Maintaining a joomla website - Canberra

Maintaining a Joomla WebsiteCanberra Joomla User Group

Presented by Tim Plummer

• Client doesn’t see value in ongoing maintenance

• I don’t have time to maintain the site

• How much should I charge?

• What regular tasks should I do?

Maintenance challenges you may face

What if you don’t maintain a site?

Site becomes vulnerable

Site gets hacked

Angry customer

Joomla gets bad reputation

Educate them as to why website needs to be maintained

• Keep website operating in peak condition

• Patch security vulnerabilities

• Disaster recovery

Client doesn’t see value

Would you buy a car and never service it?

• There are tools available that can help automate some of the maintenance tasks and save you time

• Charge enough to make it worth your while

• Consider leveraging cheaper offshore resources

I don’t have time

Different ways to price

• Include maintenance in project cost

• Annual maintenance percentage (eg. 10% of project cost)

• Fixed monthly rate

How much should I charge?

• Daily offsite backup

• Disaster recovery plan

• Software updates (core & third party extensions)

• Website monitoring

• Support

What maintenance tasks should I do?

• PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising

• Content marketing / strategy

• Social media campaigns

What should I exclude?

• Akeeba Backup professional

• Amazon S3

• Daily/weekly cron to trigger backup

Daily offsite backups

TEST YOUR BACKUPUntested = no backup

• In the event of something going wrong, have a plan to restore backup and recover site

Disaster recovery

• Keep Joomla core version up-to-date

• Keep extension versions up-to-date

Software updates

• Do you bundle subscriptions in maintenance cost?

– Client doesn’t need to worry about ongoing subscription costs for extensions used

– Depending on licence, you may be able to use for other clients at no extra cost

Software subscriptions

• Apply the latest best practice recommendations

• Can use tools to check basic settings

Site audits

• Support to help client maintain content

– some developers include up to 30mins per month in their maintenance fee

Support

• Monitor when core files changed

• Is there an update available for an extension?

• Uptime/downtime

Website monitoring

• Most of these items, the client doesn’t have visibility of, so they may not feel they are getting value for money.

• Monthly report showing what you have done/improved

– Extensions updated

– Average backup size

– Other minor improvements

Does client see value?

• Each month, focus on one small change to make all your client sites better

– SEO improvement

• update meta data

• Add a sitemap

• Update robots.txt

– Security audit

• Update/improve .htaccess

What else can you do to add value?

• Watchful.li– Get notified when core files changed

– Get notified of extension updates

– Single interface to update multiple sites

– Site audit

• Myjoomla.com– Security audit

• BF SEO– Improve organic SEO

Tools to make this easier

Questions?

Tim Plummer

www.tamlynsoftware.com

@bfsurvey