I’m often asked about why WordPress designers, freelancers and agencies should outsource their WordPress Maintenance. In this post I go through the reasons why I believe you should.
It’s not what you do – our motto is “Do what you love to do”. Carrying out updates and worrying about backups and security is not why you got into WordPress designing or development so, why do it? You know it needs to be done, its part of a great service offering but it’s not the sexy, most mind blowing part of WordPress! By outsourcing you can be sure that at a minimum all the basic maintenance tasks are being carried out. On top of the basics most providers offer additional services that will add value to your Care Plan and provide more benefits to your clients.
The result is that you can provide a first class after care service for your clients, while being able to concentrate on growing your business. You can also get back to what you love to do, namely building shiny new websites for shiny new clients.
Not only do you get back time that’s far better spent on your business you could start to earn a reliable, recurring monthly revenue stream.
Virtually all WordPress maintenance / care plan providers offer a range of schemes so you earn money including:
Referral schemes – you get paid for every client you recommend that signs up. You do however loose part of the customer relationship and they will be dealing with a 3rd party company.
White label services – you pay a discounted rate for the chosen care plan and charge your customers directly. You retain the relationship with the customer and the customer believes they are dealing with you.
There are loads of companies out there providing WordPress care plans – I hope you choose us, but you need to choose a company that firstly offers what you need at a price that’s affordable to you and, secondly, it needs to be a company you can work with, who’s ethos and people match yours.
What RocketWP offers
We provide several options for you and care plans:
- Referral scheme – you get 15% for every client you refer for every month they are a client.
- White Label Care Plans you get at least 25% off all our Care Plans. You charge your clients whatever you see fit.
- Agency Support Package, we support you and your entire portfolio for a fixed monthly fee. It’s reviewed once a quarter and the price adjusted.
- Alternatively, for a one of fee we can set it all up for you and leave you to it. We will implement everything, a mirror of what we use. We can then provide ongoing support should you need it.
What we don’t do
24/7 support – we are not here 24/7 we have on call engineers to deal with sites going down. We are available Monday to Friday 07:00 to 19:00. Outside these hours, if we’re working (and most evenings we are) we will respond to any request for support.
Development/Design work – we are not developers or designers, it’s not our core business. However we do have developers and designers who we know and trust to carry out work should you need something done.
Agency Support Package
I recently looked at the services we provide and those on the market and came up with what I believe is the best solution – an Agency Support Package. Going back to our previous example, if you currently have around 30 websites, we would charge a flat fee of £900.00 per month. For this every site would be on our Advanced Care Plan not only that the fee won’t change every time you add a new site. Every quarter we meet up, usually by Zoom and discuss any changes and, if necessary we increase (or decrease) the monthly fee for the next quarter.
So how do we do it?
So how can we do it so cost effectively (I hate the word cheap)? Economies of scale to start with and secondly I have a (small) team, consisting of 1st line support engineers who, while great at the job of updating websites, checking backups, making minor edits to sites and dealing with general queries, cost less to employ.
Average web designer hourly rate £50+ per hour, 1st Line Support £20+ per hour. By using the right people for the job we are able to offer our service for less.
I have also spent years in IT support and hosting and have built up processes and procedures to make everything run as smooth as possible.
When should you outsource?
I can’t tell you when you should outsource your Care Plans or even if you should. Just bear in mind that if your spending time carrying out Care Plan tasks and your ‘real’ work is suffering or you are ending up spending all your free time carrying out your care plans then it could be a good time to consider it.
