Hello,

 

I have just joined this forum today to seek some advice from you lovely people.

 

I recently learned how to build websites using Wordpress and then a few of my friends then asked me todo there websites, so for a small fee I started doing this as a way to earn a little extra cash.

 

I am using premium themes at the moment until I learn how to build my own and try to use a few plug-ins as possible.

 

Quite often there are updates for the themes and plug-ins and not all updates go smoothly requiring me to spend time fixing any bugs and issues with the updates and clashes that crop up with new updates. This is exactly what happened to me today with one site and it took me a good hour to fix the various issues.

 

I was just wondering is it fairly standard that Wordpress websites require (a lot ) of maintenance? I have built around 5 sites and have more sites to build. Is this where offering some kind of maintenance package would be a good idea so I am not working extra hours for nothing?

 

Any advice would be appreciated.

 

Daniel

 

 

Welcome to the forums

 

Nearly all web sites that run on content systems need maintenance, especially software updates. As you've found it doesn't always go smoothly!

 

It's quite normal to charge a fee for maintenance work - time is money so they say.

You should setup expectations before you build a site, so that the client knows and expects a charge for any maintenance work after the initial build. Even bug fixes if there are any after a certain point is chargeable. You can't maintain a site for free for the rest of your life

As you gain more experience and build sites that are more standards compliant and use less plugins then you will find that updates will be far less painful. It's been a long time since we've had an issue updating wordpress and we maintain 100+ sites. The mostl likely culprits are your premium themes are using poorly written plugins.