189 - Let us take care of your WordPress websites so that you can keep building them

Interview with Brad Morrison from GoWP, with Nathan Wrigley

I got into building WordPress websites because I like building websites. Now that is a breathtaking insight I know! But it's important to think about this for a minute. I have no metrics on this, but I know for certain that I spend quite a but of my week just patching up and maintaining websites that I've already built.

Go back a few years and the idea of website care plans was not all that widespread. Now however it's all the rage and I'd be surprised if most of you listening to this podcast did not have some kind of offering in this regard.

You exchange some predefined set of services in exchange for a monthly fee. That could be WordPress hosting, plugin / theme / WordPress Core updates, email hosting, general tweaks to the website. You know how this works. You get paid and you hope that the client never calls because then your care plan is really profitable. But what if the client does call, a lot? What if they burden you with lots of little tasks. What if you just don't enjoy this side of the business and would rather spend your time pitching for, and building, the next WordPress website?

Well if that's you then you really need to listen to the WP Builds Podcast today because we have Brad Morrison on from GoWP.

The purpose of GoWP is simple, and I will quote from their website:

GoWP is the complete solution to outsourcing your agency’s tedious or low-value work. Our expert engineers and developers work as an extension of your team. Whether it’s WordPress maintenance, a 24/7 team for content edits, or page builds — we’ve got you covered.

GoWP website

They have built a business upon helping WordPress agencies who don't want to worry about support and instead want to build their agency and more and more websites.

Clearly, if you think that you're care plans are working out for you then you might think that there's nothing in this episode for you, but hold on there, perhaps Brad can change your mind.

Have you really looked at what it costs to suppory clients? Have you added up the time that it takes to field their emails and phone calls. The effort that it takes to allocate that work to someone on the team. The backwards and forwards because you've not 100% nailed down your offering! Perhaps it's not as lucrative as you'd have hoped. Perhaps you're close to breaking even on your care plans, or (let it not be so) even losing money each month!

In the podcast Brad explains about what GoWP is, who it's for and what they will do for you.

Here's their main points in a short bullet list:

• White label services for WordPress agencies (your clients will never know that it's not you), they'll submit and email and GoWP will get on with it and let both you and your client know when it's done!
• Available 24/7 to answer the needs of your clients - I don't know about you, but there's no way that I can rival this myself!
• Unlimited amounts of <30 minute content edits.
• Plugin updates with a visual validation to check that all is still working as expected.
• Security monitoring and Malware cleanup so that you can reliably inform your clients that hacks are going to be taken care of. This involves WordPress hardening, daily scans, Malware scans and Firewall protection.
• Backups incase some needs to be rolled back. Off site, 90 days history, just in case!

All of this comes wrapped up the in the GoWP dashboard which is hub that allows you to have oversight of your entire agencies websites and their current status.

I know what comes next, you're going to say, yes this all sounds great, but what does it cost? Well that's easy, look at the GoWP pricing page...

$29 per site per month for maintainance

$79 per site per month for the addional option to have content edit

If that were not enough they have a new offering which is nothing to do with maintainance. It's called GoWP Page Builds, and it's also quite cool.

This is for those of you who want to run an agency but don't want to actually build them. As it's not really the prime topic of the podcast I'm going to just touch on it here. But GoWP Page Builds will allow you to hand off the WordPress website builds to GoWP, so you literally don't have to do anything! It's priced accordingly, but you'll get two hours a day of dev time for an unlimited amount of websites, daily reports showing progress nd much more.

If you're really good at sales and have no issues with filling up and executing your sales pipeline, this could be an interesting proposition. You'll be able to sell websites and know that other professionals can build them for you!

Anyway, it was great chatting to Brad, and if you've liked what you've heard please comment below or head over to the WP Builds Facebook Group and comment there.

Mentioned in this episode:

GoWP

GoWP Page Builds