Should You Include WordPress Maintenance As A Service? WordPress Maintenance Services, Help and Maintenance

You're probably all too acquainted with feast or famine as a web designer. Or there's the dreaded scope creep, which robs you of the earnings you were counting on. But that's what occurs when your capacity to earn money is contingent on your ability to work a certain number of hours. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a constant stream of money flowing in? We'll look at how adding WordPress maintenance services could give that answer in this piece.

(This is a paid advertisement.) One of the most typical issues with attempting to build out as a single web designer or a bootstrapping firm is time constraints. How long does it take to:

• Recruit new clientele;

• Create webpages;

• Extinguish flames;

• Take care of everything else that keeps your firm functioning.

That isn't to argue that web design isn't lucrative. It's just that your time is valuable, and if you're at capacity, that's it. You've reached the pinnacle of your scale.

You'll need to develop a regular income stream if you want to not only keep your design firm afloat but also grow it into a money-making engine. Fortunately for you, web designers and companies provide a wide range of services.

WordPress maintenance and support is one of the most popular services.

Before you get into this new job, think about what this new service will mean for your business. Because, despite the fact that it will bring you more money – and a steady supply of it — it is not simple job. Especially if you provide that service to dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people.

We'll look at the following today to assist you:

• The advantages of incorporating maintenance programs into your business

• The disadvantages of handling WordPress upkeep and support and

• How to build a strong maintenance service without exhausting yourself.

Selling WordPress Maintenance Services Has Its Advantages

Designers and developers use WordPress to create websites for a variety of reasons. However, as anyone who has spent enough time with the content management system will attest, it is not without problems.

The issue of security is a major problem. It's difficult to keep up with speed. Clients, on the other hand, aren't necessarily fond of the platform.

But that's when WordPress support services come in handy. WordPress experts are familiar with the CMS's flaws and can devise monthly maintenance and support programs to guarantee that all bases are covered long after launch.

While the benefits of maintenance and support to your clients are obvious, you stand to gain a lot by including it in your service offering as well:

IMPROVE THE PREDICTABILITY OF YOUR REVENUE STREAM

Do you ever feel that your business is either a feast or a famine? It's to be anticipated, especially if you service smaller businesses with unstable income streams.

One of the reasons why maintenance and support services are so valuable is because of this. Your cash flow becomes more predictable and easier to handle whether you enable clients to pay month to month or put them on an annual plan.

IMPROVE YOUR COMPETITIVE EDGE

If you're working with the proper customers, they'll be wondering, "What's next?" once their website is live. These are the clients who recognize the importance of safeguarding their money.

Wouldn't it be better to be the one who knows the solution rather than watching them go on to the next challenge for assistance? It's also simple to sell. You've already established yourself as a reliable designer. Why not complete your offering by being their one-stop shop?

IMPROVE THE APPEARANCE OF YOUR PORTFOLIO

You put a lot of effort into your websites, and you should be happy to display them. However, if you leave your portfolio in the hands of your clients (or a substandard maintenance provider), you risk it becoming stale soon.

That isn't to suggest you shouldn't be in it merely to preserve your reputation; nevertheless, it is something to consider if you want to use those samples to grow your firm.

IMPROVEMENT YOUR PROCESSES

One of the best things about doing WordPress maintenance is that you can automate a lot of it, so you're not actually "performing" much at all. Monitoring and help become increasingly important.

Furthermore, if you incorporate security, speed, and SEO automation into your websites from the start, you'll have even less work to do once your maintenance plans kick in. And a fantastic reason to increase your web design fees.

ADDITIONAL REVENUE STREAMS CAN BE CREATED

You might not want to stop there once you realize how useful it is to include WordPress maintenance in your service. It's possible that neither will your customers. So keep your ears to the ground. Consider how you may add it to your service if clients start asking for help with the same types of things (e.g., managing their hosting, handling their content marketing, performing SEO audits, etc.).

Managing WordPress Maintenance Site for Services Has Its Drawbacks

WordPress maintenance is useful to your clients, and it is also beneficial to your company. However, there are a few things you should be aware of before diving in.

DIFFICULT COMPETITION

While providing WordPress maintenance will undoubtedly establish you as a competitive and powerful force in the eyes of current and previous clients, this may not be the case with newcomers. You'll have to compete not just with other web designers and agencies, but also with specialized WordPress maintenance companies like WP Buffs and SkyrocketWP.

MORE WORK WITH A NEW OFFERING

WordPress maintenance services might become an even larger strain on your organization if you don't have the appropriate tools or automations in place. Remember that you want to get away from time-based services, so make sure everything is set up correctly.

KNOW-HOW IN TECHNICAL ASPECTS

Website upkeep is a highly technological task. This may not be the best recurring revenue solution for you if your expertise is mostly in design or strategy. As a result, it's critical to secure the technology and process before beginning to market any new solution.

HELP, MAINTENANCE, AND SUPPORT ARE REQUIRED.

Although we generally refer to these services as "maintenance plans," they must include assistance. You're not only doing backups or patching vulnerabilities behind the scenes. If a customer detects that their site is down, they've been locked out of the admin, or they just need help changing a page, you must make yourself available. Do you have the ability or the patience to do so?

A LOT IS ON THE LINE.

There's a lot at stake here. If you execute everything correctly, your business and bottom line will benefit greatly. However, if you fail to give adequate maintenance and support and something goes wrong with your client's site, you can guarantee your business and reputation will suffer.

What Is The Best Way To Maintain And Support WordPress?

However, the positives far outnumber the negatives. All you have to do now is handle it properly, which means you'll need a strategy, the correct tools, and a well-defined procedure.

Here's what I'd recommend:

STEP 1: DETERMINE WHAT KIND OF MAINTENANCE YOU WILL PERFORM.

Before you create a Maintenance page to your website, decide on the type of maintenance you'll provide.

Consider the following questions:

What types of customers do you cater to? How much maintenance do you estimate they'll need on a monthly basis, on average?

A legal firm's website, for example, could just require:

• Software upgrades every week,

• Backups every month,

• Security surveillance,

• Monitoring of uptime

• 1-2 small adjustments per month

A well-established sales company, on the other hand, could require the entire package:

• Backing up and restoring data,

• Updates to software,

• Security surveillance and maintenance

• Moderation of comments,

• Monitoring of downtime

• Monitoring and optimizing performance

• Cleanup of files, plugins, themes, and media

• Cleanup of the database

• Monitoring and repair of broken links

• 2 hours of editing every month

• Reporting.

If you're interested about how firms who are only focused on WordPress maintenance and support do it, here's how Maintainn breaks it down:

You might reasonably divide up your strategies this manner if you target clients at different stages. It would also be a wonderful approach to build long-term relationships with your clients, since you could assist them in growing from embryonic beginnings to thriving businesses.

It's OK if you don't want to be responsible for a wide range of maintenance tasks. Make the most of your abilities. Webvizion, for example, provides three different plans: Basic, Advanced, and Pro.

Each plan includes the same level of maintenance and support. What differs is how much of it each plan does. If you're new to maintenance and aren't sure how much you want to extend out into or how much your clients will want, this is an excellent choice. With this method, you may safely test the waters.

Make it obvious to consumers what the distinctions between the plans are and where they'll get the greatest value, whichever you decide to separate and price out your maintenance services. You want to make this decision as simple as possible for them, just as you want to make their life easier by taking care of their WordPress maintenance.

STEP 2: MAKE YOUR TOOLBOX FOR MAINTENANCE

When developing your client's website, you may have already set some of the basis by implementing:

• A security add-on (like Wordfence),

• A plugin for caching (like W3 Total Cache),

• A backup plugin (such as UpdraftPlus) combined with safe storage (such as Dropbox) (like S3).

Not only will a good managed WordPress hosting provider reinforce this setup, but it will also make your job easier.

Kinsta's Managed Hosting

If your clients are using normal WordPress hosting and both you and they want to become serious about properly managing their website, moving them to managed hosting with Kinsta is a fantastic choice. And I'll explain why.

MyKinsta is Kinsta's multi-site control panel:

MyKinsta is a really well-organized control panel solution, as you can see in this screenshot. This isn't only a location for you to keep track of your clients' Kinsta accounts and invoices. This is where you may successfully set up your own WordPress maintenance services.

Let's take a closer look at what you can accomplish:

Backups are an unavoidable aspect of WordPress upkeep. You know your clients won't do it or know how to do it, and you can't risk a security breach or human mistake jeopardizing all you've worked so hard to create for them.

You can see from this panel that Kinsta has already taken care of this duty for you — and it's doing it at a rate that you're unlikely to be able to handle (at least, if you were planning to do this for dozens of clients).

Restoring a backup is just as simple, and it only takes a few clicks to restore your client's website to its previous state.

MyKinsta's Tools section also makes website security and speed improvement easier for you:

Do you want to switch to the most recent PHP version right away? Increase the security of your passwords? Is it possible to clear the cache? With only a few clicks, you can take care of your security and speed optimization requirements.

Another speed booster is the Kinsta CDN, which may be found in this management panel.

You can't afford to scrimp on this for clients that receive a lot of traffic from all over the world. It's good to see that Kinsta makes it simple to install a CDN rather than asking consumers to sign up for a CDN from a third-party supplier and link it with their Kinsta website. A majority of the work involved in setting up a maintenance client has already been done for you.

You can perform a lot more things with this control panel. Consider the following scenario:

• Enroll consumers in new hosting plans.

• Control domain names.

/ Check for plugin updates.

• Create a staging environment and use it.

• Convert a website to a new platform.

• Keep track of performance metrics.

Once you've got everything set up the way you want it, you can rest certain that Kinsta will look after your clients' security and performance exactly as you would. And if something goes wrong or you need assistance modifying something on the backend, Kinsta professional support is accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Management of several locations

Managed hosting will take care of the server-side maintenance and support for you, which is a significant benefit. You won't have to worry about dealing with crashed servers or other important hosting-related issues in the middle of the night.

As a result, you'll have more time to focus on the website.

However, do not attempt to accomplish this on your own. It's a nice place to start with the plugins I stated before, but it's not enough. Imagine having to log in and out of dozens or hundreds of clients' websites in order to update plugins, manage backups, and perform security checks. Don't even consider squandering your time on it.

Instead, locate a multi-site management platform to which you can delegate the majority of these time-consuming duties (like InfiniteWP or iThemes Sync).

The majority of these tools allow you to:

• Create a single control panel for all of your maintenance client WordPress websites.

• Make backups a priority (and do so in a safe manner).

• Updates may be scheduled and automated (plus, you can choose which themes and plugins get updated).

• Streamline security, availability, and performance monitoring.

• Create weekly or monthly status update reports for customers automatically.

When it comes to handling the maintenance necessities, this will relieve you of a lot of the burden. Knowing that such tools exist will also assist you in determining how much maintenance you can fairly provide without exhausting yourself.

STEP 3: FORMALIZE YOUR PROCESS

It's time to create a process for what you're offering and which tools you'll use to automate and manage at least part of the activities now that you know what you're selling and which tools you'll use to automate and manage at least some of the work.

To help you get started, I'll assist you in creating a template that will make scheduling and processizing this entire process much easier.

To begin, I'd like you to compile a list of all the maintenance services you'll be providing. You can pick from the options below or create your own. Select the services that your consumers will really want assistance with after the launch:

Help & Site/Website Maintenance Services

Back-ups are important (and restore)

Updates to software

Monitoring of security

Observation of downtime

Monitoring of results

Moderation of comments

Cleaning up the database

Organize your files

User administration

Monitoring for broken links

Domain and hosting management

Keyword tracking

Marketing with content

Review of Google Analytics

Audit of the location

alterations to the website

Support

Reporting

Determine the tools you'll use to handle these services next. You can do much of this using your multi-site manager and managed hosting solution, as you'll discover. You may require extra tools, but Google provides many of them for free.

Finally, you must determine how often each of these maintenance activities must be done (or how much assistance you will offer). Because this may differ from plan to plan, I've included a few blank sections for you to fill in your replies.

Add one of the following to the frequency-based tasks:

• Hourly,\s• Daily,

• Weekly,

• Monthly.

Add one of the following to the quantity-based tasks:

• A number (for example, how many website modifications you'll complete in a month);

• Hours (for example, how many hours of help - don't forget to specify the degree of support!).

• Now that you've separated all of the basics, start to work on putting it up.

• If you haven't yet signed up for any of these tools or aren't sure how to utilize them, do so immediately. This isn't something you want to learn on the job.

• Then, within your tools, configure your automations. You could even want to use your own website as your first "customer" so you can work out all the bugs in your approach in a secure environment.

• Then, in your project management application, add all of the tasks that require your supervision and guidance. With the aid of a managed hosting service like Kinsta, a multi-site manager, and a number of Google tools on your side, there shouldn't be too many on your plate.

• The Final Word

• When things start to pick up, it's time to start thinking about outsourcing. This might include hiring a contractor to do those manual duties for you, moving your clients to one of Kinsta's managed hosting options, or completely white labeling your maintenance services using a service like WP Buffs.

• For the time being, though, concentrate on how you might make a difference in your clients' lives. Then, contact current and past clients to practice your pitch. If you don't have clients pounding on your door for assistance, there's no sense in thinking about growing and outsourcing.

• Once you've established your worth as a one-stop shop for all things WordPress, you can focus on finding ways to reduce your workload even more while boosting your recurring revenue.

How to Enable WordPress Website's Maintenance Mode

Any work that has to be done on a live site should be done behind the maintenance mode panel. That's because a half-finished online website or one that's being maintained doesn't exactly scream professionalism, does it? Regrettably, we all have to update our websites from time to time. Here's how to go about it.

WordPress maintenance mode is useful in a variety of scenarios, such as:

• changing your WordPress theme

• evaluating plugins

• resolving website issues

• making small alterations to the appearance.

When you activate maintenance mode, you'll be able to operate on your website behind closed doors. As a result, maintenance mode may also be used as a "Coming Soon" mode, allowing you to work on your new website in privacy.

Today, I'll teach you how to use a free plugin called SeedProd's Coming Soon Page & Maintenance Mode to operate in maintenance mode in WordPress.

I realize the plugin's name is a mouthful, but it's because it combines the features of two soon-to-be-defunct plugins: Ultimate Maintenance Mode and Ultimate Coming Soon Page. In their respective domains, they are two of the greatest plugins.

How can I turn on WordPress Site's maintenance mode?

We must first install the plugin before enabling maintenance mode. After logging into WordPress, go to Plugins / Add New. The Coming Soon Page & Maintenance Mode plugin will be the first plugin listed when you search for "SeedProd."