Website maintenance is a fast-growing industry segment. Both clients and digital agencies are finding benefits in establishing close and long-term relationships to keep websites delivering on client needs. As diverse as these needs are, different approaches exist to structuring and delivering maintenance—both in the tools used and the services provided.

While no one approach to maintenance fits every client, there’s an opportunity for agencies to exchange ideas on how to deliver value efficiently. For this reason, we interviewed Bobby King, COO at White Label Agency, to see what he has to share from his experience of offering website maintenance using ManageWP.

White Label Agency is an outsourcer of WordPress services to digital agencies. And a large one at that, with 3,000+ projects annually and 600+ partners. Starting out in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 2013, their initial focus was on development projects, but they soon did a lot more, including the dedicated rental of developers, designers, and content writers. When website maintenance was added in 2021, this became their fastest-growing service, leading them to put considerable effort into composing a white-label maintenance package that serves the needs of digital agencies broadly. 

Bobby, tell me why White Label Agency entered the website maintenance industry?  

For us, the value of maintenance lies more in its ability to strengthen client relationships than in its monthly fee. We look to establish regular contact with clients, and the reports offered by ManageWP allow us to achieve that. 

Once we’ve built trust and an ongoing dialogue with a client, they can generate an endless stream of work: requests to update content, add blog articles, build new pages, and make small design changes. While minor, these tasks add up. Whether an agency chooses to perform these tasks within an extended retainer package or charge for them individually, there’s value to capture here, and it’s often worth more to an agency than chasing individual large projects. The return for the time invested can also be higher. For instance, our partner agencies charge around $750 for a landing page that takes one day to build. That’s a tenth of the price they would charge to create a whole website, but it’s less than a tenth of the work.

To establish close relationships through your maintenance packages, you need to prioritize client reporting. This is the part your clients see, and it’s also your opportunity to get on the phone with them or start an email exchange. ManageWP allows you to schedule automated client reports as frequently as you wish. At White Label Agency, we send client maintenance reports monthly.

What’s included in the maintenance service you offer to your clients?

Our maintenance service includes basic tasks aimed at keeping our partners’ sites up-to-date and running securely, as well as some value-added optimization tasks. The best part is that many of these tasks can be done with ManageWP.

What is your advice to web agencies new to providing maintenance for their clients?

Be clear about what’s included in your maintenance package, and what falls outside of it. 

There are many ways to structure a maintenance relationship. Some agencies charge a low monthly rate but only carry out basic maintenance functions and charge additional services separately. Others charge a higher monthly rate and service a wide range of client requests. Both structures work fine, providing clients are clear on the arrangement. 

ManageWP is flexible in a way that it allows agencies to compose maintenance reports in a modular manner. If your agency only includes the basic tasks in your maintenance plan – updates, backups and uptime monitoring – then these are the only parameters your clients need to see in their maintenance reports. If you offer a lot more – SEO, performance, link monitoring – then it’s appropriate to also add these into the reports. Make sure your maintenance report aligns with the services your agency offers. 

How do you demonstrate the value of your work to your clients?

Luckily, in the last few years, the regular upkeep of websites has become very streamlined. Yet, when clients are investing between $150-450 per month for such services, it’s crucial to provide tangible evidence of the value they’re receiving. We value transparency and want to make sure our clients are aware of everything we do to maintain and improve their websites. That’s why sending our client reports is the key to highlighting the significance of our service. 

Our monthly maintenance reports, distributed through ManageWP, encompass various metrics. These include standard updates applied to plugins and the WordPress core, backups, analytics regarding traffic volume, security scans for malware, vulnerabilities, and web trust, as well as performance indicators such as page load time, PageSpeed, YSlow metrics, and SEO ranking on selected keywords.

However, at White Label Agency, we go beyond the routine tasks outlined in these reports. We frequently engage in additional maintenance work outside of the ManageWP console, such as content updates, image optimization, adding user accounts and much more. In order to show the added value of these tasks we make sure to share these with our partners on a monthly basis. ManageWP has a simple way of including additional tasks into the monthly reports called custom work notes.

It’s a common pitfall in the industry to rely solely on automated maintenance reports, often omitting these supplementary tasks performed within the wp-admin dashboard. This oversight risks causing confusion for clients and represents a missed opportunity to showcase the complete value we bring to the table.

What is the most important thing you learned about streamlining maintenance services?

Efficiency is important for a competitive and profitable maintenance service. Ensure your maintenance routines are streamlined and scalable from the start. 

Agencies offering maintenance should be prepared to scale fast. In 2023, our third year of offering maintenance at White Label Agency, subscriptions almost doubled. This growth appears to be continuing in 2024. Growing at this speed, you quickly run into problems if you’re not working efficiently. 

This is something we learned the hard way. When we began offering maintenance, we applied updates to each of our maintenance sites individually. As our maintenance portfolio quickly grew to hundreds of sites, regular maintenance tasks began to take a lot of time and resources. Since switching to ManageWP, we could apply plugin updates to all sites simultaneously with just a few clicks. This simplified the task of keeping our sites up-to-date with the latest software versions, safeguarding them against compatibility issues and security risks and reducing our overheads. 

We also learned the impotance of automating critical alerts. With some tasks, like critical security vulnerabilities or website downtime you have to take action as soon as it occurs. If you don’t automate these, you risk of breaking the trust your clients have in you. 

Learn to get the most out of your maintenance tools from the start, to avoid future headaches.

Conclusion

In our dispersed industry, Bobby’s insights shed light on effective strategies White Label Agency employed in their approach to website maintenance as a service. While Bobby’s experiences may not directly align with every agency’s circumstances, understanding the successful strategies of others adds value to our personal growth. Learning from the experiences of others not only broadens our perspectives but also equips us with invaluable insights to enhance our practices.