WordPress Maintenance: four problems and how to solve them

You are just trying to make a living, right? I mean, you become a WordPress developer to have flexibility, freedom, and the ability to take care of your family.

WordPress has been an awesome tool. You can create sites for your clients very affordably and they can actually update and write blog posts themselves.

You decided, along the way, that you would support your clients’ ongoing website to both help your client with all the techy stuff and to make a nice recurring revenue.

After about ten clients, it became problematic. Logging into all those sites. I mean, if it takes you 30 minutes to login to a site, run updates, secure backups, and check security, well, that time adds up.

Your family is enjoying a visit in the evening and you are stuck at your desk logging into WordPress sites! What gives?

This the plight of so many WordPress website developers today.

Yes, it is a good idea to handle your clients’ website needs. Maybe they are afraid to click update or they don’t know how to automate their backups. Left on their own, they will end up with a hacked website and no backup to restore. Your service is preventative.

When you started your service, it seemed like a great idea. Now you are spending 5 hours or more updating client websites each week.

Four problems running a WordPress maintenance business

Running a WordPress maintenance business can be fulfilling and help sustain revenue levels, but it can also create a number of problems. Here are four major problems with running a maintenance business.

You are losing all your time

Logging in and out of WordPress sites can take all day to do. You have to look up the login credentials, you go through your maintenance checklist, you check to see backups are working, and pretty soon, you’ve spent 30 minutes or an hour on the website.

You are losing your time. There are reports to create, clients to visit with, projects to kick off, your own marketing needs to be completed, and yet you are stuck doing maintenance.

Now, you could hire someone to do that. How much would you spend?

You are losing money

Whether you are doing the maintenance yourself or hiring someone, you are actively paying someone each hour for the updates.

You might have someone on your team to complete the task, hire someone on Upwork or another WordPress freelancer site. What are you going to pay them?

Let’s say you pay $15 per hour and they work 5 hours per week on updating websites for you, then you are spending $75 per week to update websites.

Recurring revenue? It’s being eaten up by hours and hours of maintenance work. Can this not be automated?

Stay tuned, my friend.

Your clients don’t know what you do

Ever sent that invoice for the service and the client asks what you are doing for that fee. All these tasks are behind the scenes.

The client doesn’t understand updating plugins and themes. The client doesn’t understand uptime or security. The client does understand a hacked site or a site that is not working because it is down, but they don’t understand our tasks to prevent those things from happening.

You can send them your checklist, but they might as well be looking at a foreign language.

Managing can be complex

Seriously, it can be really complex to manage all of your client’s websites. Depending on just what tasks you want to complete it may require a whole lot of various tools.

You will need something to manage uptime, backup websites, store the websites, invoice clients, create tickets, monitor security. You may want to help your clients with performance optimization as well as SEO basics and analytics monitoring.

Now then you are logging into multiple portals monitor all of those pieces. This creates even more time gaps.

How to Solve the problem

The best way to solve these four problems of running a WordPress maintenance business is by using a WordPress Manager tool. Using MainWP can help you eliminate the four problems of running a maintenance business.

Take back your time

Using MainWP, you can literally run your entire maintenance business from within one dashboard. Using MainWP and the available extensions, you simply login to one place and make sure everything is working on each website.

Check out what some users said about getting their time back.

At a glance info on all my sites, and the ability to update and access all of them from one place, brilliant. Love the client reports extension too, allows me to report back easily on all work done on a site that month. teezer 

This is such a huge time saver. Having used this for a few months now, the thought of going back to the bad old days of manually updating each site gives me the shivers. woopee

Recently, we outlined some ways that MainWP saves you time. Don’t lose any more time, let MainWP help you get your time back.

Affordable

Whether you are paying someone to do the tasks for your maintenance, using up your precious time, or paying for additional websites to be managed by another tool, pricing gets out of hand pretty quickly. All of these expenses can cut into the revenue you are bringing in, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

MainWP has made it affordable. You can easily get started managing your client’s websites for free with the free extensions. The MainWP Main Dashboard is also free.

Several of the free extensions will help you manage critical parts of the sites including backups and security.

If you would like to offer a premium service for your clients, simply pay for the extensions you need or utilize the bundling by getting a membership. Memberships come in monthly, yearly and lifetime plans and they will not break the bank.

MainWP pricing is very affordable for our business in comparison some other similar tools that you have to pay per site. Some other tools pricings cause additional financial burden for the businesses especially if you manage larger number of sites. Freelancer Tools

Affordability is a big point with many developers as is the case with most business owners.

Reporting

Using the MainWP reporting extension, you can automate reports to your clients each month. Customize the reports so that you can display what you want your client to see. The reporting tool is a popular feature of our maintenance tool.

It works just fine for me and helps me generate these MainWP reports which my clients really appreciate – and which help me bill my maintenance work. Clients usually don’t get that websites need updates – but when you can document the stuff you’re doing, they get the idea. voneff

Developer Joshua Vanercar has written a fantastic tutorial showing how he utilizes the reporting tool.

Conclusion

Are you frustrated with losing time, money, your clients not knowing the value of your maintenance business or the complexity of running such a business? Sometimes it just seems like a hassle to keep moving forward with this type of business. But there is a better way.

Managing doesn’t have to be complex when we take advantage of management tools.

Tap into the tool and community of MainWP. The great thing about using MainWP, free to start, is there is an amazing community of helpers in the Facebook group. So many have set up their own system using MainWP and are willing to share their solution.

MainWP is flexible allowing you to create a system you like and are comfortable with using. Why wait? Start today. Download and install MainWP!