Maintaining a Joomla WebsiteSydney 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 vulnerableSite gets hackedAngry customerJoomla 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 Plummerwww.tamlynsoftware.com

@bfsurvey