Should Your Agency Sell Website Maintenance Services?

After you launch a client website, what then? Does your agency hand over the site to the client and wish them luck? Or do you offer ongoing website maintenance services?

If your agency doesn’t provide any support post-launch, you may want to reconsider. While it may seem like tedious and boring work, website maintenance and support services can be very valuable—for both you and your clients.

What Do Website Maintenance Services Entail?

Website maintenance refers to the upkeep of a live website. Maintenance often involves technical tasks that help keep the website free of errors, bugs and security threats and performing at the highest level.

Here are some of the more common services included in maintenance plans:

• Software updates
• Backups
• Speed tests and tune-ups
• Security monitoring
• Database cleanup
• Spam removal
• Broken link repair
• Checking and fixing integrations
• Repair errors and restore website
• Accessibility fixes
• Uptime monitoring
• Manage hosting resources
• Tech support

Some agencies also offer more specialized maintenance and support plans. What’s included depends on the agency’s area of expertise and their clients’ needs, with the work often falling under the categories of marketing, optimization and content management.

If your agency is looking to differentiate itself or provide clients with more value, here are some other services that can be done as monthly retainer work:

• Design and development tweaks
• Content edits and uploads
• Image optimization
• Holiday/seasonal updates
• Analytics review and monthly reports
• Rank monitoring and SEO improvements
• Social media image generation
• Blog image generation
• Newsletter creation
• A/B testing and optimization
• User research and testing
• Brand/website consultations

No matter the type of services, they’re typically sold as monthly or annual plans. And the tasks are done on a set schedule—daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly or quarterly.

Reasons You Should Sell Monthly Maintenance and Support

Depending on the content management system you develop sites with, there are some aspects of maintenance you might not have to deal with. For instance, a managed hosting solution usually takes care of technical tasks like software updates, uptime monitoring and backups.

Even if that’s already handled, there are other services you can provide on retainer. And there are numerous reasons to do so.

Maintain Website Integrity

Ongoing maintenance helps keep client websites in good shape. A website that looks good and helps them achieve their goals will keep them happy.

If your agency relies on word-of-mouth marketing, a well-maintained website could encourage more clients to leave positive reviews online.

Improve Your Portfolio

Your portfolio will also benefit from ongoing maintenance. If you’re including a client’s site in your portfolio, you need it to be the best reflection of the work you did. If it’s fallen into disrepair, that won’t be the case.

Increase Customer Lifetime Value

Ongoing support is also an effective way to improve your agency’s customer lifetime value. Because you’re providing more long-term value to clients, they have a reason to spend more money with you far past their website launch date.

Generate Recurring Revenue Stream

This translates to more predictable income for your business. That way, even if you’re experiencing a slow month or two in terms of web development clients, you’ll have some revenue to keep you going.

Gain New Opportunities

With maintenance work, you’re typically not in touch with clients the way you are during the development process. You’re there to silently work on the site in the background from month to month.

That said, your maintenance clients still know you’re there. And when those websites start to look outdated or their businesses have scaled so much that they need more added to them, you’ll be first in line to offer your services.

Get Better Clients

Something I’ve noticed when agencies sell website + maintenance service bundles is that they tend to get better-quality clients. That’s because the clients understand and appreciate the value of having a reliable web development partner who does it all for them vs. a one-time contractor to handle a task they don’t want to or can’t do themselves.

How to Start Selling Website Maintenance Services

Your agency won’t just be competing against the myriad companies that offer standalone website maintenance packaging. You’ll also be competing against agencies like yours that sell them as a value-add.

Here are some tips to help you set up your agency as the go-to for web development and maintenance:

Find Your Value Differentiator

Take a look at your competition to see what they’re offering. Is there something you can do differently to make your offering stand apart?

While you could offer discounted rates, you don’t want to go too low on pricing. The goal is to make your services not only appear valuable, but be valuable. If you go too low, you’ll really only be able to handle light technical maintenance tasks. And if clients believe that you’re offering cheap maintenance services that aren’t doing much to help their businesses, they won’t stick around for long.

So, before doing anything else, figure out what your competitors are doing. Write a list of the different maintenance plans and services offered.

Next, come up with your own list of services you can realistically offer. Consider what your agency’s specialties are as well as what your specific target users could benefit from. For instance, if you build large news sites, they could benefit from maintenance tasks like image optimization, content edits and social media assistance.

Whittle the list down so that you have something comparable to what others in your market are doing, but that stands out as being more valuable. Note: Not every plan needs to have a value differentiator. You can also offer basic maintenance.

Offer Different Tiers of Service

Looking over your list, can you identify natural ways to break up your services into packages based on your user segments?

Typically what I see offered is three levels or tiers of service. For example, here’s how you might break up technical maintenance and support services into packages:

Basic	Pro	Elite
Weekly software updates	Daily software updates	Daily software updates
Weekly backups	Daily backups	Daily backups
Monthly speed test & tune-up	Weekly speed test & tune-up	Weekly speed test & tune-up
Monthly security monitoring	Weekly security monitoring	Weekly security monitoring
Quarterly database cleanup	Monthly database cleanup	Weekly database cleanup
	Monthly spam removal	Weekly spam removal
	Monthly broken link repair	Weekly broken link repair
	Monthly accessibility fixes	Monthly accessibility fixes
	3 hours tech support (monthly)	10 hours tech support (monthly)
	5 web design tweaks (small-medium)	10 web design tweaks (small-medium)
		Daily uptime monitoring
		Manage hosting resources
		Monthly A/B testing

You can create plans for different client types, like small business owners versus enterprise clients.

You could also create plans for non-clients as well as clients. For instance, the Basic plan could be a good way to attract maintenance customers who already have websites. As your ongoing support improves their web traffic and performance over time, you can upgrade them to higher-paying tiers.

Set Your Prices

Once you hash out what kinds of services you’ll offer, it’s time to package up the services and assign a price to each.

To start, do you know how much time you’ll spend each month on maintenance for a client? And for each plan’s activities?

If you don’t, set up a time tracking system now and do a month or two of maintenance on your own site or a client’s to figure out what your time investment looks like. Over time, the work will go faster and automations will help speed things up. For now, you need a benchmark to know what your time is worth.

That said, you don’t want to price your plans based strictly on hours spent on the job. Instead, price them based on the value to the client. What is a well-maintained website really worth to them?

Take another look at the competition—standalone maintenance providers as well as design agencies. Your pricing should be similar, but not exact. You want it to be reflective of your unique offering and value. What are you taking off your clients’ hands and what sorts of outcomes will you help them achieve by doing so?

Promote the Benefits

When talking to clients in general, it’s often a good idea to avoid tech talk. They might not know or care about things like PHP version updates, extension conflicts or UX laws. Instead, keep the focus on:

“How does this benefit me?”

While prospective clients will appreciate a checklist of what tasks you’re going to perform, they ultimately want to know why the maintenance is needed. So, make sure your website and marketing content promote the benefits of your maintenance services.

For example, you could talk about the following perks:

• Keep your website loading fast with software updates and image optimization.
• Catch security vulnerabilities before they become threats.
• Remove bugs and errors so they don’t become obstacles to conversion.
• Regularly A/B test to provide visitors the most enjoyable experience.
• Outsource content uploads so you can focus on making sales.

This is your chance to explain the value in terms they’ll understand.

Make Everyone Sign a Contract

Whether you’re selling maintenance plans to brand new customers, existing clients or former ones, make them sign a contract first. This will enable a couple things.

First, it will clearly spell out the terms of the service:

• Scope of work (i.e., tasks to be performed)
• Any limitations (like the number of tech support hours, your day/time availability, etc.)
• Timeline/schedule of deliverables
• Cost per month or year
• Payment methods and due dates
• Cancellation terms
• Change request process
  A detailed contract will keep things transparent between you and your client.

It will also help you prevent scope creep. Instead of clients seeing you as an extension of their tech support team that does their bidding as needed, you’ll define the terms of the agreement and help everyone stick to the scope.

Automate and Streamline What You Can

Some of the technical tasks I listed above can be automated. That doesn’t mean you should be completely hands-off and entrust things like updates, backups and the like wholly to a machine. Automated processes can sometimes fail or website errors can occur as a result. It’s always good to have someone check on automations from time to time.

Another way to streamline your website maintenance work is to schedule it all in advance. And on a predictable schedule, too.

So, instead of trying to fit in maintenance work when you can, incorporate it into your calendar on a set schedule. For instance, you could do all monthly backups the first of the month and all content edits every Friday around noon. Not only does this help get things done even when you have web development work to do, your clients will appreciate your reliability.

Something else to think about is streamlining client management. The less work you have to do to onboard and manage your clients, the more time you can devote to maintenance.

Here are some ways to do this:

• Publish your maintenance plans and pricing to your website. Add “Buy Now” buttons to the page and allow prospects to convert on the spot.
• Automate the contract delivery and signature process. You can use a tool like Progress ShareFile for this.
• Program your systems to automatically send you alerts, updates and reports, so you don’t have to track that info down or risk receiving it too late.
• Set up recurring subscriptions through your payment processor. Consider giving clients a discount for using auto-renewal, too.

By building shortcuts into your overall process, it will enable you to sell more maintenance packages, spend time doing billable work instead of administration, and keep your prices reasonable.

Wrapping Up

Website maintenance and support services are a win-win.

Your clients’ websites will be well-maintained, which will encourage more website traffic, higher quality leads and better outcomes. And your agency will have a source of recurring revenue that can scale over time. No matter how many or few websites you’re working on at the moment, website maintenance work can keep your agency going strong over the long term.