Frankly speaking, we were not going to make a blog post from it, but… It all started with a round-up with experts cases and advice for small business entrepreneurs about the best ways to maintain their WordPress websites. In the course of talking, we’ve asked their opinion about TemplateMonster’s recently launched service - Website Maintenance. Our dev team works on the improvement of this service, so we wanted to get an outside perspective from other professionals in this niche.
And we've gathered so many nice words, that is was just impossible to leave unshared! Also, we’ve got a lot of questions and good advice from top web developers and entrepreneurs. Not all of them were allowed for the record, but all of them are helping us to improve our new service.
Feel free to join our experts and write your opinion in the comment section below this post.
Thanks everyone who’s helping us to become better!
The website maintenance service you offer comes at a great value. It looks like you've thought of everything that the average website owner would need to keep their site fresh and up-to-date.
If I was ever looking to offload the chore of maintaining one of my sites, I'd strongly consider this service.
I think it has more than enough of features and benefits.
I think a lot of people need this service but don't know they do. It's only when a big update comes or they get hacked.
Looks great, low prices!! I hope it works for you guys!
The service does look really good actually! I'd happily switch to a solution like this once my site is fully built out and just needs maintenance. One thing that came straight to my mind is that you don't offer a free or discounted trial. Usually, I'm way more likely to test something out if I can do it for free/cheap for the first week or two. Also, I'm quite a nerd myself and I love alternative payment methods like cryptocurrency. Do you offer that or plan to offer it as a payment method?
Other than that, the landing page for the service looks very professional and thorough. There isn't anything major that comes to my mind that's missing other than the stuff I mentioned above but it may not fit your financial model.
I think it could be useful for small businesses who want basic site updates in content or to keep plugins updated. Many people who run WordPress want this done and to have a secured website.
I think it would work quite well for your business.
Regarding the Maintenance service - this might actually be a pretty good idea. I'm scouting the freelance platforms from time to time and there are a lot of jobs that require either some help with WordPress or setting up a site. So I'd say there's definitely demand for this kind of thing.
That being said, 99% of the people go to freelancing platforms to try and get lower prices. So maybe you can include an even lower priced tier, that will be directed at people with a really tight budget.
Another suggestion, that I think will be a great inclusion, is to add more marketing options. Add the option for people to pay for various forms of digital marketing - social media, SEO, etc. You can even add the option to create blog posts for them. Having a dedicated digital marketing team is always going to be more efficient, but not every company has the resources to hire a dedicated one, so it's a good option to get it "as a service".
I think there's a potential to what you have to offer. Especially for the content section because I find it the most time-consuming.
It's a great idea!
I was in a private entrepreneurial community with Dan Norris and saw that he failed again and again with different business ideas. He's talented and full of energy, but things didn't work for him, despite lots of support. Then, he hit on the idea of WP Curve and the business just exploded month on month. (He sold it to GoDaddy). I realized that it's best to serve a pain point in a growing market than to persevere with a half-broken dream.
A WordPress management service is a great idea, WordPress powers a third of the web and the market share is growing. It's easy to get started with, but at some point, it would be better to get help, when we consider our hourly value in our day jobs. For $30-50 per month, most small business owners would use that in less than an hour, if they value their own time.
I think it’s a good solution for the price. I can see how this can add value to mommy blogger types. A one-time speed, in the beginning, would be great for the lowest plan.
The more people succeed with your service, the more customers you guys will get!
It seems like a great service!
At this time, I personally would not use it since I am trying to cut costs until I am up to a consistent $5,000 per month for my blog OR need a different feature on my site. The features I like the most that you offer are Weekly Speed Optimization and SEO Consultancy.
This looks like a great value for business owners. It will solve a lot of the pain points that non-tech savvy people will encounter when owning a website. You get hosting plus A LOT of support, all at $29 per month. In short, it solves a lot of problems for a small amount of money.
Wow, it's a well formed service offering.
I think people are coming around to this type of model. I see more designers and agencies offering this service packaged this way. Small business owners and website owners seem to be open to it. I don't think they understood the need for it in the past. It's kind of one of those things, like a lawyer, you don't realize how important it is until you need it. The features look great 🙂
I think it is a very demanded offer, yes, many users who want a website and don't have a team behind to manage everything would love this kind of service for sure.
I think it is a valuable service. 24/7 monitoring and support look especially valuable. All of the other debugging and optimization features look good as well. However, I think the price might be slightly too high. An entrepreneur could also choose Wix or Weebly for about $10 per month and may be discouraged from your service by the $29 per month cost. You are using WordPress, which should be more powerful and offer more customization. However, the cost may be an issue. Everything else looks great.
It is a nice website what you shared with me. Many business owners have a need for this service but they just don't know it.
For example, if they have less technical knowledge like an A/C company or plumbing company and they are a small business, they need someone who can
maintain their website from errors and issues, so this is an in-demand service, but it needs to be marketed in a way that the small business owner understands why they need the service.
Many of my colleagues work with someone that has a similar offering. One thing included in his plan though is what he calls "small jobs" depending on the plan you can get a certain amount of "small jobs" per month. These are jobs that take 30 minutes or less. This could be configuring plugins, small customizations, etc. That really appeals to a lot of people.
Your website service offer is definitely compelling. I may not be the best person to weigh in on the service as I manage my website myself but I will definitely offer up my opinion.
I do believe that there's a demand for such an offer, especially (or maybe solely) when it comes to solo entrepreneurs and small business owners.
I think that you may want to stress out how harmful it is when a website goes down even for a short period of time. Most entrepreneurs (or at least a big part) who rely on SEO and content marketing are not aware that all their efforts may go to waste if they don't take care fo their website maintenance up front.
When a business hits a certain point, it is better to get an expert on-site, but to some extent, such a solution will be great.
I definitely think this is a needed service.
I really like the Performance Check and Optimization service, and the Weekly Debugging Service sounds intriguing. The Speed Optimization in the Premium package is also a good offering - I think people don't realize that keeping a website running at optimal speed is more than a one-and-done event.
I took a look at your maintenance offer and it looks comprehensive. I think your premium plan has all of the options people would need. I can't think of anything I would add to the service.
I think your testimonials are great, I would also recommend a section where anyone can leave a review (or where reviews are embedded). This way, people can see good reviews as well as bad and get a better picture.
Brooklinen does a great job of this. You can see that people love the sheets, they have a very high star rating, but it's also people giving honest feedback and opinions. 4.6 isn't perfect, but it's really good.
Anyway, those are my initial thoughts.
Thank you!
I am certain it is a service in demand by bloggers especially and small business owners with active websites. In fact, I would say, this maintenance package is covering all the crucial aspects of maintaining a website that is active. By active, I mean any blog or website which is updated frequently - for example - to add blog posts, media releases, sales or landing pages, collecting leads, etc.
While the package almost covers everything, it would be lovely to add image compression and optimization, Google search console integration along with Yahoo and Bing analytics set up.
Besides this, you can also offer services to check for broken links, redirections, custom CSS and inserting/ensuring nofollow links for promoted products/services.
Wow! I didn't realize they offered this service, I was only familiar with their theme customization option. This is an unbelievable deal if they deliver on even a fraction of what they promise. This is definitely something I would have signed up and tried out for had it been available back in my "cup of noodle" days. I think there's a ton of startups/entrepreneurs that would be interested in this, very curious to see the feedback from the interwebs as this evolves, and possibly we can cover this on werockyourweb.com.
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