What price to put on my web maintenance services
If you work in the world of web design and development, whether you do it as a freelancer or through an agency, you know that offering a web maintenance service is essential to keep your clients happy.
In addition, it is a very attractive recurring revenue stream for any professional. We all know how complicated it is to depend 100% on new projects that arise. There are always good times and not so good times.
But the big question we have all asked ourselves is, how do we determine an adequate price for web maintenance?
In this post we are going to look at some of the things you have to take into account when deciding these prices so that it represents a profitable business model for you and at the same time is competitive.
Let’s not forget that there are hundreds or thousands of professionals and companies offering this type of services just like you.
Also, you can try our maintenance plans calculator to configure your plans and see recommended prices based on your experience, team, geographic area and more. It’s completely free, and you can create as many plan configurations as you want.
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What should I take into account when setting my prices?
It is very important that first of all you know which are the things you have to take into account when setting the rates for your web maintenance service.
And do not let yourself be guided by just one of them.
For example. It makes no sense to set your prices in relation to those you have found from other professionals if what you are going to offer has nothing to do with it or if it is going to cost you more (in hours or money) than the price you are going to charge.
To avoid this, you should always consider the following:
Consider your time and expenses
The first factor to consider is the time and effort it takes you to provide the web maintenance service.
You can do this by looking at your hourly rate, considering the hours it will take you to carry out the different maintenance tasks in a month and adding the associated costs you may have.
We are talking here about tools that help you with these maintenance tasks, such as Modular, or server and domain costs if this is something you include in your offer.
It is also important to consider whether you are investing money in marketing or advertising to promote this maintenance service. To make sure that you are also getting a return on that investment.
This will help you make sure that you are making a profit with this business model and that you are interested in growing it. If not, you should rethink how you are doing it or the price you are charging.
Know the value you bring
When pricing your services it is important to consider your value as a professional.
If you are just starting out, it is better to start with lower prices until you gain more experience and confidence in your skills.
On the other hand, if you are one of those people who can say that you have already encountered (almost) everything and you are an expert in web maintenance and management, you should charge higher prices for your work.
Another thing to take into account, and almost the most important, is what you are offering within your web maintenance service. This will depend on the value you provide, but also on the time and costs you have to offer it.
We are talking here about things like:
- Regular updates.
- Review of errors such as broken links or forms.
- Monitoring of web Uptime.
- Review of statistics and performance analysis.
- Content changes or new developments on the website.
- Domain and hosting.
- Backup copies and their recurrence.
- Creation of reports for your clients (and the information they include).
And much more.
Understand what each of them entails and why they provide value to your customers. So that you can justify it in case they ask you and so that they know how your work is making or saving them money or time.
Research your competitors’ prices
Another important step in setting your web maintenance prices is to research your market and your competitors.
These are usually other freelancers or web design or marketing agencies. Although there are also companies or professionals that are only dedicated to providing web maintenance services with WordPress, for example, and specialise 100% in that.
You need to know what they charge, it usually appears on their websites, as well as market trends that may affect prices.
Things like if there are public subsidies for this kind of services, if there are important increases or decreases in the prices of the tools you use to provide your service, etc…
All this research will also help you to get an idea of who else is providing services of this type and how they do it. This can be useful when the time comes to promote your business.
It offers different maintenance packages
Mainly for 2 reasons:
- You make the customer see that they have a choice and that you have plans that fit their specific needs (even if in reality the one you are most interested in selling is the same for almost everyone).
- It allows you to play with prices so that one plan seems much more expensive (the one you are not interested in offering) and another much cheaper (the one you are interested in offering).
- This is the most common thing in the sector. If you take a look at your competitors’ websites you will see that they usually offer between 2 and 3 (usually 3) maintenance options.
To differentiate these plans we go back to what we talked about before. Normally they all offer basic things like backups, WordPress updates, Uptime monitoring, bug fixes, support and even hosting (if that’s something you offer).
How do the more expensive plans differ?
Well, with things like included hours of website changes, support in less than 24 hours, reporting or even SEO optimisation work.
Average price of a web maintenance service
It is clear that the price of your maintenance services will depend on everything we have talked about before and, therefore, we are nobody to tell you what it should be in your case.
But, what we did want to do, based on our experience, is to tell you what are the average prices of a WordPress web maintenance service in Spain. That is where we have investigated it the most.
Be prepared that maybe some of them will surprise you.
As a starting point we could say that the most basic price is around 20-25€ per month. It is difficult to get a return for less money or to find a client who is not willing to pay that much. Unless you have a 100% automated process and you barely have to intervene on the website due to errors 1 or 2 times a year (but be careful, this does not always depend on you).
It is more common to find things around €30-40 per month for basic plans and between €50 and €150 for more advanced plans.
We have also found very specialised and reputable companies offering packages for between €200 and €500 per month. In these cases they usually include the cost of servers for large websites.
If we go to studies made by international companies in the sector such as MainWP we see that the prices are not very different. With the majority of plans between 25-100$ and with just over 10% of professionals charging more than 200$ per month.
How to improve my web maintenance processes
We have talked about this before. Two of the keys to pricing your maintenance service are the time it takes and the value you can provide.
The less time you spend and the more value you bring to your customers, the more you can charge and the greater the profitability.
And to help with both, we have created Modular. A tool from which you can manage the maintenance of all your WordPress websites and those of your clients in a single place.
We are talking about centralised updates, 1-click login to any of the websites without username and password, Uptime monitoring to know if your website stops working, automatic backups and one-click recovery, report generation for your clients and much more.
We invite you to try it by registering for free at this link and start connecting your WordPress websites to see everything you can do with it.
Conclusion
As a web designer or developer, knowing how to price your maintenance services is key to running a successful business. And no, it is not that difficult by following the steps we have seen.
Take into account your costs of providing the service to ensure profitability, research the competition in order to be competitive and know well the value you bring to your customers. Oh, and create different packages depending on the needs they may have.
With these tips in mind, pricing your web maintenance services should be easier than ever.
Good luck!
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