Maintenance tasks will drag down productivity – unless you automate them.
For many web entrepreneurs, the first step towards success is publishing a comprehensive, fully-featured WordPress website.
Web agency owners make their living creating these websites for clients, but their work rarely ends there. Every website needs regular maintenance. The more plugins and features you include in your site, the greater the volume of security patches and new updates will be.
Staying ahead of all these changes for a single website may not be a full-time job, but doing it for a dozen websites is. Once you have a larger number of successful website projects completed, maintenance and security tasks can quickly become unmanageable.
This is important because if a client’s website goes offline, you’re the first person they will come to. If they think their business is suffering downtime because of you, it will put your web agency’s reputation at risk – whether it’s your fault or not.
That’s why reputable agencies always include a WordPress Care Plan into their contracts with long-term clients. WP Care Plans offer an easy solution to improving agency cash flow while guaranteeing best-in-class performance for your clients’ websites.
What Does a WP Care Plan Include?
Every web agency defines its WP Care Plan differently, depending on the degree of service it can afford to offer to its clients. Many agencies offer tiered plans, using multiple price points to divide talent and resources more economically.
We’re going to cover some of the basic features that all WP Care Plans should include, and then describe some of the most advanced options available on the market.
- Security Updates and Threat Detection
Security patches are by far the most important element of any WP Care plan. Website owners need to know that their digital assets are secure against hackers. There are multiple ways to achieve this, depending on the size and scope of your agency’s security framework.
At the high end of the spectrum, there are full-service cybersecurity vendors that offer security operations center-as-a-service (SOCaaS) subscriptions. These are enterprise-level solutions that come with enterprise-level costs, but there are less pricey monitoring and threat response solutions available on the market as well.
As a bare minimum, WP Care plan providers need to make sure security patches are installed and deploy monitoring tools for detecting and mitigating cyberattack risks. There is a wide range of WordPress-specific options on the market, with price points ideal for any website owner.
- High-Quality Website Backups
Reliable disaster recovery is close behind cybersecurity as a WP Care plan must-have. Website backups offer much-needed peace of mind for WordPress website owners who need to demonstrate resilience against cyberattacks, mistakes, and accidents of all kinds.
Like cybersecurity solutions, disaster recovery tools come in many different forms. The more complex your website is, the higher the robust disaster recovery is likely to cost.
You’ll also want to define the optimum recovery point objective (RPO) for your backups. This metric indicates the maximum amount of data you could potentially lose when you have to resort to a backup. Keeping more backups requires using more resources, which ultimately impacts the price of the service.
- Compatible Software and Plugin Updates
Most WordPress website owners know they need to perform regular software and plugin updates, but they delay those updates nonetheless. This isn’t recommended, but it’s very common because sometimes new updates break compatibility between plugins.
If your WordPress website has two plugins that are perfectly compatible, and new updates break their compatible functionality, you may need to roll back the update until you can find a solution. Website owners that don’t have the technical skills necessary to find those solutions may simply leave old plugin versions in place, sometimes for years.
WP Care Plans that address compatibility issues and find solutions to these problems help website owners manage their websites more effectively.
- Monthly Reports
Website owners want to know about the work being done on their site – especially if they’re paying for it. As a result, most WP Care plan providers offer comprehensive reports that provide insight into the work performed and its results.
Reports are critical for website owners who need to demonstrate ROI on web investments. If stakeholders want to ensure that website administrators are spending money wisely, they will need to know what updates were completed, when the most current backup was created, and what security issues were resolved with each passing month.
You can also include general analytics information along with your report. This may include site traffic analytics, marketing data, and even SEO keyword performance. Many of these analytics are easily available through third-party API deployments.
- Search Engine Optimization
If your agency is oriented towards digital marketing, and on-going SEO package may be a wise thing to include in your WP Care plan. You can include readymade SEO analytics into your monthly report and perform a certain number of on-page SEO services for each period.
If you want to offer a premium service, you can even offer gradual improvements to Core Web Vitals for client websites. These tasks may take some time to perform, but the compounding benefit of monthly optimization can generate significant revenue, so it’s worth offering.
If clients are updating pages and adding new content on a regular basis, you can also use your SEO retainer agreement to verify the new content and make sure it’s properly optimized. This helps to offset some of the work hours your clients might otherwise purchase elsewhere.
- Page Load Speed Improvement
One of the most valuable things you can include in your WP Care plan is ongoing page load speed optimization. This ensures that the website loads quickly, delivering a best-in-class user experience to visitors on all types of devices.
Slow loading is one of the biggest problems that WordPress websites face. It drags down productivity, reduces revenue, and hurts brand reputation – yet often goes unnoticed. WP Care plan providers can perform regular audits to ensure that page load speed is quick and timely.
When website changes impact page load speed, care plan providers can eliminate errors and perform all of the technical tasks necessary to guarantee fast, reliable website performance. They can then show the data that demonstrates their work in the monthly report and show the value of their work.
Offer WP Care Plans to Your Clients
WP Care plans are a great tool for helping web agencies increase cash flow and improve customer lifetime value. They also help agency owners make web projects more predictable, allowing for the development of productized web services.
You don’t have to perform all of these services yourself. Entrust your WP Care plan package to a reputable white label WordPress developer like UnlimitedWP so you can focus on getting more contracts and building your client base.
