Learning how to create a clear Website maintenance contract is not easy. However, it is critical, especially if your business involves proving site maintenance and support services. This is because lack of clarity can make you prone to major issues like not meeting client expectations, late payments, or even bad word of mouth.
Moreover, having a clear and straightforward website maintenance agreement would provide your clients with all the necessary details about your services that they need to make an informed decision.
This read will teach you how to create a website maintenance contract in 5 easy steps. But before that, let’s talk about why you need to have website maintenance contracts during client onboarding.
The business of website maintenance services is pretty straightforward – you get paid for keeping your clients’ websites up and working in great condition. For instance, you might not even feel the need to have a website maintenance contract when looking at the business’s straightforward nature.
However, if you fail to define your services to the clients clearly, you might cause some serious confusion. There’s a high chance that their expectations won’t line up with your actual services.
Here’s an example. Suppose your client expects you to provide SEO with your maintenance and support services, but that’s not actually a part of your actual services. Situations like these often occur and prevent both parties from getting on the same page – Ultimately resulting in bad final products.
Moreover, a website maintenance contract also provides you with fair legal protection as it includes all your clients’ obligations to you. In situations like client disagreeing to pay how much they owe, or the worst-case scenario -a client refusing to pay at all; All you have to is present a website maintenance agreement as a reference or evidence, and you’ll easily get you a paycheck.
In simpler words, A website maintenance contract outlines your services and your client’s obligations from the beginning so that there are no confusions down the road.
Now that you know how important it is to create a simple yet clear web maintenance contract let’s move down to our next subject – how to create a website maintenance contract?
We’ve already mentioned above that learning to create a web maintenance contract is a tricky job. Therefore, here’s a rundown of 5 easy steps that you can follow to create your Website maintenance agreement.
Now this will give you a fair idea of how a web maintenance agreement or contract looks like. Moreover, using a website maintenance contract template would help you avoid missing out on your contract’s key details.
All you have to do is find a template that looks stellar, is relevant to your niche, and perfectly fits all your needs.
Even though a simple search could get a thousand great templates, you must ensure that your desired web maintenance contract includes all these key details.
You must carefully consider and determine the services you want to offer in your web maintenance contract.
Here are some regular activities that are involved in maintenance services.
Note that these services can be concluded as a part of maintenance services only. On the other hand, support services are focused on troubleshooting sudden bugs, errors, and broken functionalities of a site. For example ,solving the WordPress White Screen of Death Error is a support service.
It is important to remember the key differences between both services because people generally have different ideas.
Only add the services that you actually offer in your Website maintenance agreement to avoid any unnecessary hassle.
Pricing is an important factor that determines whether or not your product is going to be successful. This is the same with website maintenance services. You have to develop a nice pricing strategy that isn’t too heavy on your pockets and doesn’t scare off your potential clients.
Typically, there are two pricing models when it comes to website maintenance services. Either you can implement tiered pricing or offer a flat cost. However, we’d recommend you offer tiered pricing because, in that way, you can target a wider audience. Refer to this image below.
Offering a tiered pricing model means that you’re targeting an audience with every type of budget from low to high.
For example, A low-tiered package would attract most of the audience towards you as they’ll find a great deal with that price.
Similarly, the middle tier package would also draw a wider audience. The package provides the most value to the clients with services like SEO, updates, and limited support.
And lastly, the top tier package is for those who care about every detail and believe that extra cost is worth it to keep their site in the best condition possible. The services here include 24/7 support, content updates, malware removal, and every other service you expect from a top-tier site maintenance package.
The next step is to add a termination clause to your Website maintenance contract. Now this one is quite important for two reasons. Firstly, if you want to raise your prices by any means, you can do it quite easily with contract renewals.
And secondly, if your client plans to change their package, they can also leverage the contract renewal to scale or cut off their maintenance expenses.
Moreover, if you have a site maintenance contract with well-defined renewal periods and payment terms, it would also cast you out as a responsible person, and your clients would feel much safer working with you.
Once you’ve gone through the course and completed creating your site maintenance contract, the final step is to show it to a legal advisor. This is highly recommended as a legal advisor can quickly guide you about any shortcomings in the agreement.
So, in this read, we’ve discussed the rundown of 5 easy steps by which you can create your website maintenance contract. Here’s a quick go-through.
Creating a site maintenance contract is quite beneficial as it acts as legal protection for both and your business. Moreover, it makes it easier for the clients to scale and cut down their expenses at will.
