FAQ

Honest answers.
No marketing-speak.

If we won't put the answer on a public page, it doesn't belong in the relationship. Pricing, ownership, lock-in, what's actually included, who builds your site, the 2-week launch, the AI piece, and how we compare to the DIY builders and the managed shops — the questions buyers ask most, answered straight.

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Common questions

The honest answers. No marketing-speak.

Who is Workspace CMS for?
Busy operators and professional teams who want a real agency behind their site without paying a real-agency retainer. You want it managed — fast, on-brand, ranking — but you don't want to spend nights inside a page-builder, and you don't want to write a five-figure check just to fix a typo. You want unlimited CMS management on a turnaround you can count on, transparent pricing, and the option to take the keys yourself whenever you feel like it.
Is the initial site build included? What about migrations and custom work?

Annual Growth and Premium plans include a free new-build (Growth: 5 pages, Premium: 10 pages) as a limited-time offer — this is a net-new build from one of our reference designs, fitted with your content, brand voice, and SEO foundation.

The free build covers new sites only. If you need us to take over an existing site, migration, or rebrand, the scope must be evaluated on an onboarding call before any work begins. Things that require a separate custom quote include: existing-site takeovers, platform migrations, custom integrations, third-party app connections, e-commerce builds, additional pages beyond the plan's included count, multi-language setups, and complex custom functionality. These are never a surprise invoice — you'll see the scope and price before we touch anything.

The monthly plan fee ($89 / $199 / $449) covers hosting and unlimited CMS management after your site is live — content edits, image swaps, blog, SEO toolset, AI visibility, and AI credits. That starts from day one of your subscription.

What is Growth?
Growth is for teams who want us to manage the CMS for them — content edits, image swaps, location updates, blog publishing, and templated page additions are unlimited. Changes ship in 2 business days on a priority queue. Blockers — site down, login broken, payment broken, forms not submitting, critical SEO regression — get handled the same business day (≤ 8 business hours). You get AI-powered writing and auditing tools, fast secure hosting, up to 5 team members, and your site stays up 99.9% of the time.
What is Premium?
Premium is white-glove CMS operations. Same unlimited management as Growth, but changes ship in 12–24 hours on a priority queue and blockers — site down, login broken, payment broken, critical SEO regression — get handled in 4 business hours. AI-powered writing and auditing tools, fast secure hosting, up to 10 team members, and capacity for one primary domain plus up to 3 aliases. Proactive monitoring — we fix it before you notice.
What's a "blocker" for SLA purposes?

A blocker is something stopping your site from functioning: the site is down, login or payment is broken, forms aren't submitting, or there's a critical SEO regression (search crawler rules blocking the site, sitemap broken, redirect loops, mass duplicate page issues). Visual nits, typos, content additions, and custom builds don't qualify. You mark a ticket as a blocker in the CMS; we honor every reasonable designation.

The blocker SLA scales by tier: 1 business day on Essentials, same business day on Growth (≤ 8 business hours), 4 business hours on Premium. Full definition lives in the SLA.

What stops my site from going stale a year after launch?
The monthly cadence does. Every plan includes unlimited CMS management on your tier's response guarantee — content edits, image swaps, blog publishing, location updates, templated page additions, business details refreshes — so the site keeps a heartbeat instead of quietly aging. Send a ticket from the CMS and we ship the change on the turnaround you bought (4 business days on Essentials, 2 business days on Growth, 12–24 hours on Premium). The site stays current with your business so Google and the AI engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini) keep treating it as authoritative.
Can our team log in and manage the site ourselves?
Yes — on every plan. You get full admin access for everyone you add (2 seats on Essentials, 5 on Growth, 10 on Premium). Hand off as much or as little to us as you want. Some clients run it themselves and ping us for occasional fixes; others never log in and let us drive. Same platform either way.
How is this different from hiring an agency for a custom build?
You get the same operators — we are an agency — but on a predictable monthly fee instead of a project quote with retainer politics. A traditional agency build for a comparable site is typically $15k–$50k up front, then a $1.5k–$5k/mo retainer, then $150–$250/hr for changes. Our equivalent is built in two weeks on a flat monthly that includes the platform, the SEO toolset, AI-visibility tracking, AI credits, and unlimited CMS management on a turnaround you can plan around. No retainer politics, no $250/hr invoices to change a phone number.
What's included in the monthly fee — and what isn't?

Included on every plan: fast, secure hosting, HTTPS security, the full SEO toolset (redirects, search crawler rules, AI search indexing, internal-link rules, alt-tag sweep, AI Content Audit), AI-visibility tracking across ChatGPT + Claude + Perplexity + Gemini, AI credits, unlimited CMS management on your tier’s turnaround (4 business days on Essentials, 2 on Growth, 12–24 hours on Premium), form builder, and the full CMS admin for your whole team.

Also included: technical maintenance, speed optimisation (Google’s speed standards, Lighthouse), and HTTPS renewals — so you’re not chasing your developer every time a certificate expires.

Not included — quoted separately on your free strategy call:

  • The initial site build or migration (one-time custom quote — scope varies)
  • Net-new custom-designed page templates or redesigns
  • Custom functionality and third-party integrations (e.g., a custom booking engine, ERP sync)
  • Ecommerce replatforming
  • Ongoing SEO, PPC, social, or email campaigns (separate agency services)

Every out-of-scope item is quoted in writing before any work starts. You’ll never open an invoice and see a surprise line item.

Can we cancel? Do we own our content?

Yes — you can cancel at any time, and you always own your content. No multi-year lock-in, no early-termination fee, no clawback, no intro rate that triples in month four.

Refund policy: Monthly plans cancel at the end of the current billing period — no partial-month refunds. Annual prepayments are non-refundable. If you cancel during an annual term, your access continues to the end of the prepaid year and then stops — we do not refund unused months. This is in §3.4 of our Terms.

Annual plans include a free website build on all three plans (Essentials: 3 pages, Growth: 5 pages, Premium: 10 pages) — limited-time offer, while build slots are open. The build cost is funded by the annual prepayment and is not refunded if you cancel mid-year.

Your content: You own it. Export content (HTML + JSON), media (raw files), and redirects (CSV) anytime — full detail in What exactly can I export if I leave? below. Domain is always yours. We hold exported data 30 days after cancellation then permanently delete it. Full terms at Terms of Service.

What exactly can I export if I leave?

What you can export, anytime: your written content (HTML + JSON), your media and image assets (raw files), and your redirect map (CSV). Your domain is always yours.

What export is not: a one-click, deployable copy of your live site, and not the Workspace CMS platform itself. The CMS, the admin, the dynamic features, and the hosting stay with Workspace. Export hands you your content and assets to take elsewhere and rebuild — not a turnkey clone of the running site.

This is standard for every managed platform (Squarespace, Wix, and Shopify work the same way). The difference: many managed-website shops won't let you export at all. We always will.

What's the timeline to launch?

Standard new builds: Essentials (3 pages) launches in approximately 1 week. Growth (5 pages) launches in approximately 2 weeks. Premium (10 pages) runs approximately 3–4 weeks. All timelines assume you can turn around content and design feedback within 24–48 hours — delays on your end shift the timeline correspondingly.

Custom scopes (takeovers, migrations, integrations, e-commerce): Timeline is sized on your onboarding call once we've evaluated the existing site and scope. These are never quoted blind — you'll see the timeline and price before any work starts.

What if we just want managed hosting + admin, not the full done-for-you build?
That's essentially the Essentials service level — you (or your team, or a contractor) run the CMS day-to-day, and we're there in 4 business days for the change tickets you send us. Blockers (site down, login broken, payment broken, critical SEO regression) get a 1 business-day response on Essentials. You get the same admin, the same SEO + AI-visibility tools, and the same uptime infrastructure as our white-glove clients. The difference is who's driving day-to-day. Many clients start here and graduate to Growth once they'd rather hand it off than touch it weekly.

Ready to talk? We're consultative, not self-serve.

Book a free 30-minute SEO strategy call. A senior 1Digital® operator (the person who handles new business AND knows the SEO playbook) audits your site, walks through what we'd do, and quotes a 2-week launch — not a chatbot, not a script-reading junior BDR.

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