At WP Buffs, we love to hop on Zoom calls with as many potential clients as we can!
We learn all about their business, their plans and future goals with WordPress and talk about how we can help them achieve this.
Our clients appreciate that they’re able to speak to a real buff before joining us on a care plan.
We’ve given you our discovery call guide that we use when talking to a potential client. We recommend introducing a structure like this when you’re speaking to potential clients about your care plans so that you fully understand the clients support requirements and you can correctly set expectations for working together. 💪
The on-boarding task list below includes tasks we typically do when a client signs up with us. This prepares the website for on-going WordPress management and ensures that the site is safe, secure and loading fast! Feel free to use these tasks throughout your marketing. Tasks will vary between plans and you can customise this for your plans and clients.
We make sure that the username & password provided for your WordPress install and hosting account are working.
We have offsite backups running as soon as you sign up and we set up your uptime monitoring so that we’re always the first to know if there’s a problem.
This forms part of our security checks, we ensure that all inactive users are removed.
We manually check to make sure your website is mobile friendly across all devices and make any necessary changes that are needed.
We use developer tools such as Pingdom and GT Metrix to find bottlenecks in your site - then we fix them! We aim for a page load time of under 2 seconds.
We run manual updates. We run initial WordPress Core updates, theme updates and plugin updates for you. We test your site to ensure that everything remains compatible. Our preferred update method is to alway update on staging for testing before pushing to live.
Security tasks will vary from site to site. Typically, we run scans to ensure that the site is clean, we also harden your WordPress install to ensure that attacks are prevented. We also install SolidWP and configure this plugin for your setup. Website security is then monitored ongoing for you.
For Perform or Protect Plans we’ll install and configure the following security/speed related plugins:
Each website that we onboard is reviewed for compatibility with these plugins - not all websites are suitable for all plugins and this is assessed on a site by site basis
Before we begin, we always recommend working with a legal partner when handling contracts and legal documents. The information here is for reference and guidance only.
If you’re looking for some help laying some boundaries with your clients, we’ve created some helpful resources for you to check when setting up a contract.
Setting clear expectations from the outset, whether it’s for clients on care plans or for a new website build, is paramount to the projects success.
Do you work 9-5? Are you off on client meeting days every Wednesday? Are you away from the office on weekends? Telling your clients your schedule in advance will ensure that they aren’t stressed out trying to contact you when you’re not available and frees you up in your business to do other stuff when you need to, including relaxing!
We’ve put together some helpful documents to help you set some boundaries in your business.
The following guide will break down the reasons why website owners and WordPress maintenance professionals need a contract. Then, we’ll give you some best practices for building one for your website:
Ask any WordPress freelancer or agency owner when the last time was they actually disconnected and took a day off and they’ll probably laugh. Most of us have emails coming in at all hours of the day and are connected via mobile phones and laptops. As a freelancer or agency worker working remotely, it’s common to feel compelled to respond to clients regardless of the hour.
Sound familiar? You might need a manifesto:
⏰Creating a ‘How I Work Manifesto’
If you’re looking for new projects and at a loose end on how to manage proposals (or not sure what to include in your proposals) you might find it useful to gather some tools you can rely on.
When it comes to WordPress development proposals, the goal is to convince leads you’re the best person for the job. To succeed, you’ll need to provide them with all the information they need to make a hiring decision:
✔️Learn about WordPress proposals and add these tools to your arsenal
Boom! 💣
One lesson that we’ve learned through managing hundreds of websites on behalf of our partners is that we must make it as easy as possible for your clients to send our team sufficient information in support requests so that we have everything we need to complete each task quickly.
When we have everything we need, we can get support requests finished quickly and efficiently, which leads to happy clients! 🎉
When we don’t have all of the information we need to complete a task, we can’t work efficiently and our turnaround times increase 😥
To tackle this, we’re making it easy for you to create a space on your website in which your clients can send in support requests.
Say hello to Gravity Forms.
Gravity Forms is an easy to use WordPress form plugin!
🎉 We’ve built you an awesome Gravity Form that you can take and import into your own website and use on your own landing page. Yup! We’ve done the heavy lifting for you! 🎉
This form comes pre-built with all of the essential questions we need to ask clients when they send in support requests and makes it easy for your clients to send us that information. We’ve even included the option for your client to be able to upload files and screenshots.
Customise your support page with your own copy and branding to match your style! This page will be used by your clients a lot – so make sure it represents your brand and reminds your clients of how awesome you are to work with 😄
Make sure your form is forwarding to our support desk, through your white-label email address. It’s always a good idea to run a test before going live. We’re happy to confirm things are working from our side!
Using another form builder and just need the fields to build your own form?
*Required field
Submit*