As a website developer, freelancing enables faster growth opportunities in your career. It also gives you the freedom to choose your client, compensation, place of work, and much more. But in the starting days, it can be a rough road when you have to pay bills with an inconsistent income. You can provide value to your clients and get consistent income by offering website maintenance packages.
Website maintenance is an act of regularly monitoring the site performance, backing up the data, and much more.
Businesses must keep their website up-to-date and secure from any malicious attack, but many don’t have the time or interest in doing it themselves.
Website maintenance plans offer peace of mind to your clients, and they pay a monthly maintenance fee for that. Under the maintenance plan, it’s your responsibility to make sure that your clients' websites run smoothly without any glitches.
Editor's note: GoDaddy now has a hosting centre located in India, enabling faster load times and better security for customer websites. You can read more here.
What to have in your website maintenance package
Now let’s deep dive into the details of the primary services you can offer as part of the website maintenance package.
1. Updates
No matter what CMS or framework the website uses, you need to check for regular updates and apply them.
For example, a WordPress site requires regular updates of themes and plugins. In fact, it is highly recommended to update your WordPress website at least twice a month.
Updating a website can unleash the advanced functionality of a plugin or theme. Regular updating also reduces the vulnerabilities and prevents the site from getting hacked.
2. Backups
Did you know that 60% of data backups are incomplete, and 50% of restores are unsuccessful? Backups are essential to restore the website if something goes wrong, like getting hacked, hit with ransomware, or crashed. This is a smart thing to include in any website maintenance package.
3. Security
There is a hacker attack every 39 seconds. Securing websites from attacks is also a primary responsibility under maintenance services.
Websites get hacked irrespective of the size of the business.
In fact, 43% of cyber-attacks target small businesses. Therefore, you should install a credible security application on every website you create and monitor it regularly.
4. Website monitoring
With a website maintenance package, your responsibility is to watch and report on the performance of the website. It also involves taking appropriate action if required.
Website monitoring can be broadly categorized into the below:
- Availability monitoring - Monitoring website uptime and taking appropriate action if the website is down for any reason. A down website ruins the brand image and causes significant monetary loss to the business.
- Performance monitoring - Monitoring the website’s performance and speed. Performance and speed are critical for maintaining a good SEO score and conversion rates. Even a one-second delay in site upload speed can reduce page views by 11% and conversions by 7%.
- Functionality monitoring - Monitoring the functionality of a website. A website that doesn’t function properly irritates the visitor. Like how would you feel if you’re continuously clicking on a button to submit the contact form, but it is not responding?
After performing any major update of the website, you should thoroughly test the main functionality to make sure it is working as it is supposed to be.
5. Analytics
Now this one is my favorite element of any good website maintenance package, and it can set you apart from the rest.
In addition to the above tasks, you can provide data analytics reports to your clients.
You can gather information from the Google Analytics dashboard and present your findings in terms of:
- Traffic coverage
- Demographics
- Most searched pages, and so on
The report can help your client to focus on what's working and improve what is not. They will get a better understanding of visitor behavior and can work towards enhancing site engagement if required.
The free Hub by GoDaddy Pro
The Hub by GoDaddy Pro helps you to automate maintenance tasks, so you can manage many client websites from one dashboard.
You can easily connect WordPress sites hosted on GoDaddy or anywhere else.
With the Hub, you can perform various maintenance operations on all the sites you manage, including:
- Log in to the WordPress admin dashboard with just one click
- Perform different routine maintenance tasks like enabling automated back-ups
- Perform one-click updates of plugins, themes and core WordPress versions for all sites
- Monitor each website’s uptime and performance
- Website optimization with activities like removing spam comments, etc.
- Security check, and much more.
The site management tools take the burden of regular back-ups and maintenance off your shoulders.
They also enable you to monitor the websites closely and take suitable action promptly.
Benefits of maintenance plans for freelancers
Maintaining websites takes a considerable amount of time from your work schedule, but it's worth it. Here are a few benefits of selling website maintenance packages:
1. Recurring and consistent income
As briefly discussed earlier in the article, website maintenance services add consistency to your cash flows. Adding maintenance service to your portfolio provides you an opportunity to get ongoing income from the same client.
2. Additional earnings from affiliates
Managing website hosting and security and taking backups are major responsibilities covered under the website maintenance package.
Most hosting and SaaS providers have robust affiliate programs in which they pass on a fixed commission to the referrer for each sale or renewal. This comes as an additional income to the website maintenance service providers.
3. Sticky clients
Did you know that acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing one?
Website maintenance services allow you to stay in regular touch with your clients.
This leads to a strong working relationship that lasts longer than gig-based development clients.
Offer value to your clients
Offering a website maintenance package is a great way to maintain consistent monthly income and offer more value to each client. It also helps you in maintaining good client relationships and ultimately get repeat business from them.
In this article, we discussed the responsibilities primarily covered under the maintenance plans. And how the free Hub by GoDaddy Pro can help you automate the majority of your routine maintenance tasks.
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More time = happier clients
When you use the Hub by GoDaddy Pro, suddenly there’s more time in your day to focus on what matters most. Forget about juggling admin tasks. Reclaim your time and use it to make clients feel like the center of your universe.
