More consolidation is happening in the WordPress maintenance services space, as SiteCare announced it has acquired Maintainn, a long-time competitor, from WebDevStudios.
“As we’ve grown and our clientele has grown [with] definitely more of a focus on the enterprise and big business, we’ve simply kind of grown away where that side of the house wasn’t really in line with the web dev side of the house in terms of the clients we’re working with,” WebDevStudios CEO Brad Williams said in an interview with The WP Minute.
“So it’s been a bit of a, struggle in terms of how best to support those clients, because of course we want to take care of our clients and they are a big reason why we’re here. That’s why, Lisa, my partner, and myself, kind of took a step back and said, maybe this doesn’t make sense for WebDev, where we’re at, where we’re continuing to go.”
As WebDevStudios began focusing more on taking on larger, more technical projects that run WordPress at scale for clients like The Wall Street Journal, Starbucks, Microsoft, Viacom, and the NBA, the company struggled to effectively market Maintainn with messaging that conveyed its distinction from WebDevStudios’ enterprise development offerings.
“Struggle of the message, the marketing message to say, hey, we can support, blogs, SMB all the way up to, enterprise and Microsoft is a hard message to get across,” Williams said.
“We knew that the marketing of that would be almost impossible for us to, to nail. It really just came from the separation of where WebDev was kind of growing more towards the enterprise and Maintainn was primarily supporting more of that SMB to to mid-tier.”
Maintainn’s current maintenance plan customers, which range from $49-$249/month, will remain at the same pricing for one year. SiteCare may reevaluate these pricing tiers in the future. Customers are promised the same level of service as their current plan but may also receive some enhanced benefits that they had not received before. In addition to maintenance services, SiteCare also offers its customers a range of digital marketing services.
This is SiteCare’s second acquisition of a WordPress site management company after acquiring WP Site Care in 2018. The company will take on all of Maintainn’s assets but the employees will remain with WebDevStudios.
The site care announcement says that maintainn was one of the first in the maintenance industry in 2012. We started maintaining clients 24/7 since 2008. Just sayin. Apparently my marketing is lacking. gah.