Creating a website maintenance process is vital if you’re going to grow your WordPress business efficiently.
You’ll know that in the delivery of WordPress website maintenance, lots of the same tasks are repeated over and over.
Whether that be updating plugins, adding a new user or carrying out a specific task on a client’s website.
You’ll also know that it’s a pain when you know you’ve done something before but it’s been a few months and you can’t quite remember exactly how you did it last time.
Enter the humble website maintenance process.
Create a wiki for your company and your efficiency will skyrocket.
Here’s what we’ll take a look at today:
An intro to processes
At Glow, we like to think of processes as mini ‘how to’ guides.
How to do basically everything (and I mean everything) in your business.
Done well, they will improve the efficiency of your business by cutting down the time it takes to perform regular tasks and reducing the amount of mistakes or errors that occur.
10 processes for your WordPress maintenance service:
If you’re only just starting, I get that it can be tricky to write a website maintenance process.
So, I thought it’d be handy to give you a quick list of 10 WordPress website maintenance processes you could create right now:
- Checking for broken links
- How often do you check for WordPress updates
- How we perform a website audit
- Informing a client they’ve used up their time
- How to update plugins
- Scheduling website backups
- How to handle premium plugin licenses
- How to setup a free SSL certificate for a client
- What is our standard auto-response for client support requests
- How to test website forms are working
From that list alone, you can see how someone new to your company would massively benefit from these being created.
They don’t need to ask you.
They don’t need to research somewhere online – they just read the process.
Ok, here’s those 3 app recommendations I promised you in the title of this article.
3 best apps for writing WordPress maintenance processes
1. Notion
We love Notion at Glow.
It’s super simple to use and there are loads of different ways to visually edit and format the content.
The user interface is really simple (we love the plain black and white colours) for organising your folders and documents.
And of course it’s got all the team collaboration and sharing features you’d expect from a SaaS product.
It is ‘another’ SaaS product though.
Which of course means it comes with a price tag.
And you’re likely already subscribed to plenty of others.
My advice if you want to keep costs down?
Try to keep team member counts low, as this is how Notion bills you – per team member.
For example, maybe you have 1 license for yourself.
Then, for your dev team, let’s say there’s 2 or 3 of them, you have one ‘dev’ account – meaning only 2 accounts total.
You’re the one in charge of writing the processes and your team just follows them when they need to.
2. Google Drive
Google Drive is an extremely popular office suite nowadays.
You’ll almost certainly have a Google account already for something, whether that’s email, ads or analytics.
If that’s the case, you could consider Drive for all of your cloud file storage.
In our experience, it’s a little clunkier than Notion for building a process wiki as you have to open each Google Doc individually in a new browser tab.
Whereas Notion is all in the one screen so clicking back and forth between processes is a doddle.
Of course if you’re already using Drive, then that means you’re already paying for it, so you wouldn’t have the extra cost outlay for something like Notion.
3. Slab
I quite recently came across Slab when doing some research and I must say, it looks impressive.
I’ve talked to a few people I know who use it and they absolutely rave about it.
Similar to Notion, it’d be another monthly cost to your business.
So if you’re already a Google account holder and you want to keep costs to a minimum right now, then maybe Drive is the one for you.
Slab’s interface is really clean and simple and the editing capabilities are excellent.
It also comes in a little cheaper than Notion ($8 per user per month vs $10, at the time of writing this) so could well be the perfect fit for you.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I urge you to get into the habit of writing processes for your WordPress maintenance service.
They will dramatically improve the efficiency of you and your team.
Regular tasks will be completed quicker.
You’ll onboard team members faster.
Mistakes and errors will be reduced as the guesswork and testing elements of finding a solution will be eradicated.
If you aren’t creating processes yet, I highly recommend you start doing so – your business will thank you for it.
Let me know in the comments if you’re creating processes already and which software you’d recommend using. I’d love to hear from you.