Streamline website management for multiple clients: Tips, best practices, and solutions with Website Pro
One of the major challenges faced by digital agencies offering website management services is figuring out how to scale effectively without negatively impacting performance. Handling website management for a short list of clients is a different ball game than staying on top of dozens, or even hundreds, of unique projects. As your client list grows, it becomes increasingly important to have a system in place that ensure nothing falls through the cracks when it comes to maintaining website performance and security.
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In this article, we’ll discuss why website management is particularly important for agencies with multiple clients, go over tips and best practices for how to effectively manage multiple websites, and provide a solution that you can start using today to streamline your website management so you can focus on what matters: growing your business.
Table of Contents
Website management: why does it matter?
Your clients expect their websites to be up-to-date, functional, and optimized for search engines. Website management is the key to achieving these objectives and delivering high-quality managed website services to your clients.
Having an effective management system in place ensures that your agency can meet—and exceed—client expectations. Many providers of website services conclude their relationships with clients when they hand off a finished project. But client needs don’t end there. Websites require ongoing maintenance, and effectively offering management services can help your agency stand out by addressing this common paint point of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
Let’s take a look at some key reasons why website management deserves your attention if you sell website services:
Better client satisfaction and retention
Handing off a finished website build without offering management services means leaving money on the table. Websites require ongoing maintenance to remain updated, safe and secure, and well-optimized for SEO performance. Having a website management system in place enables you to meet this client need while generating a recurring, repeatable income stream for your agency.
Not only does this make for happy clients and better retention rates, it also means that when they’re ready for another website overhaul, your agency is far more likely to get that business.
Improved productivity and efficiency
Effective small business website management is all about having a streamlined workflow that enables your team to reduce repetitive manual tasks by automating routine activities. Trying to manage multiple websites without a dedicated solution in place can quickly become messy and overwhelming. Instead, website management solutions can save you time and resources and allow your agency to focus on high-value activities that drive revenue and growth.
Competitive advantage over other website services providers
There’s no shortage of options out there when it comes to creating a new website. Your prospects have the choice between different agencies, freelancers, and DIY solutions. Offering website management services can position your agency as a one-stop shop for all website needs and give you a competitive edge over others offering just web design and development.
Revenue growth
Web design is a one-time gig, while website management is an ongoing service. Being able to manage websites at scale can help your agency generate a reliable regular source of revenue, making it easier to plan for the future.
Scalability
Without a reliable site management system in place, your agency can quickly reach a ceiling when it comes to how many clients you can serve at a given time. With the right solution in place that enables you to effectively stay on top of a long list of websites, scaling your business to new heights is much more feasible.
Benefits of good website management
Alright, so we’ve covered why streamlining website management for multiple clients matters for agencies. But why should your clients care about it, and how can you position it as a valuable and worthwhile monthly expenditure?
The risks to SMBs of not managing their websites can be serious, with repercussions ranging from legal issues to hampered conversion rates.
Website security
Properly managed websites are more secure, which is important for protecting sensitive data such as client login credentials and credit card information. Security measures like SSL certificates, firewalls, and regular updates are powerful tools for preventing security breaches. Without these measures in place, clients are more vulnerable to cyber-attacks which can potentially result in expensive or reputation-compromising legal action.
For example, failing to regularly update plugins can lead to security vulnerabilities. By investing in website management, SMBs can ensure their plugins and other elements of their websites are always up-to-date.
Improved website performance
Websites that load quickly and work smoothly provide a far better experience to users, reducing bounce rates and boosting conversion rates. Regular web management tasks like keeping everything updated, optimizing images, minimizing code, and ensuring fast server response times are maintained can all impact website performance.
Optimized user experience
In addition to speedier loading times, users expect responsive interfaces, intuitive navigation, and regularly updated relevant content. Site management can ensure that all of these important components of a successful website are maintained and regularly improved upon, delivering the best user experience (UX) possible.
While these can be set up when a website is first built, they can deteriorate over time. For example, theme or plugin updates might break parts of the front end of a website, and failing to catch these changes can result in non-responsive sites or otherwise poor user experiences.
Better SEO
Performing well in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) is about more than just using the right keywords in website copy. Ranking factors include page speed, responsiveness, a clear and organized structure, and more. Website management ensures these important ranking factors are maintained and continually optimized, supporting SMBs SEO efforts.
Reduced downtime
Downtime can be costly for your SMBs both in terms of lost revenue and damage to their brand reputation. Good website management includes regular monitoring and maintenance to detect and fix issues before they cause downtime. Aspects of website management like monitoring server performance, uptime, and response times all play a role in reducing downtime.
Similarly, in the unlikely event that something does go wrong with a website, performing regular backups—a key component of web management—makes it easy to get things back up and running as swiftly and easily as possible.
If an SMB has bothered to invest in a new website, it’s well worth the ongoing investment in website management to ensure their site continues to perform and be reliably accessible to their clients.
Challenges of managing multiple client websites
Time constraints
If your agency has many clients to serve simultaneously, the amount of time that can be devoted to each website will be limited. This can lead to rushed work, missed deadlines, and an increase in errors, ultimately impacting client satisfaction and your agency’s hard-earned reputation. Without a system in place to balance your workload and competing demands effectively, each website project won’t get the attention and resources it requires.
Resource allocation
Resources like staff time, software tools, and hosting capacity play a role in managing client websites. As your list of websites grows, ensuring these resources are properly used to ensure every site is well-managed can become a challenge. Over allocation of resources can also be a problem, leading to overspending on web management when the same work could have been done with a more efficient use of resources.
Managing costs
The tools and resources required to host, maintain, and manage multiple websites can add up, eating into agency profits. Growing digital agencies must carefully balance these costs against the revenue generated by each client. This includes making strategic decisions about resource allocation, prioritizing projects based on their revenue potential, and finding solutions to streamline processes to reduce costs.
Identifying priorities
With a long list of client websites requiring regular attention, it can be easy to get bogged down in low-priority work at the expense of more important tasks. Your team can also waste valuable time simply trying to identify which websites require the most pressing attention. Ideally, you’ll have a system in place that helps you identify high-priority projects effortlessly. Without this, managing priorities can become a significant challenge for agencies with multiple website management clients.
Scaling
Growth is great, and usually a significant goal for digital agencies. But it can also come with growing pains. A system that works for managing 10 or 20 client websites won’t necessarily scale to be effective for the management of 100 websites. Just as agencies get in the groove of managing their current workload, an increase in opportunities can represent a serious challenge.
Communicating with colleagues
If multiple team members are responsible for site management at your agency, effective communication to ensure work doesn’t get duplicated can be a challenge. As your list of projects grows, it becomes increasingly important to have a system of communication that automatically captures what work has already been done and what remains to be done.
Tips and best practices for website management
The challenges outlined above can be addressed by knowing which website management tasks need to be completed regularly and having a solution or system in place to ensure they all get completed.
First, let’s take a look at some tips and best practices that cover the kinds of activities that should be included in website management services. Then, we’ll discuss a solution you can use to put it all together.
Maintaining website security
Maintaining website security is one of the most important components of website management because the stakes are high: a security breach can compromise private company or user data, opening SMBs up to negative press and even potential lawsuits.
Digital agencies must ensure that client data is protected and secure, and that their websites are not vulnerable to all-too-common cyberattacks. To achieve this, there are several key activities that digital agencies should practice for web management clients.
- Regular backups: Regular backups ensure that website data is recoverable in the event of an attack or other data loss incident. Digital agencies should schedule regular backups of website data and store backups securely. The best hosting solutions will include daily backups.
- Strong passwords: When onboarding new clients, digital agencies should instruct their clients to use complex passwords and two-factor authentication to access the back end of their websites. Staff should also be trained in password hygiene to avoid weak passwords or password reuse, which can expose businesses to cybersecurity risks.
- SSL certificates: Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates are used to encrypt data that is transmitted between a website and the browsers that access it, making it more difficult for attackers to intercept sensitive data like passwords and credit card numbers. Digital agencies offering website management services should ensure all client websites have valid SSL certificates and that they're always renewed before expiration.
- Firewalls: Firewalls can be used to block unauthorized access to client websites. Consider installing and configuring firewalls on your client websites to help prevent cyberattacks.
- Security monitoring: Having tools in place to monitor client websites for signs of suspicious activity or security breaches can help you catch problems early. This can include monitoring website logs, setting up alerts for unusual activity, and regularly scanning websites for potential vulnerabilities like out-of-date plugins.
Maintaining website performance
Website performance and SEO performance are closely linked since many aspects of web performance are direct Google ranking factors. If an SMB client has invested in a beautiful new site, they're likely investing in SEO as well to drive traffic to their new home on the web. Website management is an essential component of any effective SEO strategy.
Let’s take a look at some tips and best practices for ensuring every website your agency manages performs well.
- Optimizing images: Large image files can dramatically slow down page loading times. For all managed websites, ensure that images are optimized for web use. This can include compressing images, reducing file sizes, and using appropriate, web-friendly file types.
- Responsive design: With an ever-growing share of website traffic coming from mobile devices, websites need to look great and remain usable regardless of which device they’re being accessed from. This means all parts of a website should adjust to different screen sizes and resolutions. This can be accomplished using flexible layouts, scalable images, adjustable font sizes, and mobile navigation menus.
- Minimizing plugins: Plugins can add a lot of great features to a website, but they shouldn’t be used in excess. When it comes to WordPress website management, you should audit all of your client websites to make sure installed plugins are actually being used and adding value. You should also regularly update active plugins.
- Using a content delivery network (CDN): A CDN can significantly improve website performance by distributing website content across multiple servers. Implementing the use of a CDN to deliver website content to users will make a site faster, regardless of where it’s being accessed from.
- Caching: Caching temporarily stores website data on a user's device, reducing the need for frequent (and slow) data requests. Enabling caching for client websites improves website performance and speed for regular visitors.
- General website optimization: Regularly reviewing client websites for general performance issues, like slow-loading pages, broken links, and other issues that can help identify problems that impact website performance.
Testing for user experience
User experience (UX) matters when it comes to reducing bounce rates, boosting conversions, and improving retention rates. Plus, much like website performance, it’s linked to SEO. Regularly schedule these tasks to test your client's WordPress site and check on the UX.
- Testing website functionality: Since parts of a website can stop working or break after updates to WordPress, the website builder, theme, or plugin, functionality should be tested after any changes. This can be done in a cloned website/staging environment and includes testing forms, shopping carts, and any other interactive elements of the site.
- Ensuring website accessibility: To make client websites accessible to all users, including those with disabilities, website management should include testing and implementing features like alt text for images, video closed captioning, and keyboard navigation options. This can also help you avoid any costly web accessibility lawsuits down the road.
- Browser and device testing: Testing client websites across different browsers and devices can ensure they're fully responsive and provide an optimal user experience regardless of device. Testing tools are available to simulate this without the need to physically access a range of different devices.
How to streamline your website management tasks
This may sound like a lot of work, especially when applied to a large list of client websites. However, by streamlining how you deliver website management services, you can improve your efficiency, reduce costs, and provide optimal services to all clients at scale.
Here are some ways agencies can streamline website management tasks:
- Use a website builder to create fast, responsive websites more efficiently. A great website builder will also speed up the time it takes to make changes and updates to a site.
- Consider using project management software to organize tasks, deadlines, and communication with clients and team members.
- Develop a standardized in-house process for website development, from design to launch, to ensure consistency and reduce errors.
- Use automation tools to perform repetitive tasks such as backups, updates, and security checks.
- Consider outsourcing website management tasks to white-label teams to free up internal resources without sacrificing your reputation.
- Make use of analytics tools to monitor website performance and identify opportunities for improvement.
- Use cloud-based services for website hosting, maintenance, and storage to reduce infrastructure costs and improve scalability.
Why Website Pro has the best solutions for multiple website management for SMB clients
The best way to deliver website management services at scale is with a dedicated tool with the right features for the job. Vendasta’s Website Pro is up to the task.
What is Website Pro?
Website Pro is an all-in-one website solution for agencies that goes well beyond what you might expect from a standard website builder.
In addition to a powerful drag-and-drop website builder, Website Pro includes world-class secure WordPress hosting on the Google Cloud Platform, ensuring the highest security available along with a fast, reliable website. Another perk of using Google Cloud hosting? Scaling is easy, so there’s no need to make complicated adjustments to your client’s hosting solutions if they experience a spike in traffic.
Developer tools are easily accessible and usable through the Website Pro dashboard, giving users access to all the tools they need to manage their websites. Plus, for agencies managing multiple WordPress sites, Website Pro’s Website Admin Dashboard saves valuable time by enabling one-click updates of plugins, WordPress versions, and themes. It can also be used to filter for sites that require updates, solving the problem of project prioritization.
Advantages of Website Pro
Website Pro stands out because it’s built with the needs of agencies in mind, making it the perfect solution for managing a growing portfolio of client projects.
Multi-site management
Managing multiple websites manually involves signing in and out of each individual client project to check if updates are required. With Website Pro, many routine updates can be made with a single click from the Website Admin Dashboard. If you do need to log into a client’s WordPress dashboard for more advanced changes, you can click a link in your Admin Dashboard to open it up—no login required.
This dramatically speeds up the WordPress website management workflow, eliminating the tedious and unproductive task of manually checking every client website regularly.
White-label platform
Website Pro is a rebrandable white-label website solution that can be customized to match your agency’s branding. Then, you can resell it as a proprietary software to clients who are looking for a DIY solution, bolstering your brand image while providing your clients with top-notch reseller hosting, an excellent website builder, and the best CMS for websites.
On top of the software itself being white-label, Vendasta is a white-label platform that gives your agency access to the skilled team you require to grow, without the need to hire in-house. If you prefer to focus on sales and other tasks, you can leave all your website management tasks to a white-label team of experts working directly with clients on your behalf—and under your agency’s name—to manage your website projects.
Using this white-label model, you only pay for services when you use them, rather than being on the hook for salaries that remain consistent even when work fluctuates. Plus, it gives you access to skilled experts whenever you need them, making it possible to scale your business effortlessly.
Integration with sales and marketing tools
Through Vendasta, you can access a range of sales and marketing tools that make it easier to discover opportunities, track prospects, close deals, and improve retention.
Snapshot Report, an automated needs assessment tool, can help you start a personalized, data-backed conversation with prospects, establishing your expertise and helping to position your agency as a provider of solutions. Then, use Task Manager to streamline project management in a dashboard that integrates seamlessly with Website Pro.
Website Pro vs. other website management solutions
Website Pro isn’t the only website management solution on the market, but it just might be the perfect one for your needs as a digital agency.
Website Pro vs. Duda
Duda includes a drag-and-drop builder, templates, and hosting available in three different pricing points. It also includes client management tools to facilitate conversations with clients. While this is helpful during the web design stage, it lacks an equivalent to the Admin Dashboard, which means there’s no streamlined way to effortlessly update a long list of client updates at once.
Plus, it’s more limited when it comes to easily making website customizations. The result? More time spent writing code and manually checking websites to identify if updates are required.
Website Pro vs. Webflow
Webflow positions itself as a no-code website builder that can be used to speed up web design time. While it can be a useful tool for initially building websites, it lacks the tools required for website management after projects are delivered.
Website Pro vs. Wix
Wix is a solution geared toward entrepreneurs who want to DIY their websites. Businesses can use it to create websites and manage their ecommerce. However, like many other website builders, this doesn’t take into account the particular needs of agencies offering website management services, such as cloning and staging or more advanced SEO.
To manage multiple Wix website clients, you’ll need to spend time and resources manually logging in and out of each account, leaving plenty of room of human error. As an alternative, Website Pro gives users a birds-eye view of all their client projects, dramatically reducing errors.
Using Website Pro to save time and boost revenue
Website Pro stands out from other popular website builders because it can help agencies meet their goals of boosting revenues while having time to spend where it matters: growing their business. Here’s how:
- Low-maintenance management of multiple WordPress sites: Many aspects of WordPress website management are automated with Website Pro, including select automatic updates, automatic SSL certificates. The rest can be done easily with a few clicks thanks to the Website Admin Dashboard.
- Streamlined website development: Website Pro gives agencies access to a streamlined website development process, including staging areas, a vast library of vertical-specific templates, and a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface that can reduce development time and costs.
- Robust website analytics: Website Pro provides robust website analytics, which can help marketing agencies understand user behavior and identify marketing strategies that can be sold to clients, boosting revenue.
- Integration with an ecosystem of solutions: Through the Vendasta Marketplace, agencies can access a whole suite of solutions to clients, becoming a one-stop shop for all their digital marketing needs.
Frequently asked questions
Who do I hire to manage my website?
To manage your website, consider hiring agencies that offer web content management and other website management services. Since website management can be a time-consuming task, doing it in-house can take your focus away from other important tasks required to run your business.
How much does it cost to maintain a website for a small business?
The cost of maintaining a website for a small business depends on factors such as their website hosting choice, the complexity of website updates needed, the security needs of the website, and more.
