{"id":2364,"date":"2021-05-13T13:57:53","date_gmt":"2021-05-13T12:57:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/?p=2364"},"modified":"2021-05-13T13:58:35","modified_gmt":"2021-05-13T12:58:35","slug":"how-much-to-charge-for-simple-website-maintainance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/how-much-to-charge-for-simple-website-maintainance\/","title":{"rendered":"How much to charge for Simple Website Maintainance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>In this blog post, I&#8217;ll discuss how I think about the maintenance of websites with low complexity and that don&#8217;t support critical business operations. They&#8217;re mostly marketing-type pages with no eCommerce and for businesses with up to 50 employees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When considering maintenance contracts for WordPress sites I ask myself a few questions:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>How much support will the client require? Do I need to be able to support them via phone during business hours most of the time or can the occasional email answer wait for a week?<\/li><li>What&#8217;s the cost to the client&#8217;s business if their Website doesn&#8217;t work correctly for a few hours or days?<\/li><li>Is the client outsourcing part of their operations to me or is it more of training support for their team?<\/li><li>What are ongoing costs on my side &#8211; plugins, hosting, or monitoring?<\/li><li>Do I get value from continuing to work with them?<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Don&#8217;t offer website hosting<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>When setting up a website for a smaller client or project I make sure that they&#8217;re hosting with a reputable hosting provider. Hosting is insanely cheap these days and I can&#8217;t compete with a local web hosting provider that has active phone support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It also means that I decoupled myself from the commodity layer of support and if the client doesn&#8217;t want my specialized support, someone else will take care of providing for the basic infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It also gives me another ally when debugging strange issues such as web site not being accessible from a certain ISP. The web hosting provider has better access and leverage towards ISP than I would with my own server.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Offer a year of free support and maintenance<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>The client will always call you first if they need help. Since you want to help them and keep good business relations you&#8217;ll help them. It will also help you fix any issues that you didn&#8217;t catch during the development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>During this time you&#8217;ll see the types of support requests they&#8217;ll send you. You&#8217;ll teach them how to do things on their own and maybe build a small workflow improvement so they don&#8217;t need to have you in the loop. It&#8217;s also an opportunity for upsells like offering them additional services or to start planning upgrades based on their needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">How much to charge and how?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>I find that charging between 10 &#8211; 20% of the project cost for each year of support is a good ballpark figure to start the estimate. It will also give you a reasonable amount of time each month to do planned updates during your slow times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&nbsp;Another way to have this conversation is to say that you&#8217;ll plan for an average of 4 hours of work per month for a year &#8211; so that&#8217;s 48 hours. You then multiply it by your hourly rate and you get a yearly contract value &#8211; such as 1200 EUR for 25 EUR\/hour or 3600 for 75 EUR\/hour. A reasonable amount of hours per month is something business owners understand and you&#8217;re also probably comfortable charging at that amount.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&nbsp;<strong>You should charge this as an upfront yearly fee<\/strong>. There are multiple benefits to this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Removes your administrative overhead<\/li><li>Ensures that you&#8217;re paid for being on standby<\/li><li>Moves the value conversation to once a year instead of potential questions with an invoice every month<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s a good idea to have a running log of your work activities so you can send a regular FYI report at regular intervals so that they are aware of your &#8220;background&#8221; activities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Conclusion<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>You should charge for maintenance if you can find a reasonable market rate to support it. If your client can&#8217;t justify paying for a few hours of your availability per month then it&#8217;s probably not worth trying to sell it on them. In such cases, I rather offer it for free and ask them for additional referrals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Overall you should focus on finding better clients that can extract ongoing value from their websites. It&#8217;s much easier to charge and provide value with your services in such cases.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In this blog post, I&#8217;ll discuss how I think about the maintenance of websites with low complexity and that don&#8217;t support critical business operations. They&#8217;re mostly marketing-type pages with no eCommerce and for businesses with up to 50 employees. When considering maintenance contracts for WordPress sites I ask myself a few questions: How much support [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[944],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-freelancing"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2364"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2367,"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2364\/revisions\/2367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}