Struggling with the ups and downs of project-based income? Would you like more stability and predictability in your income?
Developing recurring revenue, where your WordPress agency has predictable, ongoing income from existing clients, offers a way to do that. Recurring revenue provides financial stability, improved cash flow, a higher agency valuation, lower stress, and stronger client relationships.
This article outlines practical strategies for establishing and scaling recurring revenue within your WordPress agency, steering your business model toward long-term success and stability.
While the building and launching of a website has a specific timeline and delivery date, the website itself is never “finished.” Once it is live it requires continuous care and updating.
Clients often lack the technical expertise, time, or inclination to take on their WordPress maintenance tasks. This presents an opportunity for your agency to step in and provide a solution to meet your client’s ongoing needs.
Clients can greatly benefit from this arrangement. Their website receives better overall performance, enhanced security, and consistent updates. And clients themselves get overall peace of mind and easy access to expert support.
Your agency benefits from this kind of arrangement through consistent cash flow, stronger client relationships, easier upselling, and reduced client churn. Both your agency and your clients benefit from this model.
WordPress agencies have several opportunities for developing recurring revenue streams.
Maintenance and support plans can be offered with tiered pricing (Basic, Pro, Premium) with varying levels of support hours and features. You can take advantage of dashboard tools like MainWP, ManageWP, or other managed hosting provider tools to organize your plans. Billing can be handled with either monthly or annual subscriptions.
Offering a managed WordPress hosting service via a reseller account is an easy option. You can then bundle this with maintenance and support for a comprehensive solution. Billing can be set up as either a monthly recurring or an annual hosting fee.
By providing SEO and/or content marketing support, you can directly impact the client’s bottom line (traffic, leads, sales). You manage billing with a monthly retainer based on scope of work.
No matter the business, security and compliance are essential responsibilities, especially for ecommerce businesses handling sensitive customer data. Being able to hand off complex, security-related tasks is attractive to any business. You can bill these services as either a monthly or an annual subscription for security services.
By providing analytics and reporting, you can help clients understand their return on investment (ROI) and make better data-driven decisions. This service can be billed as a monthly reporting fee.
Offering ongoing feature development and website improvement helps your clients keep their websites up-to-date and competitive. These types of services are offered as pre-purchased hours or through a small monthly retainer.
Once you’ve defined the services you’ll offer, it’s time to implement your recurring revenue strategy.
Package and Price Strategically: Create clear, benefit-driven service packages that clients can easily understand.
Educate Clients: Explain the value of ongoing services being delivered, not just the features of each package. Clients need to clearly understand what benefits they are getting.
Automate Billing: Use invoicing software for recurring payments, such as Stripe, PayPal, FreshBook, or Wave.
Leverage Tools: Utilize agency management tools to streamline the delivery of recurring services. Make it as easy as possible for you and the client.
Start with New Clients: Integrate recurring services into initial project proposals and new client onboarding.
Upsell Existing Clients: Once you’ve gained some experience with your service offerings, circle back to existing clients and look to upsell them your recurring plans.
Deliver Exceptional Value: Consistent service quality ensures your clients will continue to come back to you month after month for your services.
WordPress agencies have several service options for generating recurring revenue, including maintenance and support plans, managed WordPress hosting, SEO and content marketing, security and compliance, analytics and reporting, website feature development and improvement.
By implementing the basic strategies outlined here, your WordPress agency can avoid unpredictable income swings and build lasting revenue stability. You can then embrace the stable and scalable opportunities offered by recurring revenue.
Start integrating these strategies now to build a more predictable and prosperous future for your WordPress agency.
If you’re looking to expand your WordPress agency offerings, Pressable makes it easy to integrate and offer your clients managed WordPress hosting by providing access to our unique features, including a Pressable application programming interface (API) and Web Host Manager Complete Solution (WHMCS), which lets WordPress hosting providers automate client billing, provisioning, and management. Pressable’s infrastructure delivers the speed, security, and reliability agencies need to confidently support ongoing client relationships.
Pressable—part of the Automattic family that also includes WordPress.com, WordPress VIP, and WooCommerce—is staffed by WordPress experts with the skills and knowledge to effectively manage your WordPress site. If you’re thinking about switching to managed WordPress hosting, schedule a demo to see how Pressable can support your continued security and growth.
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