Start using WordPress Care Plans as an essential element of your agency’s success.
Every web agency is different, but we’re all part of the same industry.
One of the industry’s biggest challenges is guaranteeing a stable monthly income from development work. If you spend a lot of time jumping from project to project, interacting with clients, and learning new things on the fly, you can’t always guarantee a solid income.
One of the ways web developers and agencies can address this problem is by spending less time looking for new clients. Instead, you can spend that time getting more business out of the clients you already have.
It’s a well-known fact that repeat customers spend more and cost less to acquire. The question is, how do you turn a one-time customer into a repeat customer?
For web agencies and developers who build WordPress websites, there is a solution: WordPress Care Plans.
WordPress Maintenance is a Valuable Service – Start Treating it Like One
Every client you build a WordPress website for will require maintenance for that website. Core updates, plugin and theme updates, and security patches are going to subtly change the way their website works, and sometimes cause complications.
It’s vitally important that website owners update their site components regularly. However, the actual process is time-consuming and tedious. Updates can cause unexpected functionality issues, which then need to be immediately addressed. Most website owners aren’t aware of this until they run into an issue themselves – or their web agency partner warns them beforehand.
If you take the initiative to explain to clients what WordPress Care really means, you can emphasize the value it offers them. At the same time, you can earn a steady monthly income without having to go through the long, time-consuming task of acquiring new clients for every dollar you earn.
How to Offer WordPress Care Plans to Clients?
In order to maximize agency cash flow by offering ongoing services to clients, you must first communicate the value of those services. This means you have to bring up the topic of WordPress maintenance with your clients, preferably before you begin the initial development project.
Some good questions to ask during project discovery include:
- Do you have a plan for maintaining website security after deployment?
- Who is responsible for downloading WordPress maintenance updates?
- Do you have a plan in case future updates impact website security or usability?
- How do you plan on keeping your website optimized for SEO, usability, and accessibility?
Some of your clients will have internal resources dedicated to these tasks. Others may not. Those are the ones to who you may be able to sell a subscription-based WordPress Care Plan package.
If you can convincingly identify the need for ongoing maintenance services, you stand a good chance of converting some of your one-time clients to long-term ones. Naturally, the choice of services you offer will have to accommodate your clients’ real-world needs.
5 Services to Include in Your WordPress Care Plan
Any of the following five services is a great starting place for discussing WP Care Plans with clients. These services reflect needs that are near-universal in today’s WordPress environment, so you can be reasonably sure that your client will need to dedicate resources to them sooner or later.
- Core, Plugin, and Theme Updates
WordPress component updates are among the first lines of defense against security vulnerabilities. When researchers catch a new malware variant spreading in the wild, they immediately start working on security updates that mitigate the risk to users.
WordPress users who are conscientious about performing these updates are better secured than those who don’t. The vast majority of successful cyberattacks on WordPress websites could have been prevented by users installing the latest updates.
Importantly, it’s not just WordPress Core updates that are in focus here. All plugins and themes should be running up to date as well, which may mean extra work for developers who need to fix broken compatibility between updates. That work should be paid for by your WP Care Plan.
- Security Monitoring and Malware Removal
Website security encompasses a wide range of services, and it’s a good idea to include several in your monthly care plan. Many of these technologies can be automated, which will help you supplement the value of your plan without dedicating more work hours to each plan.
Automated WordPress security plugins can help you scan for malware, check the integrity of your client’s files, and create security event logs from user activities. All of these things can help you prevent your clients from becoming victims of the next headline-making ransomware attack.
- Performance Optimization and Monitoring
Most clients agree that SEO benefits and an improved user experience are worth paying for. If you can provide monthly services that will optimize the speed and performance of their website over time, you can earn significant income from ongoing client contracts.
Performance optimization can be demanding in terms of time and resources. As a result, it’s typically a higher-tiered service and should be priced accordingly. If you can spend time compressing media files, minifying CSS and JavaScript, and removing unused plugins and themes, your clients may appreciate the corresponding SEO and usability boost.
- Disaster Recovery Backups
If your clients’ WordPress websites ever suffer irreversible damage, you will need to restore their site from a backup. Creating comprehensive backups is a standard website management practice, and your clients may expect you have backups available whether you discussed the topic or not.
Fortunately, you can easily automate the process of saving and archiving website backups through a third-party service provider. You can guarantee clients have access to timely, secure backups that are easy to restore from. This will provide serious peace of mind, especially if disaster eventually strikes.
- Technical Support and Content Updates
Users with little technical experience may not feel qualified to use WordPress’ robust developer support and community forums. Your clients might prefer having a dedicated support team that they know and trust available – and there is no one better suited to that task than you, their website developer.
When including technical support and content updates into WP Care Plan contracts, it’s vital you pay close attention to the details. Can you truly offer a 24/7 customer support service to every client? Take a look at third-party white label solutions that can help you deliver on support and content promises before you make them.
The Next Step: Outsource WordPress Care Plans to a White Label Web Developer
Convincing your clients to sign ongoing WordPress maintenance contracts with you is only half the battle. Once you’ve taken on all this responsibility, you need to deliver. White label web development services like UnlimitedWP can help you monetize your WordPress Care Plan contracts while freeing up your time and resources for taking on new projects.
UnlimitedWP provides white label web development services to web agencies and developers. Assign an unlimited number of tasks to our expert team and watch as your work gets done effortlessly while you wait.
