A Guide to WordPress Maintenance Contracts for Agencies

Build Recurring Revenue with WordPress Maintenance Plans

Agencies often find themselves constantly chasing after new clients. You finish a big project and have to quickly onboard the next one in order to pay the bills. This approach drains agency time and resources.

WordPress maintenance contracts offer a win-win opportunity for both agencies and clients. Agencies get predictable, recurring revenue while clients gain peace of mind with regard to their website. This requires a change in agency perspective from a “fix-it-when-it-breaks” vendor to a proactive digital partner.

Our guide details the essential components, legal protections, and technical foundations needed to build a successful maintenance service for your agency.

What to Include in a High-Value Care Plan

Different clients have different needs. An ecommerce site has vastly different support needs than a small blog-based site. But all care plans should include a few essential services.

• Core Technical Tasks: This is basic technical upkeep for sites. It includes security monitoring, daily backups, and core, theme, and plugin updates to keep the site functional.
• Performance Monitoring: Performance is a key element of site support. It’s the primary benchmark for the health of your client’s site. This can include regular speed audits and database optimization to prevent “site rot.”
• Support Hours: While the details can vary, all sites require a certain amount of time devoted to small tasks. This might be 60 minutes a week devoted to content tweaks or checking for and fixing broken links.
• Premium Hosting Support: The most profitable care plans are built on top of a host that handles security and performance automatically. This value can be passed through to your client. Pressable provides automated backups and a free Jetpack Security plan to keep client sites secure.

Legal and Strategic Components

Maintenance plans are contracts. It benefits both the agency and the client to be specific in the details of what the plan entails, so there is no misunderstanding about how the services are to be delivered.

• Scope of Work (SOW): Scope creep is a real problem as client business goals evolve and change. An effective SOW clearly defines what is (and what is not) included as part of your website maintenance services.
• Response Times (SLAs): When an issue with the website comes up, what is the timeline for resolution? An SLA for WordPress sites should set realistic expectations for how quickly your agency will respond to support tickets.
• Liability Limitations: There are some issues that are beyond the control of the agency. For example, you aren’t to blame if a third-party plugin suddenly fails or if your hosting provider experiences server issues. The maintenance plan should include legal protections for your agency.
• Termination Clauses: Deciding to end a care plan can be tricky to navigate. Agencies should specify what needs to happen if either party chooses to end the agreement with proper notice. This should include how the handoff of a full, portable backup of the site and its database will be managed.

Pricing Your Maintenance Contracts

As mentioned earlier, different clients have different maintenance needs for their sites. Agencies can take a tiered approach to pricing maintenance contracts to accommodate the variety of needs among clients.

• Tier 1. Essential Maintenance: This bare-bones plan covers basic security such as a web application firewall (WAF), core, theme, and plugin updates, and daily site backups. This tier meets the needs of small businesses like local restaurants.
• Tier 2. Professional: In addition to the essential services, this tier includes site speed optimization and priority support with same-day response for urgent issues. Professional tier maintenance meets the needs of growing SMBs and ecommerce sites.
• Tier 3. Enterprise: In addition to all the essential and professional services, this tier includes monthly strategy calls, advanced reporting, and dedicated resources and staff. Enterprise plans cater to the needs of large businesses and high-traffic ecommerce stores.
• The Staging Strategy: When a maintenance plan is in place, it’s to everyone’s advantage to avoid the risk of additional costs. Using staging environments to test updates before pushing them live is an effective strategy to help avoid additional hours spent fixing broken sites when a live update goes wrong. Pressable offers one-click staging environments to help agencies engage in safe testing and maintenance.

Reporting: Prove the Value

WordPress maintenance contracts are an ongoing expense for clients. This means that they need a clear understanding of exactly what they are getting month-to-month from the contract. Agencies that find ongoing success with maintenance plans excel at explaining the value they are delivering.

• Monthly Success Report: It’s not enough to just do the work, you need to show the results. Agencies can provide branded monthly reports that detail what updates were made, how many threats were blocked, uptime statistics, and any other relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) that showcase your plan’s value.
• Demonstrating Reliability: All clients are seeking consistency and reliability with their maintenance plans. They want their site to perform well all the time. Use your host provider’s uptime guarantee as a selling point for your agency’s own reliability. Pressable offers a 100% uptime guarantee and a high-performance cloud infrastructure to help deliver it.
• The Strategy Call: It’s important to have ongoing touchpoints with your clients. A monthly report call helps showcase the value you bring to the client and also provides a springboard for upselling new features or additional marketing services.

Maintain the Site and Maintain Your Business

Agencies need to think beyond just winning the next site project. Real, sustainable, and scalable business growth comes from offering your clients WordPress maintenance contracts. Offer more than simply building the site; offer to maintain it. When you take care of the site, the client’s site takes care of your business.

Get started today by auditing recently launched projects and proposing a maintenance plan that protects performance, security, and uptime.

Pressable: Your Maintenance Contract Partner

Pressable understands the value of WordPress maintenance contracts for agencies seeking to scale predictable revenue. We support your plans by delivering outstanding performance through server-side caching and a global content delivery network (CDN). Pressable also provides a 100% uptime guarantee and an intuitive hosting dashboard to make managing multiple client sites even easier.

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 sites. If you’re thinking about switching to managed WordPress hosting, schedule a demo to see how Pressable can support your continued optimization and growth.

Kevin MacGillivray

Kevin MacGillivray is the Chief Marketing Officer at Pressable, where he’s focused on helping more creators build fast, secure, and successful WordPress sites. He’s driven to grow Pressable’s impact and make it the go-to choice for more businesses. Kevin enjoys making technology feel simple, useful, and inspiring through clear storytelling, creative experiments, and building new ways for the community to connect and thrive. Kevin lives in Victoria, British Columbia, where you’ll often find him swimming in the ocean, exploring local trails with his dog, Minerva, or embracing the West Coast’s vibrant lifestyle and easy rhythm.