Build Recurring Revenue with WordPress Maintenance Plans (Free Crash Course)

0:00One of the biggest mistakes that I made when I started building websites for clients was waiting way too long to offer WordPress maintenance and care plans. I didn't think I was ready and I had no confidence because I really didn't know how they worked or understood the value and importance of maintenance plans and why clients really needed them. When I started to offer the plans and building that recurring revenue, that is when my business changed because I was making predictable income and for the first time I felt like I had control over my web design business. That's why I dedicated and invested into years of mastering

0:36WordPress maintenance plans and how to deliver with professional value while at the same time building a very successful business around it. And that's what I'm going to teach you inside of this crash course. We'll be breaking everything down into three key areas. First, the technical delivery. This is going to be how to fulfill the WordPress maintenance plans for your clients at a professional

0:57level. Second, the business management. We're going to cover how to price, what to offer, contracts, and most importantly, how not to make costly mistakes. And third, we are going to be covering scaling and automation. How to grow your client base without sucking up all of your time. First off, the technical delivery. And we focus on three key areas. Number one is going to be hosting. Number two is going to be

1:22your WordPress website management tool. And number three is going to be your WordPress stack. We're going to use an optimized approach because the whole purpose behind a WordPress maintenance and care plan is to make sure your clients websites stay optimal, that they are performing well, and that they are secure and reliable. So, we're going to have an optimized approach to everything while at the same time being cost-effective because we are running a business and need to keep our overhead low while not sacrificing important things on being able to manage our client sites optimally. Here are the items that we need to deliver on and I put them inside of a checklist because

2:01we are going to check them off as we are going through this portion of the crash course. First, let's start with the hosting because the hosting is very foundational. It is very very important and I want to begin with what to avoid and one of those big mistakes is to get cheap shared hosting. Share hosting those are those $199 $299 a month hosting plans that you would see on

2:24something like GoDaddy for an example. And what shared hosting is it's a shared server where there are countless of other websites in that server and that adds a lot of problems to websites. Now, it is our responsibility to make sure our clients websites are safe and optimized. But when we use shared hosting, we give risk to security and risk to performance because we are sharing a cheap server with a bunch of other websites. All it takes is another website to do something dodgy, even illegal to compromise the IP address to

2:59open up risk to our clients websites. And you know, other websites could have performance issues where they're getting attacked by bots or gobbling up all the resources impacting your website. Avoid shared hosting at all costs. Sure, it's cheap and it might save you money, but it will come back to bite you later. Now, the other type of hosting is going to be managed WordPress hosting. Those are going to be things like WP Engine, WordPress.com, many others. This isn't bad and I wouldn't say it is anywhere close to being as bad as shared hosting. It's much better than shared hosting. But the reason why I avoid WordPress managed

3:40hosting is because number one, it could cost a lot of money. It could it costs a significant amount more. But number two, and this is the real reason for me, is that there's no flexibility and scalability. I'm going to show you more about how to be flexible and scalable and why it is important in a moment. But first, we need to talk about cloud hosting. Cloud hosting is a hosting that is just like what it says. It's in the cloud. It's going to be something like Digital Ocean, something like Vulture, Hner as well, which I have my own personal websites on. And for me, what makes cloud hosting the optimal choice

4:18is for one, we get our own resources, our own dedicated resources. We don't compete with other websites. Whatever we have, those are contained and those are for our sites. We get a dedicated IP address. So, we're not dealing with other bad neighbor websites that could impact the security or the reputation of our clients websites. We're keeping them

4:40optimized and we're keeping them secure. Also, cloud hosting tends to be a lot faster and very importantly, it is a lot cheaper as well. Plus, it is scalable. To use cloud hosting or a cloud server, we need a cloud panel. And what a cloud panel is, it's basically like a SAS platform that has built the infrastructure to manage your cloud servers. Because if we were to go to say Digital Ocean and get a droplet and try to set it up on ourselves, a droplet is

5:11their terminology for their servers. Well, it takes some CIS admin skills. It could take a lot of work to keep up with. Like I tried it myself before I started using the cloud panel because I thought I was going to save a lot of money, but it was out of my skill set. It took a lot more time, a lot more resources. I had to bring in a dedicated developer to help me out with it. And then I found Cloudways, which is basically a cloud panel, a platform that manages it, sets it all up, optimizes it for you, maintains it, it does all of the work. And here is what I mean about

5:47being flexible. Let me just go ahead and start something. I'm just going to call this test and test just to show you exactly what I mean. We have the choices to start off small with the very basic one. I usually like to use the premium, but you could start off small, create your server, and create your location. And this is huge, especially if you're going to be building sites for clients in different countries because let's say

6:14you got a client and they are in the EU. You have to get them a server in the EU. There are data privacy laws that require it. So, let's say we do get somebody inside of the EU. I could go ahead and host them inside like Frankfurt. I could spin up a server and I could manage my EU clients all on the server. But let's say now I get other clients inside of the US. Now having them on this server will actually cause a little bit of a slowdown for the website because when somebody in the US goes to the website, it has to ping all the way overseas and

6:50back. Now things go pretty fast, but still we want to optimize it as much as we can. and also be mindful of data privacy laws. So this means we could create a second server and we could also create it closer to our client's location like on the east coast or on the west coast. And then when we create this, we could start off small and we

7:12could add more than one lowra website. And we will talk about low traffic and high traffic in a moment. But as far as low traffic, low resource website, your basic small business website that gets basic traffic, you could put several of them on one server. And then when you need to get more resources, you find that you put too many websites on there, you could go ahead and scale up the server and just start paying the difference. So you're only paying for what you use. It gives more control and more scalability. And then when you do get a client that let's say has a Woo Commerce website or they have some sort

7:52of a booking or they have something that drains resources or just gets a high amount of traffic, you could get them their own server and charge them more for the WordPress maintenance plans. And we're going to cover that later on when we talking about pricing. When I started, I did use shared hosting because I didn't know better. But then I wanted to get better results. I moved to WordPress manage hosting and I was using WP Engine. I was paying a lot of money about a hundred bucks a month and then it went up to even more and I found that this was costing me a lot. But then I

8:27wanted to lower my expenses. I tried doing the whole droplet thing on my own, trying to build out my own cloud servers and manage them. That was a super big headache and ended up costing me more in developer fees later on. But then when I did move over to a cloud panel with Cloudways, I saw my expenses get cut nearly in half and I also had other tools to use. If we go back over here to our checklist, and we're going to keep coming back to this during the crash course. We already covered this fast, reliable, secure hosting. Use cloud servers. They're going to get you the

9:01best results. But now we got our security. And security is huge. We want to make sure our clients sites stay safe and secure. And sure, we can go ahead and install a security plugin, but really I found those to be clunky, impacting performance. And also through time and experiments and like I said, mastering this whole maintenance thing, I found Cloudflare gave us the best results. Now, we could use the free version of Cloudflare and set up our own rules. But here's what we started doing inside of Cloudways. They have a Cloudflare Enterprise add-on. And this was only we're paying like $2 a month per website. That was it. You know, it

9:44it costs less if you got more sites, but once you build this up and even if you just start off at $5 a month, now if you were to go to Cloudflare Enterprise, it would cost you $200 a month to do it on your own. Then you have to set it up, which takes a lot of expertise. Instead, we're paying a few bucks a month, a couple dollars a month to add that to our clients websites where it is all set up by people far more qualified than I am to set up something like Cloudflare Enterprise, especially being optimized to protect WordPress websites. It just

10:18takes the stress and headache out of it. Now, as we start to build up websites in our WordPress maintenance plans, one thing that we want to focus on is to remove those headaches. have things set up. Sometimes we got to pay a little bit more, but it'll give us peace of mind and save us a lot of time. This is one of those things and this is the reason why we stuck with Cloudways for several years because of these types of integrations that were very important for our maintenance plans. Now, that checks off the security. There's still

10:51more we're going to do in our security. We'll cover some of those later. And if you do want to take it a step further, they do have other products for more uh things like malware protection. I haven't used this one. I'm only going to share with you what I have used because I am very cost effective. That's what I'm focusing on. I have other things that we are going to show on how to do more with the security coming up. But

11:16first, we got to look at these backups. You see, I got backup one, two, and three. Backup, backup, backup. three backups minimum for your WordPress maintenance plans. That is so important because it's going to happen to you one day where backup number one and backup number two fails and then all of a sudden you're getting soaked with cold sweat worried that the website is gone and you're going to be so grateful you have that backup number three. Now backup number one, this is in our hosting just about all host. If you got a hosting that doesn't have backups, leave that hosting right away. If your hosting is charging you for backups,

11:52leave that hosting right away. When you have a cloud panel server, they're also creating backups of that server as well, not just the website. Backup number two, this is going to be inside of our WordPress management tool, which brings us on to the next segment of this crash course, WordPress management tools. What a WordPress management tool is, it's a tool that centralizes all of your websites that you manage into one location, allowing you to perform WordPress maintenance. Here are some of the OGs. You got MainWP, you got manage

12:27WP. These have been around forever. These are old school, even WP remote. Very solid. Also been around for a while. But here is the new guy on the block and that is WP umbrella. This is the one that I am using. Previously, I use manage WP. I use this for years, but I felt like it just got outdated. It was not updating and I had some issues with with support. Support is vital. Whatever tool you are using, you got to make sure support is going to be there to answer you back within a day. And I had issues with their support, which made me lose hope. And that's when I moved to WP

13:06Umbrella. And I even manage my own personal sites inside of here because I get all those benefits. First off, it's going to show you exactly if any issues are going on. You can see in my sites, I got some plugins and some updates that I need to make. I also see some risk anytime there are some. Now, the risk that I'm seeing here is just a plugin that's inactive. Nothing severe, but if there is a severe one going on, going to get notified. I'm going to find out right away about it. So, there's not going to be any surprises. Now, let's go and take a look at what we are doing

13:39when we're managing the website because we need to work on our delivery checklist. Now, let's go back over here. First up, we got the next backup. And the backup is very simple. Set it up. I usually create mine for one day. Every single day, we create a backup. That's for your basic normal sites. Now, if you do have, let's say, a WooCommerce site that is actively getting sales, you're probably going to want to set your backups from anywhere between one to three hours. Just keep in mind that'll probably incur extra costs. Not that much, but still, it's a reason why we

14:14charge more for Woo Commerce websites. Again, more on that when we get to the pricing. But right here, we got our backups inside of our management tool. That covers backup number two. Next up, our uptime monitoring. This is super super important. The last thing we want is for a client who is paying us every single month to just be the best client, never say anything, and then all of a sudden out of the blue message us, why is our website down? That is a bad position to be in because that shows the

14:46client we are not performing our duties. So, we need to have an uptime monitoring. I have mine set up here. This way, if something goes down, you're getting notified right away. Not only by email, but we are even able to connect this all to Slack. That way, if you do, let's say, have a VA, you have an assistant, or you have somebody else to help you out, you can get your notification right there in Slack, everybody's on the same page. If you are, let's say, sleeping and you got another assistant, which is a very good situation to be in, they could get the Slack notification and they could jump

15:20on it. But still, I like to get my notifications by Slack and email cuz sometimes emails slip by me. So, we set up the uptime. Now, the performance as well. We could set this up and have it so it is checking our website every day. And that way, if something happens to the website and it all of a sudden slows down, we're being notified. This way, again, the client doesn't message us and

15:43say, "Hey, our website feels very slow." Instead, we have the data. We have the testing going on every single day and when done right, our client won't even notice anything wrong because we'll catch it before the client does. And going back to our checklist, we can see now we have just checked off two more items off of our delivery. Next up, we have our client reports. And I put this as optional because this is totally up to you. Now, I do suggest using them because they are very helpful. Most clients won't even read it. Most of them don't even see it or pay notice. They just delete the email or they archive

16:25it. But sometimes clients start to think, what am I paying for? Do I really need this? And I feel like the client reports just creates that transparency. It shows exactly what we are doing for them. And then it also, you know, reaffirms that there's actual work being done on the website every single month, even if they don't understand what it is. And we could set up all of our reports here and then, you know, create your template. You could go ahead and even automate it. So, you can make this a complete 100% automated schedule release process. You just spend the time to get it set up once. So, back over to

17:03our checklist, we now have almost everything checked off. All we have left is our backups, our updates and bug fixes, and client support. And now let's take a look at those updates because we could do all of this within our management tool. But here is a caveat. So I could go in here and I can see I

17:23got four plugins that I need to update. I could go ahead select in update them. Let's update. I could do the advanced safe which I like to do. It does have the platform try to visually compare the updates making sure nothing has broken but you want a human eye on this. That's my suggestion. Whenever you perform all the updates, you have to go through them and actually take a look and make sure everything is still running. Most websites that you get, it could be your basic brochure business website. You just got to go into the website really quickly, click around, make sure nothing is broken, and then you're pretty much

18:01good to go. E-commerce websites, you're going to want to make sure you can still check out, purchase products, add products to the cart, and go through the whole buying process. If it is a booking website, you want to make sure that the booking forms are still working. Same thing with contact forms. You also want to check your contact forms. You want to make sure that the updates did not do anything that prevents our clients from getting leads and generating sales because that is revenue for their business. And the last thing we want to do is a client coming to us saying, "Hey, our contact form wasn't working

18:36for several days and I think we lost $10,000." and they just pull a number out of the air. It could happen. So, that's why I always prefer to go with the manual. Make sure you're manually doing this. Now, later when we do look at the scaling portion of the course, I'm going to show you how you could offload a lot of this manual fulfillment work. When it comes to doing updates, my recommendation is to either do it once every week or once every month. It is your call. I like to do a weekly, but there's still nothing wrong with just having one day a month. Now, if you do

19:10get a security alert from your management tool saying, "Hey, this plug-in has been identified as a security risk, which a tool like WP Umbrella will do." Well, jump in immediately and make that update and then run tests. For the general updates on all of your websites, you want to do all of this at once and schedule it. Make it a routine. I like to do mine Friday mornings. I set aside one to two hours and that's all the time I really need to complete all of it. Now, by doing this in a scheduled systematic way, it creates a routine that does not interrupt with the rest of your web

19:50design business. And that is very important. And now the bug fixes because sometimes when you do run updates, bugs can occur. It's a natural part of the process. You're going to get bugs. Some bugs are going to be easy to fix. Some of them are going to be very difficult. If it is very difficult, there's nothing wrong with rolling a backup and scheduling those bugs to be fixed at a time when you have time. It doesn't mean that if there's a major bug that is going to take you hours and hours and try to solve or you might even need to hire a more experienced developer to

20:26come in and fix that bug for you. It doesn't mean you have to let it interrupt your schedule. And this is the reason why scheduling is so important. You should not spend no more than one to two hours. That is my golden rule. If you have a bug that is going to take you more time, roll the back up, schedule that in, and go ahead and either try to fix it yourself at a later time or plan to have another developer to come in and fix it for you. Just a heads up, Woo Commerce and complex sites, they are going to have more bugs. So, just be

20:59prepared for it and charging appropriately for it. And with that, we deliver our updates and bug fixes. Now, let's take a look at our WordPress stacks. A WordPress stack is a set of tools that you are going to use on every single website. Building a stack, it takes investments in expenses and investments in time to master that stack. One of the biggest mistakes that I see creatives making is the shiny eyed syndrome. The need to constantly change the tools that they are using for something brighter and shinier and something that looks just more fun. I get it. I fell into that myself. I have fun opening up new tools, trying them

21:41out, and I want to implement them. But this is a pitfall when it comes to WordPress maintenance plans. We should not be using different tools on different sites because let's say you have 30 websites on your maintenance plans. And let's say out of 30 of those sites, you have three page builders, you have Gutenberg, you have 10 different themes that all look good, you have several different performance plugins, tons of different security setup. Can you see how messy and unmanageable that would be? You want the same set of tools on every single site. It is going to be cohesive. You're going to know exactly what's going on in each one of those

22:22sites. You're not going to have to sit there and spend time remembering how it was built and trying to figure stuff out. Instead, everything is built the same way using the same tools. It makes it so much more easier and streamlined and organized as well as scalable, especially when we start to bring other

22:40people in. More on that towards the end. This all ties into my philosophy. Master one thing at a time. It's one of the things that my first mentor taught me and one of the most important lessons I teach others because if you master that thing, you're going to get really good at it and you're going to provide the most value you can out of it. And when you jump to something else, you're starting over from scratch. You got to take time to learn it and you got to take time to learn how to provide value with it. Here is my stack and this is what I use on all my websites. I don't

23:12use anything else. I use Elementor and Bricks. Sure, I would like to try other page builders. I really want to get into breakdance. It's been on my list forever. I'm very interested in many others and I would love to have the time to explore. But truth is, I just don't have that kind of time and I've invested so much into Elementor and Bricks and I've mastered them to the point where I could deliver top professional value with both of them. For Elementor, the only add-on I use is dynamic oo. This is going to be for more complex sites. And for bricks, I got my stack core

23:46framework, advanced themur, bricks extras, and bricks forge. That's all I use for bricks. Now, for security, I use cloudflare and loginown pro. Login lockdown pro. It is a plugin. I bought it off of Absumo. And you know what? It does a few extra things that I feel just gives it a little bit extra layer of security. Mostly I use it because it adds a 7 and 8G firewall and that really is what most WordPress security plugins do. They add that firewall into your HT access. I have videos on this as well on my channel that breaks down the security at different levels. I'll share one of

24:25those inside of the description of this video to give you more insights on how to properly secure your website at all levels. For performance, I use Lightseed, Perf Matters, and Short Pixel. Lightseed is my optimization plugin, and we do need to have one. Lightseed is a good free choice, but it is a bit complex to set up. If you want something easier that is plug-andplay, ready to go, you go with like WP Rocket, Nitro Pack, you know, those they cost, but they also are easy to use. I use Perf Matters to take my performance to another level. I'm able to do some more advanced stuff with it. and then short

25:03pixel for my image performance, my image optimization. Then we got the backups and migrations. Now it's time to check off that third backup on our list. And we could do this with the on-site backup. I use WP vivid and all-in-one migration. I have lifetime deals on both of those. I also use Crocco because I use Jet Engine and I use custom fields all the time. That is one of those necessities for me and my WordPress websites. That is in my stack. There's SEO Press Pro. That's for my SEO management. Now, it's really, really important to understand this. SEO services are not part of WordPress maintenance. Do not include anything

25:46related to SEO in your maintenance plans. It's a completely separate service. This is just one of those tools in my stack that I put on all of my websites. Then I got Fluent Snippets, WP Codebox. Those are for my code management tools. And now lately I've added a lot more automations. And I'm using Autokit, Bit Flows, and NADN. It all depends on the project. And out of everything you see here in my stack, I'm

26:11only paying for three subscriptions. Everything else is either an LTD or a free tool that I am using. If you have any questions about any of these, definitely leave them inside of the comments. And back to our checklist. were able to check off backup number three, which leaves us to the final item. And I saved this for last. And the reason why I save client support for last is because out of everything that we have covered so far in WordPress maintenance plans, client support is by far the most important and adds the most value to our clients. I'm going to repeat this. Client support adds the

26:51most value out of anything else on our checklist. It is the most important part of our WordPress maintenance plans. And it is the most underestimated and overlooked part of WordPress maintenance plans that creatives make. And here's why. Clients, they don't really understand most of this stuff. You could explain to them how important it is to have good hosting. You could explain to them about, you know, backups and and uptime monitoring, but it's going to go over their head. They really don't understand it or they don't really see the value in it. But what they do see the value in is having you there for them when they need you. Put yourself in

27:36a business owner's shoes, a new business owner, a smaller business owner. They're not able to afford in-house developers and in-house designers. They don't have somebody in their office that they could turn to and say, "Hey, Tommy, can you do this for me? Hey, what's going on with this? They need us to be that person for them. And they're also getting it at a heck of a deal. They're getting it at a very affordable monthly rate. Most clients who are going to take your WordPress maintenance plans are going to take it not for the hosting, not for the uptime monitoring or backups. They're going to take it because of you. Because

28:15they want you there when they need you and they know they are going to need you later on. It gives them peace of mind. It gives them security. That is the true value. That is where clients are going to see the most value and where we need to focus on the most client support. So do not underestimate this. When we go over pricing coming up next, this is going to play a critical role. And hopefully by you being able to change your mindset around client support and seeing it for the value that it is, it is going to give you the confidence to charge what you should be charging for

28:54your WordPress maintenance plans and stop making all the costly mistakes. Which brings us now to part two of this crash course. Part two, business management. Let's create our plans. I'm going to walk you through this. We're going to keep it super easy because actually creating plans is super easy. We don't need to be unique. There's nothing that we need to do to stand out from everybody else with our maintenance plans. Maintenance is very straightforward. We make sure our clients websites stay healthy, safe, secure, optimized, performing well, and we are giving them support. We are there for them as they need us. The first place to start is right here in our

29:34checklist. We already covered everything and we already walked through how to complete all these deliverables. Now, I want to start with the biggest mistake that I see in most plans and chances are many of you are making this mistake right now. And that is offering free work inside of your care plans or your maintenance plans. What that means is inside of your maintenance plans, you're saying we'll give you two, three, four hours a month in updates and changes to your website. That's giving away free

30:04work. That's not part of maintenance. That is giving something extra. And I believe most add that to their plan either because they see other people doing it or because they don't feel confident enough with what they are delivering and what they are charging. And a lot of us creatives are more introverted and also have a bit of a struggle when it comes to mindset around money. It also creates a character where we want to give more and do more to try to justify for what we are charging. But when we are adding free hours of work into our maintenance plans, we are taking out a very big portion of our

30:44earnings that we should be making because one of the big advantages and benefits for us to offer maintenance plans to our clients is to get ongoing work. That's what we want. Our clients, they need that person who's like an in-house designer or developer. They need somebody who could come in, make changes to their websites, make updates as their business requires it. If we're giving it away for free, then we are just giving away free work. We're not

31:12charging for what we're actually doing. Honestly, I feel like this is the second biggest mistake that maintenance and care plans make. Number one is not understanding the value of client support. Number two, giving away free work. What my agency started doing was selling retainer packages. I created a package and a system around it where a client would pay upfront for a set number of hours that went into those small, you know, those minimal tasks, those those small ones, the ones that you don't want to just create an invoice for one or two hours, you know, because that's just going to waste everybody's

31:47time and get a client upset at you. Instead, we created these retainer packages and we sold them as add-ons to our maintenance plans. Again, it had a significant impact on our earnings, but also had a huge impact on what we were delivering to our clients. We're able to do stuff faster without getting burnt out. Going back to our checklist, this is where to begin. You want to avoid the need to fluff it up and to add a bunch of stuff or to get super creative and unique with it because again the client is going to be mostly buying the maintenance plans for you to keep you

32:24there. Let's take a look at my website and use this as an example. So up here I do highlight the important things that we are doing. These are the items in our checklist that we've already covered in part one of this crash course. Now, if we go here to the actual plans, I do have a three- tiered plan. Here is the plan that almost all websites are going

32:45to get and almost all websites need. Usually, it's one plan fits most at a high number, like just a really, really high percentage of websites will fit into this plan. And everything you see included is exactly what is inside of our checklist. There is one extra, however, and this is going to be an

33:04access library of our premium plugins. Going back to our WordPress stack, we invest in it and we do put a lot of money and finances in it and a lot of the times we're going to be paying ongoing subscriptions. We need to highlight that to our clients and let them know this is what they're getting. I know some developers and designers choose not to do that and choose rather to have the clients buy their own licenses, but here's my take on that. It causes friction and anytime I could remove the friction from the client and my maintenance plans and just make it so much easier not just for the client but

33:46for myself. I'm going to go that route. I would rather buy agency licenses, position them as this is included in your maintenance plan. And if the client chooses not to get a maintenance plan, that's fine. They could go and get their own licenses. If the client chooses to cancel their maintenance plan, then we cancel their licenses and we let them know they have to go purchase their licenses in order to continue making updates for security. So, my suggestion is with your stack that we've already covered, get the agency license, get the LTDs, and position that in a way that will just show the client some more

34:25value with our plans. We don't need to do anything else. We don't need to fluff it up. We don't need to start making it unique and trying to make it really stand out. The client isn't going to understand all that. We don't need a bunch of listenit items. It is better to underpromise and overd deliver and stick with the basics. Especially if you're just starting off. And right now, if you are adding way too many things, you're just doing too much. You're giving free hours away every single month. You need to scale that back. You could restructure your plan and you could just communicate that with the client that

34:58you have made updates to your plan. There's no problem with that. Almost anybody will be very understanding about that. So this is the one plan that is going to fit most our regular WordPress maintenance plan. Now when it does come to Woo Commerce or high velocity, I just called it high velocity. I was getting a bit creative here, but really these are for websites that are going to be for bigger brands that have a whole lot more risk. For an example, we had Topgolf, one of their websites that we built and that we were maintaining. That is a high-risk website, meaning if it goes down, the company could potentially lose

35:38thousands of dollars per hour. Those are going to take extra special care. So, we want to have something for it. That is even if you choose to manage a website like that. But definitely for Woo Commerce, you're just going to add on a little bit more. I talked about the retainer packages. I do like to add a little something for the retainer packages cuz it is an add-on or an upsell for my maintenance plans. If you would like to know more about retainer packages, let me know inside of the

36:08comments. Everything is kept basic. Everything is focused on the fundamentals. Underpromising and overd deliver with your client support. That is where you are going to impress your clients. Now, let's talk about pricing. Here's one of the biggest mistakes that I've seen. The biggest mistake is charging too low. That is a huge mistake. We have to factor in our expenses. How much is it going to cost for our stack? How much is it going to cost for our hosting? We don't want to cheap out on hosting with the cheap shared server hosting. We don't want to cheap out on not putting those security add-ons to our website. And real quick,

36:49I did forget to show this earlier, but when we talk about those add-ons for things like security, we have, let's say, this $2 a month add-on per site that connects PatchStack, which is a very highly well-known and recognized security platform for WordPress. we could connect it to our site for $2 a month. We don't want to cheap out on those things, you know, we want to make sure that we are giving the best to our clients. So, if we charge too low, then we are going to penny pinch and, you know, sacrifice a small $2 a month add-on that could have a really big

37:25impact on our client's site's security. Now, with that said, if you are new, you also don't want to shoot too high. You want to start off at a place where you could build up on. It's always easier to start low and work your way up versus going too high, making that mistake and trying to bring it back down. Trust me, I learned that from experience. I am going to simplify this for you. Never ever sell a WordPress maintenance care plan for less than $50 a month. And $50 a month, this is great. Let's say if you are living in a region of the world where the economy is a bit different,

38:03where $50 is like, you know, basically like $200 in North America. This gives you an advantage. Actually, it gives you a leverage because you could be offering $50 a month maintenance plans to agencies and the agencies could be using you and they could be reselling it to their clients for $150, $200 a month. But that is the only situation I would go that low. Never I would go under $50 a month. A good medium to get started with is $100 a month. And if you take a look at my care plans, it's in Thaibot right now because this is geollocated for the pricing. This is the equivalent

38:42of about a 100 bucks. This is about 200 bucks. And this is about 300 bucks. This is all too low. These prices are way overdue for an increase. I am going to be increasing my starter price to 150. Might even want to push it up to 200. I might consider that. And that is to factor in the economy where we're at right now with the inflation. $100 today is not what it was 5 years ago because the cost of tools and expenses they all go up as well. And definitely when we are going to do something for Woo Commerce and not just Woo Commerce, you can see here this is also membership LMS

39:20booking websites, we have to double that price. Like this needs to cost a significant amount more because when bugs happen, they often are far more difficult. They happen more often and they are more critical as well, meaning that they could prevent sales from going through. They require more time for testing. For those, you got to charge a lot more. You got to factor it in. And one thing you want to factor in, something most don't, is having to hire outside help. The time is going to come where something goes wrong on the site you're managing, and it is beyond your skill set. And when that happens, you

40:01have to be ready to go into the piggy bank and pay somebody to come in and do it. We can't go to the client and charge them. We can't go to a client and say, "Hey, there was a update. I broke the site. It is too hard for me to do. It's going to cost you $200 more to get it fixed." The client has paid you up to that point to cover that. Now, a lot of the times when the WordPress maintenance payments are coming through, there's very little work going in because you're setting up systems. You're keeping an eye on everything. Almost everything is automated. So, you're only spending

40:33about an hour, maybe two hours a week, keeping everything updated and keeping your systems running and keeping an eye on it all. But then when something goes wrong, that's when the money pays off. That's when we got to go in and get that problem solved. So, we're not charging for what happened this month. We are charging for what is going to happen three months from now, if that makes sense. And we got to think this way because that is how a business owner is going to think. And we got to approach this as a business owner, not just a web designer or web developer. So pricing,

41:08it could be complicated, but here's the rule. No less than $50 a month. And aim for anywhere between $1 to $200 a month for regular pricing. And if it is e-commerce, something more complicated, double that price at least. From there, give it six months to a year. Let your plan stay. Don't change your plans. You created your plans. You set your

41:33pricing. Now, give it time to work. You're going to track your expenses. You're going to track how much you are spending a year on the hosting. How much are you spending on the tools that you are using in your WordPress stack? You're going to look at the overall expenses. How much did you have to pay for outside help to help you fix a problem? And then you're going to look at what you earned. And then you're

41:56going to see how much of that is profit. What percentage of profit did you make? And then you could make adjustments from that. Don't go in changing your prices and changing your plans every single month. Build them. Let them sit. See how they work and then intentionally and strategically take time either in six months or a year to make updates. And we're going to end with this two metrics to look at to let you know if you are running your WordPress business correctly. The first metric is your closing rate. If you are not closing at least 80% of your clients on WordPress maintenance plans, something needs to be fixed in your

42:38sales process. And then for your profits, you should be making at least 80% profit above your overhead. Those are the two metrics to look at. Now, let's talk about contracts and agreements because we need to protect ourselves. Things happen on websites and it's unavoidable. We could do as much as we can to prevent things like hacked websites, broken websites, websites that

43:04just go down, but these things happen. Even Facebook or PayPal, they get hacked. So, if those platforms with engineers that are making millions of dollars can't make their platforms 100% hackproof, how are we going to do that with a WordPress website? We need to be clear about this and we need to be clear in our agreement that these things do happen. And even though we will do our best and optimize everything to the best of our abilities, we cannot guarantee anything. We also need to protect ourselves from when something goes down and if the client wants to make claims such as, hey, my website was not

43:44working, the contact form wasn't working, I am predicting or estimating we lost this amount of leads that cost us this amount of money. We need to protect ourselves in that way. This is not legal advice because I'm not a lawyer. But here's what I do. I do have a contract, a template that I use and it has disclaimers in it and I make it very very clear what I am not liable for. I take the liability away from me and my business and I also communicate this very clearly to the client. And now the costly mistakes to avoid. These are the mistakes that I've only earned through

44:24years of experience in making firsthand or seeing and coaching other freelancers and agency owners that were making these mistakes. And by the way, I did create a course, my very first course on building a WordPress maintenance plans business. I probably should have said that in the very beginning of this video because that course had hundreds of freelancers and agency owners that made a whole lot more money on their plans that solved so many of the problems and headaches they were going through preventing these mistakes these costly mistakes. Mistake number one was offering too much especially the free work. I have seen this firsthand when other freelancers

45:04and agency owners cut that out and then they start selling the retainer packages and retainer plans and charging for that extra work. How much more money that they made? I mean, anybody could use an extra 5, 10, $20,000 a year. That is the amount that we are basically taking out of our pockets when we are giving away this free work. Next mistake is going cheap with hosting tools. This is only going to come back to bite you. It always, always does. We got to make sure our client sites that they stay fast, reliable, secured, and optimized at all times. The cheap hosting will always get in the way of that. Next up is the shiny

45:46eyed syndrome. Changing tools all the time. Master your stack. Forget about the noise. Forget about, you know, the drama that goes on inside of WordPress. Forget about, you know, just the chatter and stuff when people are hyping something up or putting something down. Use your stack. Master it. Get really good at it. And when the time comes and you could invest in a new stack, go for

46:10it. But don't keep bouncing around. Every time I see somebody bouncing around, that's all they do. They stay bouncing, but they never go forward. They just bounce sideways. If you stay in your lane and go forward, you're going to move faster and you're going to get ahead of most people. Next up is not being clear about the possibilities of risks such as hacked websites, websites that go down and broken websites. We need to talk about those risks with the client. We got to let the client know that, hey, we can never be 100% on any of this. I mean, if you really think about it, WordPress is different. And

46:48this is the reason why WordPress maintenance plans are absolutely needed for every single website. And that is because we're not running a SAS platform like Shopify or Wix or, you know, uh Squarespace. Those closed platforms, they have dedicated developers that are keeping everything up to date, that are constantly working on everything, constantly fixing it and providing that kind of support. WordPress doesn't do that. WordPress is open source. So you got to have somebody who can perform those duties. But we got to be very clear that because of the nature of WordPress and because it is just us, you know, we cannot be 100% sure. Now if the

47:33website is hacked, if the website goes down or the website breaks, that is on us to fix. I have had websites in our maintenance plans that got hacked. When it did, I was in there fixing the hack. I was in there removing the malware and there were times when it was above my scope of expertise that I had to hire outside help and invest to get the websites done. Now, backup is going to fix most of those situations, but things do happen and when they do happen, if something breaks, it's on us. These are

48:06our responsibilities. But what we aren't liable for and we got to make sure we protect ourselves from is the liability of potential business loss that our client could have when one of these things happen. We'll fix it and we'll let the client know we'll fix it. But if your site goes down for two hours while we're fixing a hack, that is the business of a website. That is what

48:29happens and we can't be liable for that. Next up, big mistake. Not charging enough. It costs money to maintain a WordPress website just like what we covered 10 seconds ago. And then the number one mistake that I know many and most of us are making and that is underestimating the value of support. It's the biggest one. I cannot emphasize how big of a mistake that is to not know the value. Because once you understand that value, once you believe in it here, and it's right here inside of your heart, like in your soul, in your core, you know the value you are providing to your client because you are there for

49:05them. Something goes wrong with their side, you're ready to jump in. They need help. They have a question. You are right there with them. They are not alone running their business. They got somebody they could depend on, they could rely on, somebody that they trust. When you understand that value, everything else is going to be so much more clear. It's going to be so much more simple inside of your WordPress maintenance plans. And now part three, scaling and automating. Going back to our checklist, you're going to see here just about everything is already automated. We have everything automated within our hosting and within our WordPress management tool. Even your

49:44third backup, the plugin that you would put on your site like WP Vivid that I'm using, you can set that up to automatically create backups every single day. All of these are going to be automated except for the updates and the client support. These are the two things where we need to actually get in there,

50:03roll up our sleeves, and do some work. But the goal is to automate until we are out of the fulfillment process. I truly believe in that because it is okay if we're managing 10, 20, 30 websites, but when we start to really scale up, we want to be able to turn that over. And here's how we do it. First, we built the system. We've already gone through the framework of building that system. You get it going, spend about six months on it to really make sure it's working right. After six months or a year, make those adjustments. And then with those adjustments, you create the SOPs. You

50:39create the guidelines. This is exactly how it runs. We have our maintenance on schedule that is taking place certain day of the week or month at a certain time. So we have all that process down. Even our support, we could start to build a system with our support as well. There are tools like fluent support. We we could create ticketing systems. We could create something with dedicated slack channels with our clients. There are different ways we could provide the

51:05support. But we find what works for us. Once we get that system set up, we could bring on a VA that has, you know, just a basic understanding of WordPress or a junior developer to come in and take over our maintenance day. You know, that day where we schedule it for a couple of hours, you know, once a week or once a month. Well, we could pay somebody to come in and do that. And if you think about it, you could pay somebody, you know, maybe $200 a week, which is not bad. That's like a guaranteed $800 a month for them. That's going to be really good for someone. In fact, that's

51:41kind of on the high end a little bit. But think about it. You're giving somebody else a predictable income. Somewhere between $4 and $800 a month to go ahead and perform those tasks. Take them right off of your plate completely. They perform the updates. They review all the websites. And if there is a bug, they either fix it or, you know, they let you know that we need help with somebody else to fix it. And if you have, let's say, 30 websites and you're charging basically on the lower end, $100 a month, well, that's $3,000 a month. So, even if you're paying that other person pretty good at $800 a

52:15month, you're still walking away with $2,200 a month. And how much time are you spending, you know, you're spending time talking with the clients, communicating, providing that support, and then you're spending your time in other parts of the business that matter. you're either, you know, working on the next projects, closing the next deals, you're working on other things, and now your maintenance business is starting to work on its own. And then once you start to work with your VA, your junior developer, whoever it is that you're getting to help you out with those updates and those bug fixes, you build that relationship with them. They become

52:53part of that process. You might have to go through a few to find somebody good. That's part of the journey. But when you do, then you could even start to turn over the support and then all of a sudden you are running a 100% automated business. You spent the time putting together that infrastructure. You know that one that guarantees your websites that you're managing stay optimized, safe, secure, healthy, that your client's websites are in good standing at all times. You spent the time building the system to make sure that there's always an eye on it, that the monitoring is always happening, and then you built that system for somebody else

53:34to come in and take over. Once you get to that point and your hands are completely off of it, you're just making sure that system runs, now you have a truly scalable business. I got mine to that point. And when I did, I got to tell you, it was beautiful. The stress was gone. The small stuff that used to come to my mailbox, it was gone. The little tiny bug fixes that drove me crazy because I'm working on a highlevel

53:59design, it evaporated. It was wonderful. And the best part, it helped the business run. It allowed me to control my business. I hope you gained a lot of value from this. And I know I I could get very passionate about this because I am. I am so passionate about maintenance plans because not only did it do just so much for my business and it got me out of a very tough spot when I started my agency. It was tough. I made so many mistakes and I almost failed so bad I almost quit web design maintenance plans and building that predictable revenue that changed everything. And then not

54:37only that, you know, teaching this and building a course on this and sharing everything that I've gone through through the years, all the work that I put into this to build these systems, seeing it work in others the way that it has, it has been such a rewarding gift and it continues to inspire me to teach more about this. If you do want to invest more into learning about building a WordPress maintenance business, you can check out the course that I build. I do have a refresh version coming out next year. It's going to have updated contracts, agreements, frameworks, updated tools, and if you do have any

55:15questions in general, just leave them inside of the comments. Thank you for watching. I'll see you in the next one.