them. Better experience means they will be able to offer proper maintenance and support services across different industry verticals.

Are they reliable?

This question is very important as reliability is considered as one of the main traits of choosing a Laravel developer for website maintenance and support service. The developer should have an idea regarding taking care of different activities that need to be performed when maintaining the Website. Completing the work within the expected deadline also falls under the reliability factor. Their ability to upgrade themselves with the changing technology trends and the swiftness to resolve issues quickly should also be looked at.

Understand what all you can expect from them

When you are talking about the quality of work, some of the forces which drive them are flexibility, innovation, and enthusiasm. Take some time and go through their past works. Check out the applications and websites that they have worked on in Laravel. Such a step will let you know the kind of work which you can expect. You will know the kind of tools that they are capable of using and this seems to be important when you are trying to define the quality of work.

Get to know about their technical expertise

What is their proficiency in PHP frameworks? How well are they aware of the different versions of Laravel? How well are they keen about moving or upgrading whenever some new features get included? The kind of answers you will get for these questions will let you know about the technical expertise they enjoy over Laravel.

Know their different communication channels

Good Communication skills is very essential thing to consider while hiring a Laravel developer or a Laravel development company. The different strategies that they will be following to carry out the maintenance service should be precisely defined. The promptness that they will be showing in reverting back can be considered as added points in terms of offering good communication.

What will they charge for the services?

A good part of your work will get done once you decide the budget of the work beforehand. This way, you will be able to plan out the project requirements step-by-step as you have a budget set in mind. You will need to spend some amount of money if you are expecting the quality of work. However, make sure that you cannot expect a high quality of work just by spending lots of money. Some of the Laravel developers or the development company have the goodwill of offering the best services and so you won’t have to think twice before taking up the service or spending money on them. You should also look into what the pricing actually includes. Such a step will save you from making unexpected payments ahead.

How much does it cost to maintain the Laravel Site?

Laravel maintenance and support services clearly depend on a number of factors. Together they define the cost of such services. This means you need to have an idea about them to know what and where you will be spending your money. Factors that affect Laravel maintenance costs are:

Source code audit

One of the effective ways to identify errors or bugs within your website is source code auditing. You need a dedicated Laravel developer who can troubleshoot the bugs of all nature as well as take care of the line of code which seems to be vulnerable. There are a number of source code errors that seem to pop up across all the Laravel projects and so having a list of the same can help you resolve the bugs in your project quickly and effectively. When you are performing source code auditing, you need to consider some important factors and the same have been explained here:

• Evaluate the security issues
• Dead code elimination
• Reduce code complexity
• Ensure source code documentation, quality standards and guidelines.
• Identifying un-validated data
• Finding and eliminating duplicate code

Third-party integration

Third-party integration is quite common these days. Businesses either need to integrate in-store ERP/EPOS/Stock Control/Logistics or have third-party applications to meet the needs of the business. Hiring experienced Laravel developer will let you develop seamless integrated customized solutions for your web application.

Updating security patches

Upgrading to the latest security patches is the first step to secure your web app. You can keep your Website safe from malware and from the hackers or other attackers by going for regular security upgrades. You will also get to build trust with your customers by following this step. All you will need is a Laravel developers with experience in using different security testing tools.

Migration and version upgrades

When it comes to Laravel maintenance services, migration or version upgrades play a key role. You need to find expert developers in carrying out smooth portal migration. Such developers can help you with an easy transition when you plan to upgrade your Laravel from the existing version.

Themes and plugin updates

Out-dated themes or plugins will make your site to be vulnerable to attacks as it might provide easy access to hackers. You need to resolve this issue by integrating properly customized theme into your existing design or portal. This has to be done in a manner that your website stays secure and updated.

Implementation of new features

In case you have some idea to be implemented in your existing web application, then it is time to get it done under the website maintenance services. You can let your Laravel developer get the work done within quick turnaround time. When you choose the right Laravel developers or the development company, they will scan your Website and make feature recommendations. Such recommendations will be capable enough to boost user experience and increase the usability of the Website.

Website performance analysis

What kind of conversions your Website or web application will witness clearly depends on website speed and performance. So if your Website experiences poor performance or has high loading speed, you have more chances of losing visitors. This is where you should be focused on optimizing the website in terms of speed and performance. It will help you reach your goals in the right manner.

How to enable and disable Laravel Maintenance Mode for your Website

It is quite easy to put your Laravel Site into the maintenance mode. Suppose that you are planning to access the login and super admin group routes within your project even when the maintenance mode has been enabled.

• Build new custom middleware
• Now from app/Http/Middleware directory open CheckForMaintenanceMode.php file and replace it with the code given below:

<?php
namespace App\Http\Middleware;
use Closure;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Application;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Http\Exceptions\MaintenanceModeException;
classCheckForMaintenanceMode
{
protected $app;
public function __construct(Application $app)
{
$this->app = $app;
}
public function handle($request, Closure $next)
{
if ($this->app->isDownForMaintenance() && !$this->isBackendRequest($request)) {
$data = json_decode(file_get_contents($this->app->storagePath() . '/framework/down'), true);
throw new MaintenanceModeException($data['time'], $data['retry'], $data['message']);
}
return $next($request);
}
private function isBackendRequest($request)
{
return ($request->is('login') or $request->is('admin/*') or $request->is('api/*'));
}
}

Now inside the function isBackendRequest, you can define the routes which you want to have when the maintenance mode is kept enabled.

3. Now navigate to app/Http directory and inside the Kerel.php file include the CheckForMaintenanceMode middleware

You have to do two things in here:

1. Inside protected $middleware = […], add a line of code

'App\Http\Middleware\CheckForMaintenanceMode',

1. From protected $middleware = […] remove CheckForMaintenanceMode::class code

\Illuminate\Foundation\Http\Middleware\CheckForMaintenanceMode::class,

4. In order to make your site Online/Offline, visit the admin panel and create a new form using the drop-down selection. Once done that, you can manage flag into the database. You can run an Artisan code based on the selection made whenever the site availability is changed by the admin user.

if ($request->get('is_online') == '1')
{
    \Artisan::call('up');
}
else
{    
\Artisan::call('down');
}

Our Laravel specialist team of experts has wide experience in:

• Developing business-centric Laravel Web Application
• Integrating Laravel with other third-party applications.
• Integrating in-store EPOS/ERP/Logistics/Stock Control
• Taking care of security patches and Laravel version upgrades
• Migrating web applications to Laravel.
• Optimizing images and page load speed.
• Optimizing database and taking regular backups.
• Migrating to latest Laravel version

Wrapping it up

Laravel is one of the prominent PHP frameworks used to develop a web application for your business. When it comes to building a Laravel web application, it is equally important to maintain it. This is where you need to depend on effective maintenance and support services. Such kind of services will help you build a web solution that is effective and efficient in nature. It is capable enough to meet the client’s business goals.