If you speak to any site owner, they’ll all value the concept of keeping a website in top condition. To a person, you’ll encounter enthusiastic nods when talking about updates, security, and more. Still, lots of site owners don’t do some of these basic elements of WordPress website maintenance. Though, the reason isn’t due to laziness.
Of course, running a site often needs more than 24 hours in a day to get everything done. What many site owners lack is time rather than knowledge. As such, offering maintenance services to other online businesses can be lucrative. It can also help you earn money on a consistent basis.
In this article, we’ll look at how to offer WordPress website maintenance. It will cover a lot, including the pros and cons, and even what a maintenance service should consist of. By the end, you’ll know what to do, and how to put your plan into action.
What Does WordPress Website Maintenance Consist Of?
First off, let’s define the scope of WordPress website maintenance. At a base level, there are a few day-to-day tasks a site owner will undertake:
What’s more, there are some more advanced jobs that sit under the ‘maintenance’ umbrella too:
Many of these are tasks that you’ll undertake without thinking, sometimes along with other tasks. What’s more, they don’t take too long with the way WordPress is set up.
Still, every task adds time to maintenance. Let’s discuss why this is a good thing for you.
Why Should You Offer WordPress Website Maintenance?
If there’s a task that improves the quality of life for both developers and site owners, maintenance is it. Here’s why we think offering these services is a sound business idea:
- You can diversify your service offerings. Instead of offering one or two services, you’re now providing one more. Also, this won’t dilute your current income in most cases.
- Your income stream improves. Services can often be mutually exclusive. As such, because you have more service offerings, there’s increased potential for your income to rise too.
- Any client showcase of yours can keep its quality. If your portfolio contains client websites (as it should), it’s in your best interests to make sure those sites are well-maintained.
On the whole, consider WordPress website maintenance as an extension of your standard services. Of course, there are situations that go against these benefits too.
Is Offering WordPress Website Maintenance for Everyone?
In short, no. Offering WordPress website maintenance isn’t a nailed-on easy money stream. If you nod your head to any of the below, you’ll want to think hard about whether offering maintenance is a good idea:
- You can’t spare the time to offer new services to your existing clients.
- There’s little inclination your end to promote new services.
- You’d have to learn how to maintain sites to a higher standard than your current ability.
While there are solutions to the above that may not impact you, they are still a counterweight to the benefits of offering WordPress website maintenance.
How Do You Offer WordPress Website Maintenance to Clients (3 Steps to Follow)?
Once you’ve decided that WordPress website maintenance services are something you’d like to offer, the next step is putting the wheels in motion. The following three steps are what we think you need to implement to get started. First off is nailing down your offering.
1. Decide on the Type of Support You’ll Offer
Before you put any services into place, you’ll need to decide which ones to offer. Maintenance is a broad niche, and there are some tracks that you may or may not want to run. Your first question should be, What do my clients want?. This is because different industries and business sizes have varied needs.
For example, a small business with an owner lacking technical knowledge needs less complex maintenance than an enterprise. What’s more, you need to consider whether you’re bringing new customers in, or whether maintenance is an add-on service. The latter can be adapted to your client’s (or even industry-specific) needs.
You’ll also want to consider your expertise here. We’ve said how you don’t necessarily need expert level knowledge – and we’ll talk more about why later – but you should still play to your strengths. In other words, offering deep malware detection and removal isn’t a good idea if you can’t deliver.
The specifics of what you offer are important too. If you’re following a Software as a Service (SaaS) business model, bundling services into tiered subscriptions is a natural path to follow.
Here, you’d bundle certain tasks into different tiers. For example, basic maintenance could be in your bottom tier. This would be straightforward updates, backups, and essential security. From there, you can bundled a bunch of business-specific tasks into a middle tier (with a higher price, naturally). For your upper tier, this will be almost a concierge-like premium service that sees you almost managing your client’s sites.
Still, the specifics aren’t as important as determining the appetite for WordPress website maintenance. Let’s talk about this next.
2. Show Your Clients How Important WordPress Website Maintenance Is
We said at the start of the piece that most site owners understand the value of maintenance. Still, there are lots who don’t, and if you want to offer WordPress website maintenance services, you have to appeal to them.
Part of your service workflow should be to gauge the desire for maintenance from both existing and new clients. If it doesn’t exist, you should try and cultivate it.
Here are some steps you can take to show clients the value of regular WordPress website maintenance:
- Start a blog to discuss some of the more crucial maintenance elements.
- Put together reports for clients, showing them how maintenance can help.
- Discuss the ramifications of neglecting website maintenance.
- Provide the benefits of outsourcing maintenance to you.
This list isn’t exhaustive, but it’s a good start. If you can hit the ‘pain points’ for your client base, and tie this into the above methods, you could have good success – or at least a solid bunch of leads to work with.
3. Develop Your Maintenance ‘Toolbox’
Once you have detailed plans on how to offer website maintenance to clients, and you’ve had a few bites, you should begin to fill your toolbox. On a fundamental level, you’ll need some suitable plugins to carry out day-based tasks. These should be related to the services you’ve decided to offer. For example:
You should also think about other factors that impact a website, such as your choice of hosting. This is where reseller hosting comes into play, although a developer-centric account with a provider such as Kinsta is going to be suitable.
Of course, you could also outsource the majority of your support and maintenance using a solution such as WPBuffs or WPMaintain. Going down this route can give you peace of mind and a stellar support provision too, and it’s a solid consideration if WordPress website maintenance services are on your radar.
Should You Offer WordPress Website Maintenance Services?
On the whole, only you can decide whether you offer WordPress website maintenance services. If you have the right level of knowledge, it’s a provision that you could add to your existing services. Though, you’ll also need the time to dedicate to maintaining your client’s sites, and good soft skills based on the number of people you’ll interact with.
The good news is that offering white labelled website maintenance is straightforward with a partner who can take a lot of the hard work off your hands, and make sure your clients get a level of support and maintenance that meets your standards.
In Conclusion
Your common or garden site owner only has so much time to get every day-to-day task done. As such, there’s a great opportunity for a knowledgeable business to take some aspects off of their hands. WordPress website maintenance is a vital part of site ownership, but it often gets left by the wayside.
Over the course of this post, we’ve talked about whether you should offer WordPress website maintenance services. If the concept is for you, there are three steps to get up and running:
- Figure out what services you can (and want to) offer.
- Sell the idea of WordPress maintenance to your target audience.
- Curate a set of tools to help you maintain websites.
Are you thinking about offering WordPress website maintenance services, and if so, how are you going to go about it? Share your ideas in the comments section below!