As a freelancer or agency, offering maintenance services to your clients adds value and builds long-term trust and recurring revenue. In this post, we’ll guide you through creating a WordPress maintenance plan and how Divi Dash and other tools can simplify managing multiple websites simultaneously.
Why You Need a WordPress Maintenance Plan for Your Clients?
A WordPress maintenance plan offers several key benefits that help ensure your client’s websites run smoothly and efficiently. Not only do they keep your clients happy, but they can also create more income for your business with minimal upkeep if you have the right tools.
Here are some of the primary advantages of having a maintenance plan for your clients:
- Enhanced Security: Regular updates to plugins, themes, and the WordPress core help patch vulnerabilities, reducing the risk of hacking, malware, or security breaches. You can simplify this process by automating updates, ensuring that your clients’ sites are always secure without manual intervention.
- Improved Website Performance: Regular maintenance optimizes your website’s performance by addressing issues such as slow loading times, database bloat, or broken links. Monitoring tools can help you track site performance, providing real-time data to ensure optimal performance across all your sites.
- Reduced Downtime: With the appropriate monitoring tools (and good hosting), you can prevent unexpected crashes or downtime. And uptime monitoring tools, you can notify yourself and your client anytime your site goes down in real-time so you can get it back online quickly.
- Automated Backups: Manually backing up multiple sites can be a pain, but it is essential for you and your clients. Nothing is worse than a broken site without a backup. You can use tools like UpdraftPlus to schedule automated backups for you.
- Peace of Mind: Maintenance plans ensure peace of mind by automating essential tasks, allowing you to focus on core business activities while keeping sites well-maintained.
- Recurring Revenue for Your Business: As a web design freelancer or agency, providing a manageable maintenance plan can be one of the best ways to increase your revenue with recurring monthly revenue between projects.
Key Services to Include in Your Plan
Now that we’ve outlined why a WordPress maintenance plan is crucial for your clients, let’s explore the key services you should include in each plan to keep their websites running smoothly. It is important to keep in mind that your maintenance plan should only include services you can actually provide with minimal effort. You don’t want to get in over your head by offering services that you can’t live up to. As a rule of thumb, you want to offer services that most websites need already and include more advanced services that can be automated with the tools you have. For example, with tools like Divi Dash and other features available through your Divi membership, managing most of these tasks becomes much more efficient.
Hosting
Including hosting in your maintenance plan is a great idea. Instead of setting your client up with their own hosting to manage themselves, you can add them to your own at little to no cost to you. Siteground and other managed WordPress hosting providers offer hosting plans for agencies that allow you to host unlimited sites and many helpful maintenance features.
Core, Theme, and Plugin Updates
Regular updates to the WordPress core, themes, and plugins are vital for maintaining a website’s security and functionality. Keeping everything up-to-date ensures you benefit from the latest security patches, performance improvements, and new features. Divi Dash automates this process, allowing you to schedule and apply updates across all your client sites with just a few clicks.
Backups
Backups are essential for safeguarding data and preventing potential loss from server failures, cyberattacks, or accidental deletions. Implementing automated backups frequently, ideally daily or weekly, depending on how often the content is updated, simplifies the backup process. Using a solution like UpdraftPlus or hosting with SiteGround ensures that automated backups are securely stored, making it easy to restore data in case of a technical glitch or cyberattack.
Security
Ensuring robust security is essential for any WordPress website, especially given the increasing number of cyber threats. Effective security measures protect against malware, hacking, and data breaches. Key practices include using strong passwords and two-factor authentication to secure user accounts, keeping themes and plugins up-to-date to fix vulnerabilities, and installing reliable security plugins for real-time monitoring and firewall defense. Regular security audits are also crucial for detecting and addressing potential weaknesses before they can be exploited.
Uptime Monitoring
It is important that clients have the peace of mind of knowing somebody is making sure their website doesn’t go down. Uptime monitoring tools can help you provide this service with minimal effort. By continuously tracking the website’s availability, uptime monitoring tools can quickly detect any downtime or performance issues, alerting you immediately to take prompt action. This proactive approach helps minimize disruptions, ensures a seamless user experience, and prevents potential revenue loss from extended outages.
Performance Optimization and Monitoring
Performance optimization tasks, such as database cleaning, caching, image optimization, and using a CDN, help your clients’ websites maintain peak performance and are fast. Implementing and monitoring these features will be an important maintenance feature for your clients.
Support
Providing ongoing support ensures clients have someone to turn to when they encounter technical issues. Offering email or chat support, with faster response times for higher-tier plans, builds trust and adds value to your service.
Analytics and Reporting
Offering monthly analytics reports gives clients valuable insights into their website’s performance, user behavior, and traffic trends. You can provide detailed metrics on SEO performance, visitor demographics, and conversion rates, helping your clients make informed decisions about their site.
Broken Link Monitoring
Regularly checking for broken links and applying appropriate redirects helps maintain SEO and ensures a smooth user experience. Broken link monitoring keeps the site functioning properly without penalizing its search engine rankings.
Custom Development/Small Customizations
Offering minor customizations, bug fixes, or layout tweaks can add significant value to your maintenance plan. This service allows clients to request small changes without needing a full redesign.
3 Example Maintenance Plan Options to Offer Your Clients
Developing a WordPress maintenance package is essential for providing ongoing support to your clients while ensuring their websites remain secure, optimized, and functional. Below, we explore three distinct maintenance plans tailored to different client needs, allowing you to cater to a wide range of audiences effectively. Depending on your needs, you may only need one plan or five. And the services you offer for each plan will also differ. You may need to add, remove, or move around the services to fit your business needs, but the examples below should give you a good idea of what you can include.
Each plan can be managed more efficiently using Divi Dash, your hosting provider, and other tools. This ensures you stay on top of updates, backups, and security across multiple sites without manual intervention. More on that later.
Here are the three example plans:
Plan 1: Basic Maintenance Plan
- Managed WordPress Hosting: Managed hosting on SiteGround, including daily backups, built-in caching, and advanced security features.
- Free SSL Certificate: Ensure the website remains secure with free SSL setup and monitoring.
- Daily Backups: Automatic daily backups provided by SiteGround, with the ability to restore previous versions as needed.
- Core, Theme, and Plugin Updates: Regular updates to ensure that the WordPress core, themes, and plugins remain secure and functional.
- Security Optimization and Monitoring: Solid Security plugin setup. Monthly malware scans, vulnerability checks, and security patching for basic security threats. 24/7 uptime monitoring.
- Basic Performance Optimization: Basic performance optimizations, including site caching and database cleaning.
- Basic SEO: SEO plugin setup for website search engine visibility.
- 24/7 Email Support: Around-the-clock email support for any issues related to hosting, security, or performance.
Price: $50-$150
The Basic Maintenance Plan includes all essential services needed by a small business or personal blog to maintain a secure, functional, and optimized website. Offering managed hosting and daily backups on SiteGround ensures that clients won’t have to worry about website performance or security breaches. Setting up a basic SEO plugin, you’re helping clients improve their visibility in search engines without overwhelming them with advanced configurations.
The lower price allows you to offer all the essentials without much work.
Plan 2: Advanced Maintenance Plan
- Includes Everything in the Basic Plan: All features from the Basic Plan, including hosting, SSL, backups, updates, and security monitoring.
- Advanced Security and Monitoring: More frequent security scans, real-time monitoring, and intrusion detection for advanced security needs.
- Google Analytics Setup: Full setup of Google Analytics to track website traffic and monitor key performance metrics with MonsterInsights.
- Staging Environment: A staging site for testing updates and changes before they go live, ensuring no disruptions to the live site.
- Advanced Speed Optimization + CDN: Performance enhancements with advanced caching, CDN setup, and image compression to ensure the fastest possible load times.
- Broken Link Monitoring: Regular monitoring of the site for broken links, with fixes or redirects to ensure a seamless user experience and improved SEO.
- Custom Development/Small Customizations (up to 3 hours per month): More development time for customizations, bug fixes, and design changes.
Price: $150-$400
The Advanced Plan caters to businesses that need more frequent monitoring and more sophisticated performance optimization. The inclusion of Google Analytics helps clients track their traffic, and the staging environment is essential for testing updates without risking site functionality. Offering advanced speed optimization and broken link monitoring ensures the website is always fast and error-free, boosting both user experience and SEO rankings.
The mid-range price reflects the value of services added that require more hands-on customization.
Plan 3: Premium Maintenance Plan
- Includes Everything in the Advanced Plan: All features from the Advanced Plan, including hosting, security, updates, and advanced performance optimization.
- On-Page SEO Optimization: Full on-page SEO services, including keyword research, content optimization, metadata updates, and internal linking, to improve site visibility and rankings.
- Keyword Tracking and SEO Reports: Track keyword performance and provide detailed SEO reports with actionable insights to improve search engine visibility.
- Premium Performance Monitoring and Reporting: Real-time performance tracking, detailed monthly reports, and proactive adjustments to ensure optimal site performance.
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) and A/B Testing: Set up and monitor conversion goals and perform A/B testing to optimize landing pages and improve conversion rates.
- Custom Development/Small Customizations (up to 5 hours per month): Increased development time to cover more extensive customizations, advanced design changes, and complex integrations.
- 24/7 Priority Support: Faster response times and priority support for critical issues, ensuring minimal downtime and quick resolutions.
Price: $400-$1000
The Premium Plan is designed for businesses that rely heavily on their website for revenue and need a comprehensive, performance-driven solution. Including on-page SEO optimization and keyword tracking adds significant value, helping businesses boost their organic traffic. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) and A/B testing help improve user engagement and conversion rates, directly impacting a client’s bottom line. By offering up to 5 hours of custom development, you allow clients to continuously refine and optimize their site to meet evolving business needs, while 24/7 priority support ensures they always have a safety net for timely issues.
The higher price reflects the high level of ongoing services that require a more extensive workload.
Essential Tools to Streamline Your Maintenance Tasks
Creating a WordPress maintenance plan for your clients requires a solid toolkit to ensure efficient and effective management. In this section, we’ll explore some essential tools to streamline your workflow and help you deliver top-notch maintenance services to your clients. These tools are vital for keeping WordPress websites secure, updated, and optimized for performance.
1. Divi + Divi Dash: The Ultimate Solution for Building and Managing Your Client Websites
As a freelancer, you need a reliable toolkit that saves you time, boosts productivity, and empowers you to deliver professional websites for your clients. With Divi, you get more than just a website builder—you get access to Divi Dash, a powerful WordPress management solution designed to simplify your workflow and help you manage all your clients’ websites from one place, even if they’re not built with Divi.
Here’s how Divi and Divi Dash can transform your web design business.
Build Stunning, Custom Websites with Divi
Divi is one of the most powerful and flexible WordPress website builders on the market, making it perfect for freelancers who need a versatile tool to tackle various projects. Whether you’re building a simple blog or a complex eCommerce site, Divi’s Visual Builder lets you create stunning, custom designs without writing a single line of code. With over 2,300 pre-made layouts and hundreds of design modules, you can quickly deliver professional websites tailored to each client’s unique needs. Here are
- Visual Builder: Divi’s drag-and-drop editor makes building websites fast and intuitive, even for those without coding experience.
- Pre-made Layouts: Choose from a vast library of customizable templates to jumpstart your projects and meet tight deadlines.
- Full-Site Editing: Divi allows complete control over every aspect of your website, including headers, footers, and global styles, helping you deliver consistent branding across all pages.
- Divi Quick Sites: With Divi Quick Sites, you can generate a fully functional website quickly. Whether you use a starter site or let Divi create a site based on your input, Quick Sites simplifies the design process and speeds up project delivery.
- Divi AI: Divi AI enables you to leverage AI-powered tools for content generation, image creation, and design suggestions. This tool helps automate parts of the design process, making it easier to scale your web design services while maintaining creativity and customization.
- Divi Teams: Divi Teams allows you to collaborate with clients, team members, and partners more efficiently. Manage user roles, permissions, and projects directly within Divi, ensuring smooth workflows and secure collaboration.
- Divi VIP: Divi VIP offers premium support and priority access to customer service, ensuring that any issues you or your clients encounter are resolved quickly and efficiently. This service is ideal for freelancers managing multiple websites who require top-tier support and reliability.
Manage All Your WordPress Websites with Divi Dash
As your client list grows, so do your maintenance responsibilities. Divi Dash—included free with a Divi Membership—provides you with a centralized tool to manage all your WordPress websites, even if they weren’t built with Divi.
- One Dashboard for All Websites: Manage updates, backups, and security for multiple client sites from a single, intuitive interface. No more logging into separate dashboards for each site.
- Automated Updates: Keep all your WordPress core files, themes, and plugins updated automatically with Divi Dash, reducing the risk of security vulnerabilities and improving site performance.
- Performance Monitoring: Track uptime, page speed, and overall site health to ensure that your client’s websites are always running smoothly and securely.
- Client Management: Divi Dash allows you to organize websites by client, making it easy to keep track of who owns which site and what updates they need.
Whether managing one site or one hundred, Divi Dash helps you stay organized and ensures that your client’s websites are always secure and up-to-date.
2. UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is a top-rated WordPress backup plugin with over 3 million active users and a nearly perfect rating. Available in both free and premium versions, it allows you to create detailed backups of your site, store them locally or on the cloud, and schedule automatic backups, making it an essential part of any WordPress maintenance plan.
- Automatic Backup Scheduling: UpdraftPlus enables you to set up daily, weekly, or monthly backup schedules, depending on your clients’ needs. This flexibility ensures that your client’s website data is regularly secured.
- Easy Restoration: Quickly restore your clients’ websites with just a few clicks in case of data loss, server issues, or site failures. This feature is vital for minimizing downtime and keeping your clients’ businesses running smoothly.
For anyone managing multiple client websites, having a reliable backup solution like UpdraftPlus is non-negotiable. Pairing it with Divi Dash for managing other maintenance tasks creates a well-rounded toolkit for website management.
3. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a leading premium caching plugin for WordPress, celebrated for its intuitive interface and robust performance-enhancing features. The plugin accelerates your website by optimizing CSS and JavaScript, preloading the cache, and enabling LazyLoad for images, all of which help to improve your site’s speed and overall performance.
- Speed Optimization: WP Rocket significantly improves site loading times, which is key for both SEO and user experience. Faster websites reduce bounce rates and keep visitors engaged.
- Database Optimization: WP Rocket also helps clean up your website’s database by removing unnecessary data, reducing bloat, and ensuring your site runs efficiently.
- Seamless Integration: WP Rocket integrates easily with WordPress, requiring no technical knowledge to set up. It works behind the scenes, optimizing performance with minimal input from you.
Adding WP Rocket to your WordPress maintenance package ensures that your clients’ sites stay fast and responsive, improving their user experience and search engine rankings. It’s a must-have tool for any maintenance plan aimed at delivering top performance.
4. Solid Security
Solid Security (previously known as iThemes Security) is a robust WordPress plugin designed to offer comprehensive protection for your site. It includes more than 30 security features, such as password protection, user activity monitoring, and defenses against brute force attacks. Solid Security ensures that your clients’ websites remain safe from various online threats.
- Password Protection: Solid Security allows you to enforce strong passwords and regularly prompts users to update their credentials, reducing the risk of unauthorized access.
- User Monitoring: Track user activity and detect suspicious behavior to prevent unauthorized changes or access to sensitive areas of your site.
- Malware Scanning and Intrusion Detection: The plugin continuously monitors for malware and intrusion attempts, alerting you immediately if any security risks are detected.
Solid Security is particularly popular among beginners and small businesses for its ease of use, but its advanced security features make it a great addition to any WordPress maintenance plan, especially for clients who prioritize robust security.
5. UptimeRobot
UptimeRobot is a powerful uptime monitoring service that ensures your clients’ websites remain accessible and functional. It continuously checks your website’s availability and alerts you if any downtime occurs, allowing you to take immediate action to resolve the issue.
- Instant Downtime Alerts: UptimeRobot monitors your site every five minutes and notifies you via email, SMS, or other methods if your site goes down. This immediate alert helps you minimize the impact of downtime.
- Detailed Uptime Reports: The service provides detailed reports on your website’s uptime performance, giving you valuable insights into maintaining consistent availability.
- Easy Integration: UptimeRobot is easy to integrate with WordPress and other platforms, making it a seamless addition to your WordPress maintenance package.
For any WordPress maintenance plan, monitoring uptime is critical for ensuring uninterrupted service, protecting your clients’ businesses, and maintaining customer satisfaction.
How to Manage and Deliver Your Maintenance Plans Efficiently
A well-structured maintenance strategy minimizes downtime and enhances productivity and client satisfaction. This guide explores key strategies for effective maintenance management, providing you with the tools and insights needed to streamline your processes and deliver exceptional results.
Centralized Site Management
Managing multiple client websites can be overwhelming without the right tools. Hence, effective maintenance management begins with centralized site management. With Divi Dash, you can oversee all your WordPress sites from a user-friendly dashboard. This eliminates the need to juggle multiple logins or update each site separately. Everything you require is centralized, simplifying monitoring your website’s performance, security, and updates.
With a single click, you can refresh all WordPress core files, plugins, and themes simultaneously. This is a significant time-saver, particularly for those managing multiple WordPress sites. The convenience of updating dozens or even hundreds of websites simultaneously truly transforms the management process.
Automating Updates and Backups
Keeping your clients informed with regular updates is essential for maintaining strong relationships and trust. You can automate updates using Divi Dash. This tool can set up an update schedule for all your sites. You can automate updates for themes, plugins, and WordPress itself, ensuring your websites are always running the latest versions. This scheduling reduces downtime and lets you tailor the update settings to your preferences. You can easily choose the frequency, timing, and time zone, ensuring updates occur with minimal disruption to your site’s uptime.
Effective backup management is critical for protecting client data in addition to updates. UpdraftPlus is an excellent solution for managing backups, offering robust features that ensure all client data is securely stored and easily recoverable in emergencies. You can set daily, weekly, or monthly backup schedules tailored to each client’s needs. Moreover, you can choose from various remote storage options, such as Google Drive or Dropbox, to keep backups safe from local failures.
Security Monitoring and Management
Security monitoring involves continuous oversight of client websites to identify and address threats proactively. Regular malware scans and vulnerability checks help you detect issues before they escalate, ensuring your clients’ sites remain secure and functional. This vigilance protects sensitive information and minimizes the risk of costly downtime caused by security breaches.
One of the most important tasks for maintaining your WordPress site is regularly updating your password. For a simple method of updating your password, consider using Divi Dash. Its user-friendly dashboard allows you to change your site’s passwords easily.
Performance Monitoring and Optimization
A well-performing site enhances user experience and positively impacts search engine rankings and conversion rates. Key performance indicators (KPIs) such as load times, uptime, and response rates should be tracked consistently. By proactively addressing performance issues, you can help prevent site slowdowns.
Divi Dash offers a convenient solution for removing unwanted database entries, ensuring your website runs efficiently and quickly. To eliminate unnecessary items from your website, start by accessing the main Dashboard of Divi Dash and selecting the website you want to optimize.
Besides Divi Dash, tools like WP Rocket can offer advanced caching and performance optimization for high-traffic websites. Hosting solutions like SiteGround, with their built-in caching tools, are also ideal for improving performance.
Client Management and Communication
For a healthy WordPress maintenance plan, reporting your clients and detailing the work done on their websites is important. Divi Dash simplifies client management by providing a centralized dashboard for tracking client information, project specifics, and website assignments. It makes assigning websites to respective accounts quick and efficient. With all client details organized in one place, there’s no need to sift through emails or physical notes to find what you need. Divi Dash is your digital client directory, helping you save time and work more efficiently.
Divi Dash is also an excellent tool for team collaboration. It allows the creation of multiple user accounts, each with specific roles and permissions, making task assignment and website access management more efficient. Its seamless integration with Divi Teams, a robust collaboration platform designed to simplify teamwork, makes this possible. Together, Divi Dash and Divi Teams streamline project collaboration and ensure all team members stay aligned and informed.
With Divi Dash, you can easily share performance reports, security updates, and other critical data with your clients, informing them about ongoing maintenance work. This helps build trust and ensures long-term relationships with your clients.
Get Started with Divi Dash Today!
Without regular maintenance, your clients’ websites could experience security vulnerabilities, slowdowns, or performance issues. Consistent upkeep protects your clients’ investments and provides you with an ongoing source of revenue. You can secure repeat business, earn positive referrals, and build a stronger portfolio of high-quality, well-maintained websites by offering reliable maintenance services.
With tools like Divi Dash, Divi, and other essential plugins like UpdraftPlus, you can offer top-tier maintenance services that keep your clients’ sites secure, optimized, and running smoothly.
To get started with these powerful tools, join the Divi community and unlock all the features needed to manage and grow your web design business.
Here is a table of recommended tools for creating an effective maintenance strategy for your client’s websites:
| Featured Product | Suited For | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Divi + Divi Dash | Website Building and Management | Get |
| 2 | Divi Teams | Collaboration with Team Members | Get |
| 3 | UpdraftPlus | Creating, Restoring and Managing Backups | Get |
| 4 | WP Rocket | Caching and Performance Optimization | Get |
| 5 | Get | Website Security | Get |
| 6 | Uptime Robot | Uptime Monitoring | Get |
To enhance the effectiveness of your maintenance service proposals, begin by outlining the tasks you’ll provide. Communicate the significance of site maintenance in simple, understandable terms for your clients. Customize your pitch to address both new and existing customers. Accurately estimate and present the maintenance costs to your clients. With this approach, consider incorporating WordPress maintenance into your web design business.
The post How to Create a WordPress Maintenance Plan for Your Clients appeared first on Elegant Themes Blog.