Selling website maintenance services to your clients is one of the best ways to generate significant revenue for your agency. The responsibilities of web design agencies is to keep an eye on websites for clients and make sure that they are working properly.
In this article, we will explore all the essential services that can be bundled together in a Maintenance plan, for the existing and potential clients.
Maintenance services includes end to end covering of technical aspects that enable your clients’ websites secure, up-to-date, and fully optimized – giving them complete peace of mind to focus on their core business.
By selling website maintenance packages to your clients, you can generate an additional recurring revenue stream to your business.
Let’s dive deep in maintenance world.
14 Services which makes a website maintenance plan more effective
As per our industry experience of more than 20 years, every website must have these essential services:
1. Complete Backups
Retain daily backups or incremental backups as per business demands. If anything happens, you have your core files and database stored remotely for easy access and quick restoration. Backups provide additional sense of security to all the stakeholders, especially if they know their website complete backup is readily available and can be fully-restored in the event of a disaster or accidental deletion.
2. Security Monitoring
WordPress, being the leading content management system for the Websites; makes it a popular target for attackers. Unfortunately, there are people & systems actively working to hack websites, so protecting your clients’ websites is very important.
As hacks and security breaches become more of a concern for anyone running a WordPress website, it’s important to have someone who can take care of your website security and maintenance.
Regularly scanning for vulnerabilities, version controlling, removing malware, and checking for overall health index helps to protect your clients’ sites.
3. Core Software, Plugins Updates
WordPress sites are the combination off core software i.e., PHP/WordPress, Plugins, and Themes, and these are upgraded regularly to keep them secure and intact from outside infiltrations, so it’s highly recommended to keep the latest version of all core software i.e., PHP/WordPress, Plugins, and Themes. It is the only way to keep the client’s website running smoothly without any security issues.
4. Site Speed & Performance
Incredible speed, flawless user experience, and top SERP ranking are things anyone probably wish for their website. WordPromise experts will reduce your website load time and boost your Google PageSpeed and Core Web Vitals scores and improves your overall website performance to help you address the most important PageSpeed Insights recommendations.
By improving your loading time, WordPromise helps you keep your visitors engaged. Site speed being one of the most important ranking factors, you will make Google happy too, and rank higher in search engine results. Being able to quickly identify and fix issues that are slowing down their site’s speed is critical.
5. Performance Analytics
Measuring the overall performance of your website is not simple as it involves many metrics like Time to first byte, First Paint, First Contentful Paint, Largest Contentful Paint, Total Blocking time, Total Page size and so on. For a comprehensive maintenance plan, the performance analytics must be the part of the plan to optimize your website for better speed. Providing performance analytics reports to the clients, help them understand key web vitals regarding user experience & behaviour which can help them improve their content and see significantly better results in their business.
6. Cross Browser Functionality Testing
Cross-browser testing, also called browser testing, is a quality assurance (QA) process that checks whether a web-based application, site or page functions as intended for end users across multiple browsers and devices. This includes areas like page responsiveness, accessibility, images, content visibility etc, which may have cascading effects if any un-compatible changes are made to the site or the site’s theme, new plugins are added, etc.
7. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO recommendations are intended to help your site rank higher and more accurately in search engines, like Google. The goal behind having good SEO is to increase your website’s SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ranking. WordPromise expert Make sure to use short, easy-to-read post slugs that accurately describe what your posts are about. This involves identifying SEO issues that are affecting your site’s ranking and its web traffic.
8. Edits and Fixes
Broken links and page errors makes a permanent dent on the Website impression among its users and it can have a negative impact on a website’s search rankings. A good maintenance plan takes care of checking the site for broken links, functional vulnerabilities, errors, and issues caused by plugin conflicts, software errors etc.
9. Uptime Monitoring
Knowing that your website is available and accessible to visitors is critical to every business. Uptime monitoring tests the availability of your website, applications, and servers. Uptime is mainly the responsibility of your server host, so if you are experiencing frequent downtime or bandwidth issues, you should connect with them to review your hosting options. A hosting framework with maximum uptime is a best choice. While no host can guarantee 100% uptime, you should aim for a host which promise a maximum uptime like 99.9%.
10. Technical Support
WordPromise experts offers a variety of WordPress support like help with setting up a plugin, troubleshooting errors, help fixing content related issue, or fixing broken backlinks. Most of the clients do lack the technical programming skills to perform content updates, adding of new pages or adding new links to their website top menu or sidebar, reconfigure menus, etc.
Offering a maintenance plan that includes all the technical aspect of a website starting from content updates to configuration to site edits & tweaks, do add tremendous value to the overall health index of the websites.
11. User Friendly Reports
Businesses always appreciate information about what’s going on with their websites in terms of its maintenance and upgradations. A proper self-explanatory WordPress Security Audit & Maintenance monthly reports are not only useful for clients, but they also provide proof of the great efforts the technical experts are putting on their website. The reports must include detailing about security, web vitals, SEO, or performance issues on their site, as well as analytic reports, and details of any updates or changes made to software, plugins, or themes.
12. Site Functionality as a whole
Each websites have basic functionality component like contact us form, signup and registration forms etc. which has to be integrated seamlessly without any break in the flow of user experience. Having a website where essential functions work correctly is very important for the business. Your website maintenance plan must check that everything on the site is working as anticipated as per defined business flow.
13. Spam Filtering
There is no place for Spam content in the Website. Maintenance plan must check the junk comments on a daily basis and keep the website and dashboard uncluttered. It should also optimize your database for speed and SEO.
14. Protecting System Files & Permissions
An effective maintenance plan must prevent public access to system files as these files can give away important information on your site. In fact, literally lock some of the main files even from writing access by various programs.
Additional Maintenance Services
In addition to the above website maintenance services, Following can be the additional services can be offered to clients, such as:
- Content Writing– With an experienced content writer, this service becomes very helpful for the business to have an original content.
- Dedicated Resource/Man-Power– Dedicated expert round the clock for business specific requirements. This service can be offered as an add-on.
- Digital Marketing– Digital Marketing or email marketing, this service can be offered as an add-on which include marketing campaign for businesses through email writing, scheduling, and sending regular email digest or newsletters to your clients’ potential users.
- Woo–commerce – There are specific plugins and technical framework for the woo-commerce websites. It require a niche skills for woo-commerce environment.
- Website Edits/major development– If a client requires to enhance the website scope which requires further development of website pages and workflows and if you offer that service, it can be an advantage to both sides.
- Hosting Services – For new businesses, selecting a suitable website host provider is the confusing task and you can fill the gap with your expertise. All you have to do is to be the bridge between Hosting Service Provider and the clients.
- SSL Certificates: An SSL certificate is a bit of code on your web server that provides security for online communications. When a web browser contacts your secured website, the SSL certificate enables an encrypted connection. If you handle client sites, you have to ensure their SSL certificates as well.
Why Website Maintenance Plan could be a game changer
As a web development agency, you must have the resources and skills and keeping a WordPress website secure, up-to-date, and fully optimized is not hard, complicated or time-consuming for experts. With the right use of automated tools plus manual cross checking, all this can be done in a considerably less time.
Here are a few reasons why you should consider selling website maintenance plan.
- Defined Monthly Revenue from Clients: Providing after services is a great opportunity to get into the defined monthly revenue streams apart from your web development business.
- Earning from additional maintenance services: Once your maintenance plan becomes useful to the clients, you can offer additional services such as content writing, dedicated resources to their websites, digital marketing, hosting consultancy etc.
- Retaining Clients after development of their website, becomes easy: For a business growth and continuity long lasting relation with a client is must and by offering a useful website maintenance plan will help you boost client retention.
- Better maintenance services result in direct marketing from clients: Once your maintenance plan gets popular and reaches to the satisfaction of your clients, it enables them to spread the good word organically about your services.
What to charge from your clients?
This one is little tough; as you are not alone, who is offering such type of services to the clients. The plan is to be competitive with a moderate margin as well.
As per Standard practice, you may consider introducing more than one maintenance package plan so that the clients have a clear indication as to what all the services, a particular package plan offers. Package amount to be derived in such a way that it looks existing to the Clients as well as it is covering all the website maintenance cost. The maintenance plan can be defined depending upon the level of maintenance service that you offer to your clients.
It’s prudent that you offer multiple options to your clients. With just one single maintenance plan, the clients won’t have anything to compare it with. You should consider having more than one, maintenance plan, so that clients can compare and choose from. Remember, Clients won’t mind paying extra, as long as you are offering a higher standard of premium services.
Note that You can’t be the best and the cheapest at the same price, so set the pricing plans accordingly.
Let’s Get to Work!
Now it’s time to put your plan to work. You can reach out to WordPromise for better recommendations as per your business requirements or you can partner with us for tremendous business growth. Selling WordPromise maintenance is one of the best ways to create steady, dependable income. It will just empower your business to reach greater heights.
All-In-One WordPress
Maintenance Service with
24/7 support
WordPress Security, Speed, Support and Maintenance Plan for Website Owners and agencies.
Email us at info@wordpromise.com
