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How Automated Maintenance and Support Services Can Boost Your Profitability

Let’s be honest: Working with WordPress as a CMS has its pros and cons. There’s no other platform that gives users so much flexibility or extensibility and, yet, its complex nature is also what drives many away. It can be a struggle building websites or products for WordPress if you don’t package your services up the right way.

When you think about all the reasons someone ends up choosing a platform like Wix over WordPress, what are the most common arguments made? 

  • That anyone can design a website using website builder technologies? 
  • That they can launch a new site in minutes rather than weeks or months? 
  • That they don’t have to worry about web hosting since it’s already baked in? 
  • That maintenance is something they’ll never have to worry about?
  • That it’s a more cost-effective option? 

What if you could shoot down all of those arguments and make more money for your business by offering WordPress maintenance or support services?

Whether or not this thought has occurred to you, have you considered taking it a step further by automating it? 

Today, we’re going to take a look at: 

  • Why WordPress websites desperately need someone to support them.
  • Why every WordPress agency, web developer, theme designer, and plugin creator should sell maintenance and/or support services.
  • What kinds of maintenance and support services you can offer. 
  • How automating and bundling these services exponentially increases your profits. 

Why Do WordPress Websites Need Maintenance and Support?

It doesn’t matter what you contribute to the WordPress ecosystem — whether you build websites, themes, or plugins. Your customers still have to deal with the fact that WordPress is self-hosted. 

That means that someone needs to: 

  • Select a web hosting plan and get it set up.
  • Configure security settings and continue to monitor and manage them. 
  • Optimize their website for speed and keep tabs on it. 
  • Watch for downtime. 
  • Manage WordPress updates. 
  • Provide support if something happens to the site or a plugin or theme installed on it.

Of course, you could leave this is the hands of your customers, but then you run the risk of them not choosing you in the first place (because of how much work they’re left to do) or them not taking care of the website because they don’t know how or don’t have time to. 

That’s reason #1. 

Then, there’s the fact that WordPress websites tend to have more issues with security and performance than those built on other content management systems. 

According to Sucuri’s Hacked Website Report in 2019, WordPress websites accounted for 94% of all infections. And 49% of those WordPress attacks occurred on outdated CMS software. 

One reason to sell maintenance and support services for WordPress -- high security breach rates

As data from the WordPress Vulnerability Statistics database reveals, all WordPress software is susceptible to breach especially when it’s not kept up to date: 

General vulnerability statistics from WordPress, plugins, and themes

Then you have the matter of performance to worry about. When Backlinko analyzed the average page speed performance for different CMS, WordPress was one of the worst performing: 

Backlinko reports on CMS page speed performance rankings and shows how slow WordPress sites tend to be

Only 24% of WordPress sites were considered “fast”, 35% were “average”, and the remaining 40% were “slow”. 

Many of these issues can be fixed by having someone actively maintaining and supporting a WordPress website (not to mention building solid products from the get-go). While you could leave that for others to handle — like a web hosting company or a third-party WordPress maintenance company — why? 

Doesn’t it make more sense for you to take care of the product you built, whether it was a website, theme, or plugin? Of course, it does.

What Are the Benefits of Selling WordPress Maintenance or Support Services? 

For your customers, the benefits are clear: 

WordPress maintenance and support services protect the investment they’ve made in their website while offloading the work to professionals who know what they’re doing. 

But what about for you? 

Design Agency or Web Designer Benefits: 

  • Stop limiting your earnings to the number of websites you can build.
  • With an automated cloud platform, you can set it and forget it (for the most part).
  • Generate predictable income and empower your business to invest in better tools, stronger processes, more marketing, etc. 
  • Automated monthly payments mean less time spent tracking down late invoices.
  • Clients are likely to entrust even more to you when you take care of everything else for their site.

Theme and Plugin Vendor Benefits: 

  • Stop giving away a chunk of your sales to a third party; the only fee you should pay is for payment processing. 
  • Fully own the sales and marketing of your product and drive more steady volumes of traffic to it. 
  • Frm actual relationships with customers as you directly support the products they’ve licensed from you. 
  • WordPress users are more likely to buy your other products once they’re seen how valuable your other product is.

Seems like a no-brainer when compared to how much work you put into your WordPress services or products now, huh? 

What Kinds of Bundled Services Do WordPress Users Need? 

Although you can certainly sell WordPress maintenance as a standalone product or support as an add-on, it’s a much better idea to bundle it into your existing solutions. Remember: you want to make your customers’ lives easier, so the fewer decisions they have to make, the better. 

Let’s take a look at some of the ways WordPress agencies, designers, and vendors can bundle maintenance and/or support into their offering: 

Pixelgrade Sells Supported Themes

This is the Pricing page for Pixelgrade’s Felt theme: 

Pixelgrade sells supported theme plans

Each subscription plan offers increasingly more value to users: 

  • Felt on a roll bundles 1 year of support and updates into the cost of the theme.
  • Felt, the theme gives users lifetime support and updates for a higher one-time payment. 
  • Themes Bundle includes access to all Pixelgrade themes as well as lifetime support and updates.

Compared to what users get when they download a theme from WordPress.org or purchase one from Themeforest, this is a great deal.

LaunchMyWP.com Sells Hosted Ready-to-use Sites

This is the pricing for LaunchMyWP

LaunchMyWP.com sells hosted ready-to-use sites by the subscription

Each plan is designed to attract a different kind of user:

  • Drone provides individuals with ready-to-use sites, security, daily backups, and basic support.
  • Rocket is for businesses that need more robust maintenance, updates, and support. They also receive Elementor Pro and Jet Plugins for free. 
  • Galaxy is for agencies that want to streamline designing and maintaining client websites instead of having to buy the Rocket plan one at a time. 

Similar to Wix and Shopify, these plans take the hard work out of getting a website online and finding someone to manage it for them. 

Learn more about how LaunchMyWP.com came to be. 

How Do Automated Maintenance and Support Services Boost Profitability? 

As you can see, there are a variety of ways to bundle up the maintenance and support piece with what you already have to offer customers. It’s simply a matter of unlocking the right combination for your business. 

One last thing to mention is that adding maintenance and support to your business is typically not an easy thing to do. That is, it’s not easy when you end up having to manually do it all yourself. 

But the whole point in selling maintenance and support is so you can move away from one-off services and sales and start selling recurring subscriptions. 

So, whether you have an existing maintenance service or you’re going to build one now, automate it as soon as you can. It doesn’t matter if you have 3 customers or 300, automation is the only way to make this a truly scalable and profitable venture. And by automation, we mean letting someone (or something) else take care of: 

  • Selling your services or products. 
  • Configuring fast and secure hosting. 
  • Installing WordPress. 
  • Launching pre-built websites.
  • Managing backups and updates. 
  • And more.

The good news is that the Dollie cloud automation platform will enable you to do this. 

If you want to learn how to sell your own subscription products and services, and then automate the maintenance and support piece of it using Dollie technology, let’s talk

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