Recently, we onboarded a new Agency into a maintenance plan for their client sites. The agency thought they had things under control and were quite surprised when they discovered the truth.
The challenge
The biggest challenge was that the agency thought they had things under control. They were periodically updating sites, they even had a spreadsheet to let them know when they visited a site. This worked most of the time, however, from time to time clients would come to them saying a site was down or there was some other issue. They didn’t like that the client always had to tell them about things (and their clients didn’t like that either).
They had invested in improved hosting with Flywheel, which increased the stability and reduced the issues they had with hosting with their clients. So this agency was primed for moving to maintenance because they had already discovered some real wins by investing in better tools & services.
It really hit them they needed a better website management system when their accounting person needed to know which sites were using a particular premium plugin and they had no way to tell.
Onboarding 35 sites in 3 days
The agency expected that their sites would be needing updates when they moved to a maintenance plan, but they weren’t expecting to find that half their sites had security issues.
The result of maintenance
Now that the sites have been onboarded and cleaned up, the agency is sleeping a lot better. They also have a full dashboard so they know for certain where all of their sites are at and an audit log of what’s been done. As a nice bonus, their clients are now getting maintenance reports, showing the results of their hard work.
Some key takeaways that add value:
- They have a birds-eye view of what’s going on with all their sites.
- In 3 clicks they can find out exactly which websites are using a given plugin, including version numbers and if updates are available.
- Their websites are scanned daily for known security vulnerabilities & blacklists.
- They are the first to know if a website goes offline.
- They now have regular offsite backups for all of their client sites, without the need to figure out their own storage.
- An audit log for every site, so they know exactly what was done and when.
- Their clients get a monthly report to let them know what was done, without them lifting a finger.
The agency hasn’t tossed that old spreadsheet, it just now has the client name & email used for the automated monthly report. And they now can answer important questions like “which clients use this plugin” and “what was done last month on the website”.
Sample Client Report
Use the carousel below to see a sample of what their clients now receive every month. It’s these details that help to build confidence with clients.
