Maintaining a Joomla Website Canberra Joomla User Group Presented by Tim Plummer
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