In early May, I took a survey looking to get a better understanding of what’s being practiced in the WordPress community in terms of maintenance: services offered, tools used and pricing. While the survey was mostly to satisfy my own curiosity, it was also used to compliment a talk I gave at WordCamp Lyon on June 4.
The slides from my presentation are posted here (in French), and I’m pleased to now share the complete results of the survey with you below.
Maintenance has become a preoccupation of mine since the start of last year when I realized two simple things:
- Maintenance needs cannot be neglected when working with open source CMS like WordPress.
- I was doing a really poor job of communicating the value of maintenance to my clients.
Why did I finally start taking maintenance seriously?
- More and more site owners (clients and others whose sites I hadn’t built) were coming to me with hacked sites, largely due to the fact that they hadn’t been updated.
- For the first time I was being confronted with clients who had no concept of maintenance, and whose expectations I could not (and would not) meet. In other words, people who thought having a website built meant a lifetime guarantee.
So I had to tackle these NO myths and start figuring out a way to both remove my own fears and obstacles, and find a way to convincingly communicate the importance and value of maintenance to my clients.
1. “I don’t have the time or the resources.” I started to wonder, how long could it really take? After calculating my time spent over the last 6 months, I’m averaging around 6 minutes per site per month. Even if that’s low, and it would take me 10 minutes per site, with 17 active maintenance contracts, I’m spending approximately 3 hours per month. I can afford that.
2. “It’s not interesting work. I hate doing it.” When it feels like a burden, like a task that isn’t appreciated by clients and one that you’re not being well remunerated for, then yes – it feels like a total drag. In the beginning, before I learned how to add value to the offer, clients were not excited about maintenance at all. Since, now that I’m talking about it in a way that they can relate to, in a way that gives them the satisfaction of knowing someone’s there looking after the health and well-being of their sites, I have a whole bunch of grateful people making it feel worth my while. Add to that the fun in tracking my time, working on improving my communications on the subject, testing out new tools, etc, it’s a fun new challenge for me as well. And as seen above, I’m not spending an overwhelming amount time on it. Frame it the right way, and anything drab can be fab!
3. “Client’s don’t see the value and don’t want to pay.” If we can’t show them the value, then no, of course not. Most people wait until something bad happens to them to take these issues seriously. So if we’re not being upfront about prevention, transparent about what kind of needs might arise and the responsibilities of working with an open source CMS, how are they to know? I wonder if the reticence to talk openly about this from the start doesn’t stem from the fear that it might make some people flee from WordPress as a solution. But, that should really be their choice, shouldn’t it? If they are not able and willing to assume the responsibility for the long-term maintenance of their site, then maybe they are in the wrong place. There are, for example, many SaaS solutions that might be better suited for them.
4. “It’s not a part of our job.” A lot of us, particularly freelancers, well, I think we get bored. One of the things we like both about working in the web and freelancing, is that each new project allows us to change things up a bit. We get to do a project and then move on and do another one. Maintenance is a long-term engagement. It means not moving on, but sticking around. It’s a commitment. So yes, this can be a turn off to some. Even if you don’t want to be doing the work, we still owe it to our clients to be open and honest about the need, and owe it to our profession to add value to the offer. Surely there is another freelancer or service provider we could recommend to that client to make sure they’re covered.
5. “I leave maintenance to the client.” I switched from building good old-fashioned html sites to working with content management systems because clients wanted autonomy over their websites. We were both tired of relying on me to update texts and swap out images, so it was win-win. And in the beginning it was easy to say, “yeah, just hit that update link,” or, “call me when you need something,” and that was that. In my experience, most site-owners do not update their sites, even if they know how. Furthermore, very few would be able to resolve any kind of conflict that might arise when, say, one plugin update doesn’t play nice with another. And let’s face it, updates are more frequent than they ever were before. We have to stay on top of them, and I believe that leaving this responsibility in the hands of a non-professional is, well, irresponsible.
Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below! My next post on this topic will take a look at how I started to build my own maintenance offer, what it entails and how I manage it.