Bundling Maintenance with Your Hosting Plans: A Smart Growth Strategy
Let’s assume you’re already providing hosting for your clients. (You are, right?) It’s also a pretty safe bet you’d love to grow your agency. If so, are you looking for ways to deepen relationships and boost recurring revenue? One great way to accomplish both is bundling website maintenance packages with your hosting services.
Offering hosting alone, without integrated support, misses out on a crucial stream of predictable income for your agency. But beyond that, it means you’re not leveraging your expertise to ensure their website’s long-term health and performance.
Adding comprehensive site maintenance to your hosting transforms your service from a utility into an indispensable solution for your clients.
Let’s explore why bundling maintenance with hosting plans is a smart growth strategy. We’ll cover how creating robust website support packages solidifies your role as a trusted partner, including the profound benefits for both your agency and the ongoing health and success of client sites.
The case for bundling: More than just convenience
Bundling maintenance with hosting plans is far more than just a convenient add-on; it’s a strategic move that fundamentally strengthens your agency’s business model and client relationships.
It’s also entirely possible you are already performing maintenance tasks as part of “being a good host.” Adding maintenance as a paid service helps ensure your hosting plans are more profitable.
It does this by increasing recurring revenue and a client’s lifetime value (CLV), enhancing client stickiness, improving site performance, and streamlining operations.
Increased recurring revenue
One of the most compelling benefits of maintenance bundling is the creation of another source of recurring revenue. If your clients are already paying an annual fee for hosting, bundling maintenance builds on that revenue.
Higher CLV and enhanced client stickiness
It’s almost always more profitable to keep clients than acquire new ones. And clients are more likely to stay if they see the value your services provide. This increased longevity translates directly into a higher CLV.
Furthermore, a deeper, ongoing relationship creates more opportunities for future projects or additional upsells. The goodwill built over time opens the door to additional offerings like SEO services, content creation, new feature development, or even complete website redesigns down the line.
All of this ties into the concept of client stickiness. By providing comprehensive hosting and maintenance, adding on additional marketing services, and tackling new projects as they come up, you become an indispensable partner to your clients, rather than just a one-and-done service provider.
Improved website performance & security
Proactive management of both hosting and maintenance reduces the likelihood of site issues and minimizes support requests.
When you’re actively updating WordPress®, monitoring security, and optimizing performance, you’re preventing problems before they even occur. This leads to a better overall experience for your clients and their customers, which benefits your clients’ bottom line and their satisfaction with your agency.
Streamlined operations
Managing all aspects of a client’s site under one roof simplifies your agency’s internal operations. This is especially true if you’re leveraging automation and bulk site tools through a managed hosting service like WP Engine, whose feature set and agency plans are designed to make managing sites at a scale easier.
Not only does this create efficiencies, you are freeing up your team’s time to tackle bigger, more strategic tasks, making the most of their billable hours and spending less time and resources on mundane tasks. But before you start bundling, you have a critical choice to make. Namely, who you’re trusting to provide and manage your clients’ hosting.
The importance of choosing the right hosting partner
Before you can offer hosting or maintenance to your clients, it’s vital to make sure you have a hosting partner you can trust. Any services or features they’re not providing will fall to your agency to fill in the gaps.
This makes your choice in hosting partners a big factor in total cost of ownership, your agency’s profit margins, and your team’s bandwidth to work on more strategic tasks. When evaluating hosts, some important considerations include:
- Reliability and performance
- Agency-specific features
- Support offerings
- Scalability
- Security
- Automation
Reliability and performance
Look for a partner with excellent uptime guarantees, modern infrastructure offerings, and features and tooling focused on performance optimization.
For instance, WP Engine has offerings from performance-focused shared plans to enterprise-grade offerings with a 99.99% uptime guarantee.
Agency-specific features
The needs of an agency reselling hosting are inherently different from a brand hosting their digital footprint. Make sure you prioritize partners offering features tailored specifically for agencies, such as bulk management tools for multiple client sites, robust developer tools for building, staging, and transferring sites, and plans designed with predictable per-site pricing.
Support
It’s important to ensure the hosting partner provides 24/7 expert support specifically for your agency, as well as your clients. Their ability to quickly resolve issues directly impacts your ability to support your clients.
Scalability
Your choice in a hosting partner should have the infrastructure and processes to grow seamlessly with your agency and its increasing client base. This includes accommodating new clients and expanding with the evolving needs of existing clients without friction.
Security
Security is table stakes in our digital-first world.
So it’s important to verify your choice in hosting partner not only implements robust security measures, but is transparent with security reporting so you can confidently report to your clients.
In addition to the proper certifications, you’ll want to look for advanced firewalls, comprehensive malware protection, and proactive monitoring systems to safeguard all your client sites.
Automation tools
When evaluating hosting partners, look for tools that help you automate as much as possible. This includes automating updates, backups, reporting, and client communication whenever possible to efficiently manage your expanded service offerings.
Automation is key to simplifying the scaling that comes with growth without proportionally increasing your workload. This also makes it key to improving your agency’s margins.
What to include in your bundled plans
Assuming you’ve decided to bundle maintenance packages with hosting plans and you’ve chosen the right hosting partner, now it’s time to put it all together. To create truly valuable website maintenance packages, your bundled plans should be comprehensive and clearly defined. Consider including all of the following:
- Hosting services
- Core website maintenance
- Security monitoring and management
- Performance optimization
- Support and regular reporting
Hosting services
We started with the assumption you’re already doing this, but if you’re not—start here. Your bundled plans should include robust, high-performance hosting services. This means choosing reliable, performance-optimized hosting that includes features like included SSL certificates for security, an integrated, global Content Delivery Network (CDN) for faster content delivery, and regular backups with easy restoration capabilities to protect client data.
The right choice in a hosting provider is critical. A modern, cost-effective platform with predictable pricing and scalable agency offerings sets your business up for success. It not only gives you a strong partner to help build your reputation with, it gives you a way to increase margins as your company grows.
Core website maintenance
Every maintenance plan should start with core maintenance, including routine updates for PHP, the WordPress® core install, as well as themes and plugins to ensure compatibility and security. This is also a good place to include database optimization and broken link checks to keep the site running smoothly.
Security monitoring and management
Again, security is table stakes. Make sure your maintenance plans provide proactive security measures.
This encompasses continuous malware scanning and removal, robust firewall configuration, and constant uptime monitoring to immediately detect and address any threats, keeping client sites safe and operational.
You can also provide your clients enterprise-grade security offerings such as DDOS protection or SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications at higher tiers.
Performance optimization
What good is a secure site if it’s too slow for anyone to use it? Your agency’s maintenance services need to include actively enhancing site speed and efficiency.
This typically involves smart caching and CDN configurations, image optimization and lazy-loading to reduce load times, plus regular speed tests to ensure optimal performance.
Support and regular reporting
As much as we’d love to solve everything proactively, it just isn’t possible. As part of your maintenance and support offerings you’ll need to establish clear, dedicated support channels for clients, such as a ticketing system or direct email.
On top of support, communication is critical to building trust and communicating your value. Be sure to provide monthly performance reports to detail updates completed, uptime statistics, security scan summaries, and issues resolved.
Structuring your bundled offerings
Since not every client is the same, you’ll need to make sure your new maintenance bundles give them the right options. To maximize adoption and profitability, consider structuring your bundled offerings with clear tiers and transparent communication.
Tiered pricing (Good, Better, Best)
Offer different levels of service to cater to varied client needs and budgets. This strategy allows clients to choose a plan that fits their current requirements while providing clear upgrade paths.
Good tier
This entry-level tier should include core hosting, essential updates, and fundamental security measures, ensuring the site stays up and secure.
Better tier
Building on the Good tier, this option can add performance optimization, continuous uptime monitoring, and a limited number of dedicated support hours.
Best tier
The most comprehensive offering, this tier encompasses all previous features, plus priority support, advanced reporting and analytics, more robust security features, and potentially strategic consulting sessions for deeper partnership.
Include clear service level agreements
Each tier should clearly define service level agreements (SLAs). These should specify guaranteed response times for support, uptime guarantees for hosting, and precisely what is included or excluded from each plan. Think of SLAs as another tool to help build trust, manage expectations, and maybe most importantly, protect your agency.
Make sure you communicate value
When presenting your bundled plans, emphasize the peace of mind, proactive problem-solving, and the value you provide to each client through these services. Highlight how your services protect their investment and support their business goals.
It might also be helpful to contrast your services with the potential cost of not having consistent maintenance. The true cost of downtime, security breaches, data loss, or lost sales due to a poorly performing website are not to be taken lightly.
Implementing the strategy
Now that you know what you’re offering, it’s time to roll it out to clients old and new alike. A strategic go-to-market plan for your new bundled hosting and maintenance packages should include marketing and sales education, updating proposals and SLAs, a new, streamlined onboarding experience, and a well-thoughtout introduction for existing clients.
Educate your sales and marketing teams
Bringing new products to market requires updating marketing materials and training your sales team to effectively communicate the products’ value. Make sure your teams have clear messaging and practical enablement tools to engage both prospective and existing clients.
Update your proposals & service agreements
When pitching new work, bundled hosting and maintenance plans should be your primary offering for ongoing support. Make sure you update any proposal or SLA templates to reflect this.
Streamline onboarding and transition
Create a smooth, efficient process for both new clients adopting the bundled service and existing clients transitioning to the enhanced offering. Clearly define steps and communication often and early to minimize friction.
Introduce bundles to existing hosting clients
Hopefully more hands-on help from your agency is something your clients are always open to. Whether they are or not, you’ll need to develop clear and compelling messaging to present the new maintenance plans to your existing hosting clients.
It’s often helpful to explain the benefits in terms of their website’s health, security, and long-term performance in order to make the transition appealing.
Tl;dr
Bundling comprehensive maintenance with your existing hosting plans is a powerful win-win strategy. It provides predictable recurring revenue for your agency, builds trust with your clients, and fosters growth in both organizations.
By offering your clients increased peace of mind through enhanced site performance and robust security, you make your agency an indispensable partner. By offering maintenance from a managed host like WP Engine, you pair this reputation-building advantage with a predictable revenue stream that boosts your agency’s profitability and builds a stable platform for continued growth.
Start evaluating your current service offerings today and consider how bundling site maintenance might become a smart growth strategy for your agency.
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