#172 – Reyes Martínez and Héctor De Prada on Website Maintenance for WordPress Agencies and Freelancers

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, website maintenance for WordPress agencies and freelancers.

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So on the podcast today, we have Reyes Martínez, and Héctor de Prada.

Reyes has been involved in the WordPress community since 2015, with a background in journalism, digital communications, and early stage startups. From 2021 to 2024, she was sponsored by Automattic to contribute full-time to global marketing and communication efforts for the WordPress Open Source project, She led several initiatives during that time, including the experimental WordPress Media Corps. Reyes currently serves as content lead at Modular DS.

Héctor has been building websites since he was 12, and has worked with WordPress for nearly a decade, first as a freelancer, then running his own agency. Today, he’s one of the co-founders of Modular DS. He co-organizes the WordPress meetup in León in Spain, and writes a Spanish newsletter that keeps readers updated with the latest news from the WordPress ecosystem.

In this episode, we get into the nitty gritty of WordPress maintenance. What it takes to effectively manage multiple websites, and why maintenance is such a crucial, if often overlooked, part of running a successful client business.

You might think that updating plugins and themes is all there is to it, but Reyes and Héctor explained that there’s much more involved, performing regular backups, monitoring, uptime, and performance, checking for security vulnerabilities, database cleanups, and ensuring essential features like contact forms continue working as expected.

We discuss best practices for educating clients, how to position ongoing maintenance as an investment rather than a cost, and solutions which can help automate and streamline these essential tasks.

We also chat about how the maintenance landscape is changing with upcoming legal requirements around accessibility and privacy, and the emerging business opportunities for professionals specializing solely in website care.

If you’re a freelancer or agency owner looking to scale up your business, perhaps you offer care plans to clients, or are considering adding maintenance plans to your service, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast. Where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Reyes Martínez and Héctor de Prada.

I am joined on the podcast today by Reyes Martinez and by Héctor de Prada. Hello Both.

[00:03:53] Héctor de Prada: Hello Nathan.

[00:03:54] Reyes Martínez: Hello Nathan.

[00:03:55] Nathan Wrigley: I’m so pleased to have both of you on. This is going to be interesting because I’m going to be speaking to Héctor in about a week’s time as well, which will be kind of interesting. So there’ll be two podcasts coming out in quick succession featuring Héctor.

But the topic will be very different, and I’ll explain in a moment what the topic is going to be about.

But before that, I wonder if we could just get a little bit of an introduction to both of you. If we can keep it around the subject of WordPress that would be helpful.

So let’s go to Reyes first. Tell us exactly who you are, who you work for, what do they do, whatever you like in your little potted bio.

[00:04:29] Reyes Martínez: Yeah, sure. I’m Reyes and I have been part of the WordPress community since 2015. My background is in journalism and digital marketing and communications, and over the past 10 years, more or less, I have worked with startups and tech companies closely connected to the WordPress ecosystem.

And from 2021 and 2024, I was sponsored by Automattic to contribute full time to the WordPress project, where I had the opportunity to contribute to different marketing and communications initiatives.

And now I am the content lead at Modular DS. We’re building a tool to help freelancers and agencies manage multiple WordPress sites more efficiently.

[00:05:13] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. And let’s move over to Héctor. Similar question really, just give us your little potted bio.

[00:05:19] Héctor de Prada: Of course. Well, I have been making websites, I always say almost all my life, since I was like very young, at 12, 13 years old. At the beginning, not with WordPress, I have to say. But I started working with WordPress around 8, 9 years ago when I started freelancing as a web designer, and that evolved to creating a web design agency.

So I have been doing web design and websites, WordPress websites, for a long time. And 4 years ago almost, it’s when my partner and I, David and I, we started our current company, which is Modular DS, which is now where Reyes is working.

I am also part of the community. This is what you were saying, Nathan, that we are going to talk about, WordCamp Europe, because I am one of the organisers at the meetup in León, in my city. So this is also something I like a lot because we go to a lot of WordCamps, a lot of WordPress events, and it’s very nice to be able to do that in our own city as well.

[00:06:20] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you both so much. So if we stray into anything today, like a blog post is mentioned or a homepage or anything like that is mentioned, I will endeavor to link to that into the show notes. So if you head to wptavern.com and then search for the episode with these two fine people, then you’ll be able to find all of those links. It’s going to be easier to do it that way than to read anything out in an audio podcast.

The approach I think I want to take with this episode is one of somebody fairly new in the WordPress space. So if you are new in the WordPress space, then you might just have the one website. And maintaining that one simple website is probably a reasonably straightforward thing to do. You know, you log in, you update the plugins, you update the themes and what have you.

But if you’ve got any aspirations of becoming a bigger player in the WordPress space, perhaps you want to take on the job of maintaining multiple websites, perhaps you want to have clients and you want to maintain their websites, it becomes fairly obvious, fairly quickly, it’s a bit of a chore. There’s quite a lot of tasks that you need to do in order to keep those websites live.

So that’s what we’re going to talk about. What are those tasks? What’s important to notice if you are a WordPress freelancer or agency owner. What are the things that you need to make sure that your clients are getting updated with and for? And then I guess we’ll sort of mention right at the beginning that Modular DS is something which kind of can take that process off your shoulders and make it fairly automated. But you can go and check out that of your own accord.

So let’s just get into it then. What are the things that you would need to worry about? You can interrupt each other as you see fit. What are the kind of tasks that as a newbie WordPress we may not even know are coming our way, when we’ve got 2, 3, 5, 50 websites that we’ve got to keep maintained?

[00:08:14] Héctor de Prada: I don’t think it’s, how to say, like that we don’t know we have to do that, or that we don’t expect to do it when we are trying to manage a few websites. Reyes and I, we were talking this morning, normally maintenance or maintenance tasks are something nobody is very thrilled about doing, okay. It’s not like the best job. Like, you can be a designer because you love creativity and designing things, or a developer because you love to build things.

But I haven’t met anybody that is like, oh, my dream is to update plugins, create backups, and restore the website when it’s broken, you know? I think that’s the number one challenge, okay. Normally I see that one of the biggest problems is that we know maintenance has to be done in a website, but we don’t always do it. And when we have more and more websites, it becomes even a bigger problem, because we also let it aside more and more because it’s too much work. So that’s one of the main problems.

[00:09:17] Nathan Wrigley: One of the things that in my life, I don’t know what the number of websites was, but there was a point where each morning, because I decided to do the updating on a more or less daily basis, there came a point where you realise that you’d now logged into X number of websites. So you’d gone to the URL to log in, you’d found the username and password, you’d logged in, you’d inspected whether there were plugins or themes to be updated. You’d gone to them individually, you’d update them in a careful manner to make sure nothing got broken, and you moved on to the next website. And at some point you kind of have the intuition, how many minutes or hours have I just lost?

And whilst for one or two websites this really isn’t a problem, I guess what we’re talking about here is something at scale, when you’re over a, let’s say 2 or 3 or 5, or whatever that number is. It does start to add up, and you can’t afford to waste time in that way. And I think it’s exactly like you said, you don’t really know going into it that this is what you’re going to end up doing with your WordPress websites. But you’re right, nobody wrote down on their bucket list of things to do in life, I would like to update plugins for a living.

[00:10:23] Héctor de Prada: And it’s very important at the same time. Like we said, yeah, maybe Reyes, you can say a little bit more about it. But maintenance, it’s really important for many reasons, in particular in the WordPress ecosystem.

[00:10:34] Reyes Martínez: Yeah, I would say that it’s just that, that it’s not the most glamorous part of managing a website, like all the maintenance tasks. But I think it’s also what keep things running smoothly and professionally. I guess that’s the difference between being reactive and being proactive as well. I mean, that makes all the difference. So even though it’s not the most, I don’t know, glamorous part, it’s still very important to keep things professionally.

[00:11:03] Nathan Wrigley: What are the things that we’re updating? So we’ve covered plugins and themes, and I suspect that they’re the ones most people, and again, the audience for this podcast is really broad, so obviously that sentence will be really blindingly obvious to many people. But there may be a proportion of people who don’t even know that that kind of stuff needs to be updated. So let’s just work from the basics upwards. There’s plugins and themes. When you talk about maintenance, what else are you bringing into that?

[00:11:30] Héctor de Prada: You have the updates, both plugin, themes and the Core of WordPress, because it also gets updated. Now it’s once a year, it used to be like two, three times a year so those are also very important updates. But normally it’s mostly, because some people might ask, why should I update a plugin? If my website is working, if it’s perfectly fine, why do I have to update a plugin or a theme?

Well, one of the biggest things in maintenance, because we have to do these updates, is the security part. I am positive that WordPress is a secure solution, that is why it powers 40 something percent of the web. But at the same time, we have 60,000 different plugins just in the WordPress repository. Each one of them is created by an independent team or developers. And even when everybody tries to create the best possible plugin, a secure plugin, and everything, there is human error, of course. And there is always people, since WordPress is so popular, trying to find vulnerabilities to attack these kind of plugins or themes.

So many times, the most important updates are security updates. To avoid that, you have an older version of a plugin or a theme that maybe got exposed, and somebody found a vulnerability, and your website might get hacked because you didn’t do the updates. So even if your website is functioning perfectly, you should still do those updates. And this is something, for example, a lot of end clients, they normally don’t understand when you run an agency and stuff, because they don’t see the point of doing this. But this is one of the reasons, it’s super important.

[00:13:08] Nathan Wrigley: In the normal experience in life, you go into a shop and you buy a thing, like some new sunglasses or a pair of shoes. You don’t anticipate having to update the shoes or update the sunglasses. You kind of just bought the thing and the thing is now yours and off it goes. You know, you expect it to function as sunglasses from now on, and the shoes will keep going as shoes. You know, you might have to replace them from time to time, but that’s another thing altogether. So it’s kind of hard to encapsulate that.

But also, I suspect that most clients wouldn’t even know that there’s this sort of specter of security problems and the fact that bad things could potentially happen. Most clients I imagine have just come to you, the agency, the freelancer, because they want a website. They’re not interested particularly in all of that, but you have to explain that to them. And I always thought that was quite hard. I always got an intuition that the clients kind of thought, what are you on about? I’ve just bought this thing from you, why do I need to update it? Why do I need to keep doing these things?

[00:14:07] Héctor de Prada: Education is one of the biggest parts in having a WordPress maintenance service in your agency or as a professional. Most people, end clients, many people is not tech people so they won’t understand. Updates, backups, these are all very not tangible things. So it’s not hard to explain, but it is more, it’s not like you go to a store, okay? You buy something, it normally doesn’t need maintenance. But I would say it’s like, you buy a house, you buy a car, it needs maintenance, okay? Because you can keep running with a car, but even if the car still works, maybe the brakes, at some point they will stop working and you will have a crash and nobody wants that. So I would say a website is more like a car than a normal product.

[00:14:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s a really nice example because with a car particularly, there are bad people who are literally trying to break into the car and take the car away, or do damage to the car, or steal bits from the car. That explains it really well.

Okay, let’s imagine that you’ve had that conversation, you’ve done that education piece, you’ve said to the clients, look, we need some kind of thing going on in the background. There has to be some kind of ongoing relationship between me, the website builder, the developer, and you, the client. But what are those tasks? What are the things, I guess your software will handle these kind of things, but just talking about them hypothetically, what are the list of things just beyond plugin, theme, Core updates? Are there any other things which you recommend?

[00:15:32] Reyes Martínez: Besides updates there are also, for example, like I think it’s very important making regular backups. Monitoring up time and performance. Checking for security issues, you were just talking about that as well. Vulnerabilities, cleaning up the database, and in general, like making sure the site is running smoothly, like contact forms and links are working.

Because there are things that even people think they might have not, I don’t know, like they are not very important. They can have an impact on their business as well. For example, like a broken contact form, that’s just like a very small example, but yeah, those things come to mind. I don’t know, Héctor, if you want to add anything else.

[00:16:15] Héctor de Prada: I think those are the main ones, like your backups and the restoration of the backups when you have a problem. It happened to me I have to say. When we had the agency, I remember more than a few times having a client calling me and telling me, hey Héctor, the website is not working. And I was like, I didn’t know. So it’s like a very, very embarrassing moment because you’re supposed to be taking care of the website, but you didn’t know it wasn’t working until the client told you.

So things like monitoring. When I started making websites, I couldn’t monitor them at all. If they break, I wouldn’t find out because somebody told me or I was just trying to do something and I found out. So monitoring as well. Security Monitoring, like you said, for vulnerabilities, for malware. There are a bunch of tools. I mean, it’s not only tools, maintenance tools, like it can be Modular or others.

There are a bunch of tools in WordPress, like for everything in WordPress, that can help you with this maintenance task. Because the ideal thing, like we were saying, is to automate them so they don’t take so much time. Even if you only have one website, the ideal thing is that backups, monitoring, you have most of it automated, so you make sure even if you forget, if you go on holiday or whatever, it will still be running.

[00:17:30] Reyes Martínez: Yeah, and you can get alerts, for example. Like Héctor was saying, if a website goes down, you can get alerts so you don’t have to be monitoring all the time. Imagine like manual monitoring or going site by site, just checking if everything is working correctly. And monitoring, it’s exactly a big task as well of maintenance and because it can help you catch problems early.

[00:17:55] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, let’s just break all that now and then. So we’re imagining a scenario where we’ve built a website, we’ve handed it over to a client, and then we’re sort of presenting with the client the scenario, look, although we’ve given you the thing, here’s the website, there it is, it’s on the internet, there’s a whole load of other things that we need to do in the background.

And there’s an education piece there, but there’s also a bit of sales that has to go on there because you have to persuade them, presumably that the thing that I’m suggesting here, you are going to need to pay for probably, there’ll be a, some kind of subscription model going on there. We will do all of these things in return for a monthly fee or whatever it might be.

But broadly it is updating things. So that’s plugins, themes and Core. Making sure that those things are available. Then there’s the backup piece, a different thing altogether, and that’s just basically storing in multiple locations, an entire version of the website, the database, and the files to make sure that if an absolute catastrophe occurs, you can go back to whenever the website was last saved successfully, minus any security problems that you might have.

And then another thing is uptime monitoring, which is the process of just alerting you, and I presume it’s you, not the client, that something’s gone wrong. The website that was there 10 minutes ago is not here now. And that’s a really, really, you know, that’s not a once a day thing, that’s once every two minutes kind of thing. You want to know the minute the website goes down, so that you can be the person that contacts the client to say, look, we see that the website’s gone down. And in some curious sense, you actually paint yourself in a good light by admitting something before they’ve even learned about it.

But also something that you said that I never really think about is the idea of bits of the website, which may appear to work, but which don’t work. So the contact form is a big one. You know that whole egg on your face moment where you realise that possibly for six months, the contact form hasn’t worked, has never worked, and you have no way of saying to your client, look, sorry, we’ll be able to reverse that, we’ll be able to get all of the contact forms that would have been submitted over the last six months, because you won’t. It’s gone. And if it wasn’t working, that’s a catastrophe.

But then my mind then goes to things like e-commerce. The site might look fine. Everything might check out okay, when I say checkout, I don’t mean checkout through the cart, I mean, looks fine. But the checkout might not work. Maybe people can’t actually buy things off your website, so it’s up but it’s not working.

So there’s all this stuff. And I guess what Modular DS is doing, and the rivals that you’ve got in that space, is they’re trying to take all of those tasks, package them up into a wrapper piece of software, and basically you don’t really have to worry too much about it. You just sort of set it all up, make sure that all the dominoes are set up in the right place. And then it will do all of those things for you without you having to do too much. Have I got that about right?

[00:20:54] Héctor de Prada: Yeah, of course. That’s the idea, to try to centralise everything when you have a lot of websites. And at the same time, like we were saying, yeah, automate these kinds of tasks so they don’t slip away. And it’s a great point about the WooCommerce because one thing about maintenance is that it’s very dependent on the type of website you have. I mean, it’s not the same maintenance you have to do for maybe a small corporate website, like the Meetup group website, for example, than a big e-commerce that is selling hundreds of products every day. You won’t need to have the same systems in place, not for backups, not for monitoring, not for any kind of checks. So that’s also very important to know. Maintenance is very different depending on the website.

[00:21:38] Nathan Wrigley: So in the case of this whole idea of being able to do this for your client, I’m guessing your position would be that this is something that you can in fact sell to your clients on a regular basis. It’s not like you built the site back in 2024 and you’ve charged a fee for it, and then that’s the end of that. This is more of a, you charged a fee to build the website, and now we have this kind of, I think the term which I hear used a lot is like Care Plan or something like that.

Some kind of process of, on a monthly basis, annual basis, whatever it might be, you offer these different things in return for a subscription fee, and therefore kind of have recurring revenue. And in many cases that recurring revenue might not need a lot of work. You know, fingers crossed, if everything works out okay, and WordPress updates itself correctly, and the plugins all work out and there are no security vulnerabilities, you might have days, weeks, entire months go by where your revenue is really not that difficult to manage.

[00:22:39] Héctor de Prada: In what you said there, it’s like all the main things. Not only you can offer Care Plans or Web Maintenance Plans, but you should as a professional. Because I’ve heard you talk on another podcast, Nathan, you were saying that when you’re a freelancer or an agency, you are always waiting for next projects to see when they come. What’s going to be next? And if you’re going to have enough work to keep going.

And that’s why recurring revenue, it’s so important for us as professionals. And in web design or web development, it’s not so easy to get besides web maintenance. It might be if you want to go to plugin development or theme development or do something like that, you can start getting recurring revenue.

But if it’s just building websites, I think the only way to get that recurring revenue is by offering Care Plans. That’s why I always say, the critical thing that you were also mentioning before, is that it’s of course also a sales job to sell this to a client, but I don’t think it has to be once the website is generated, and you try to tell the client, okay, we did the website, it’s looking good, it’s working. And now we are going to do maintenance on the website, and you have to pay this or that.

I think it has to go way before that. When we were an agency, what worked really good for us, so I always give this advice because it really worked for us, is that we used to talk about maintenance with the clients before we started the website project. If somebody would come to us saying, okay, we want a new website design for our company, we’d include it always in our proposal. It’ll be, okay, we are going to design the website, we are going to do the development of the website, and then after that we are going to care for the website.

So we are going to do a maintenance on the website because this is very important. We are not going to just leave you there with your website, out in the open. Like, you don’t really know how it works, but we are going to be there with you. And this was like a massive change for us because when we were selling it this way, once the website was completed and we would tell the client, okay, now is the time to start the web maintenance job, and they were like, oh great, so this what we were talking about. It is not even a discussion anymore. It is like, oh great, it’s finally the time. So that’s like crucial. It was crucial for us.

[00:25:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think when people do get recurring revenue into their business, especially around maintenance, it does feel like, why didn’t I do this before? Because it really is kind of, I hate to use the phrase, you are kind of leaving money on the table a little bit.

I wonder what both of you have in your head around the way to pitch that product. Because I went through lots of different ways of doing it. Some of them I’m not that proud of. So for example, in some cases I would emphasise the problems that could happen. You know, your website could go down. The internet can be a bit of a dark place, there’s hackers out there. And in the end it felt a bit like, I’m trying to scare you into giving me this maintenance deal. But then on the other hand, there was the sort of more positive way of doing it. You know, we’ll make sure that your website is always up and just different ways.

I wonder how you, both of you, tackle that. Do you have a particular kind of language? Do you have like a brochure or a booklet that you pass on to somebody which outlines it all?

[00:25:59] Héctor de Prada: For us, at least when we were an agency, you are seeing that I like to talk a lot. So for me it was like I could talk a lot with the clients. I would just try to be very educational, like we said from the beginning, in calls or in meetings I could talk about maintenance, the task it requires. Trying to explain it for everybody, of course, like not trying to make it sound technical or anything. Just trying to make them understand that technology evolves, WordPress evolves, the needs that the website, or the business, might have change so we should keep the website evolving with the business so it always stays in good shape.

Luckily, even when this is a terrible thing for our field, is that many, many clients, they come to you when they have had a bad experience before, having a website design. And this experience, so many times has more to do about not having maintenance than about the web design itself. Because they might come after three, four years and they might tell you, somebody did this website for me four years ago and now nothing works.

And it’s like, okay, when they did the website, everything worked. What happened? Nobody looked at the website for four years, so now nothing is working, which is understandable. So that also helps you a lot to make them understand that you don’t want that to happen again.

[00:27:22] Reyes Martínez: I think it’s also important to maybe reframe things or just showing clients that that’s part of, I mean that you care about their success over time. So it’s not just about launching their site. I don’t know, sometimes I like to think about maintenance as insurance. You hope you don’t need it, but if something goes wrong, you’ll be glad to have it. So I think it’s the same. Like, if you have someone who’s taking care of your website to make sure it’s healthy, that it is performant and that everything is running smoothly. I think you are investing in its long-term success as well.

[00:27:57] Nathan Wrigley: Framing it as an investment is quite a good way around it, isn’t it? As opposed to a, it’s not like a cost, it’s an investment. You’re putting something in so that it maintains. Spending money kind of feels like, oh, I’ve spent it, it’s all gone. Whereas an investment, you feel a bit more like, okay, I’ve spent some money, but as a result, things are going to be better in the future.

[00:28:15] Héctor de Prada: You both said it, Reyes, you said right now that it is kind of an insurance also, if something bad happens. Because when something really bad, like the website crashes or gets hacked or whatever, because it can always happen, at some point everybody will be glad to have a professional taking care of things.

Because another way to frame this, and you were saying that before Nathan, is that I’ve seen many, many professionals that they are like, okay, so the client doesn’t want to pay for maintenance, so I’m just going to wait until they have a huge problem that will come sooner or later. When they come without the maintenance deal, I’m going to charge them a bunch and then they will be glad they get the maintenance package. And they will start paying for that. I’m not saying I recommend that, I haven’t done that, but I’ve seen so many people do that at the same time.

[00:29:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think describing his insurance is quite interesting. The curious thing about insurance is, how to describe it, at some point you might begin to resent paying the insurance if you never have an accident or nothing is ever stolen. So one of the things that I often got with the Care Plans was this whole thing of years would go by, I would do my job well, so nothing ever happened.

And so after 24 months of nothing ever happening, the client would turn around and say, what am I actually spending the money on? And then it occurred to me, okay, maybe there should have been some process of telling you what I was doing each month. Some kind of report or something to give to the client to say, look, literally things are happening. It’s not like we’ve gone away with your monthly subscription and done nothing.

So I wondered if you had any thoughts around those, you know those clients who think nothing’s happening, why am I spending this each month in order for apparently nothing to happen? It’s just a black hole.

[00:30:02] Reyes Martínez: That’s actually one of the hardest parts as well, like showing all the work that professionals are, like us are doing in the background. That work, that it’s not so visible as well, and how to communicate the value of all that work.

So I think there are, I don’t know, there are many different ways to communicate that value, but for example, like reports are pretty common. Showing, not just task, but all you have been monitoring and performance data, updates. And just, again, like educating on how all the work done have an impact on their business.

Because I think it’s also easy to go maybe, or to get into technical details, but I think clients don’t really care if you update a plugin or if you, you know, how you are maintaining their site. I think they care that their website is secure, fast and it’s working. It’s always working.

[00:30:58] Nathan Wrigley: One of the things that I ended up doing, which I think worked well was, I eventually landed on the idea of this report thing. So I would issue a report and it would say, during the course of the last month, these things have happened. And it would be a list of all the plugins that been updated, maybe WordPress Core had been updated, maybe I’d done some work on the server to update that, a PHP version or something like that. So all of those kind of things. And then some kind of indication of how the uptime went. You know, it was 99.9% last month, we had a little glitch on Tuesday or whatever, but that was taken care of within five minutes.

But the thing which worked best for me was I offered a proportion of time, based upon the plan that they gave me, of my actual time. And that could be deployed in any which way they wanted.So, for example, it could have been, I will just tell you what that report means or let’s just knock our heads together for half an hour or an hour, and figure out if there’s anything you wanted doing on the website. Maybe you want a telephone number updating or you want to have a different design on the homepage because Christmas is coming or whatever it might be.

And interestingly, most clients never took me up on it, but the mere fact that it was offered, and I’d offered the time, there was just something a bit more to it. There was something more tangible and more credible about it. And then when the clients did take me up on it, and I could explain what had happened and that it wasn’t this black hole where the money was just falling into for the maintenance plan and nothing happened, that really worked.

But I had the time available. And it may be that some people, most people don’t have that time available. For me, that was a good thing, you know, that kind of personal touch was a way to make it work.

[00:32:33] Héctor de Prada: Also another thing that is very important to solve, for example, in client reports, and it’s not so obvious, it’s because it is not a job you are doing. It’s some stats about how the website is working for their business. Because 99% of the time a website comes from a business that needs an online presence.

So it should be very important for them to know how this is performing or how this is helping the business. And I found this hundreds of times, that people have a website and they don’t know if somebody’s visiting the website, if you can find it on Google. They don’t know anything about the website. They are just like, yeah, I have a website there, but I don’t really know what’s happening with it.

So I think adding things like, I don’t know, like Google Analytics or any other analytics. Or search console results so you know, it’s somebody coming from Google or where is people coming. Or if you have an international website, from which countries is people coming. Things like that, I think it’s like very valuable for the end client, for the business, to know how the website is performing. And it’s not always added, but I think it’s crucial to also put that information.

[00:33:41] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know if anybody actually makes a business out of what you do? So, do people have a business of maintaining websites? Just doing that work. So they’ve decided they don’t want to be involved in creating the website, but they want to turn this product, if you like, that we’re talking about now. Is that a thing? Do people do that for a living? They maintain other people’s websites for them. Maybe you could bind yourself to an agency and they would hand the maintenance side to you. You are both nodding, so I’m guessing the answer’s yes.

[00:34:11] Héctor de Prada: We know many people, but we are kind of biased because most of our clients are agencies or freelancers that manage a lot of websites. So many of them are actually specialised in this kind of service. So we have freelancers that manage like 120 websites, and that’s all they do. They don’t do any websites, they just manage websites.

And then we have agencies that they are like fully specialised in web maintenance, web caring, and maybe if you have an urgency in your site because it’s broken or something, they can help you with that also. But they don’t design websites or create new websites.

So I think, yes. And one example I always say is that, at least in Spain, if you search in Google for WordPress maintenance, there are so many page results. So that means it’s a profitable business, okay? There is a lot of competence of people trying to get leads out of those keywords. I would imagine in most countries it could be the same. So yeah, definitely. I think it’s possible. I see it every day, so yeah, a hundred percent

[00:35:10] Nathan Wrigley: That’s kind of interesting because it may be that you are, I don’t know, you just want to take a break from actually building websites, and this might be an interesting way to pivot, especially if you’ve got your foot in the door with a bunch of agencies, and you know people that could supply you that work and they don’t wish to be involved in that. That’s curious.

[00:35:27] Héctor de Prada: You can automate much more stuff than in a web design process, or web development. In maintenance, like we were saying, with tools like Modular or other tools, you can automate most of the maintenance tasks. So many times, yeah, like one person can manage like 120 websites. Imagine how long it would take to build 120 websites. It’s almost impossible. You could say, oh, I don’t know, like five years, seven years. But you can maintain every week or every month, 120 websites by yourselves, just with the tools that are available. So that’s a really big difference.

[00:36:04] Nathan Wrigley: Does this maintenance landscape change? Because I’m just curious, the web industry changes all the time, but broadly, you know, plugins and theme updates, that’s been around since WordPress got plugins and themes. Hosting and backups, again, similar.

But there have been developments in the more recent past where I’m thinking, okay, you could definitely push that into the maintenance idea. So things that come to mind are, I don’t know, optimisation, Core Web Vital scores, maybe something like that could leak in.

And the one at the minute, which I think would be really interesting, and again, maybe it’s a thing already, is accessibility. Some kind of report about, okay, it looks like these pages need a particular bit of attention, or something’s gone wrong here from an accessibility point of view. And so really my question there is, does the landscape of maintenance change, or is it broadly fixed with whatever it is now is how it’ll be in a decade?

[00:36:57] Héctor de Prada: Now also with AI, I don’t even know what’s going to happen in a decade. But I do think things change. For example, with accessibility, like you said, now in Europe it’s going to be big changes. With security as well, with the new Cyber Resilience Act, it’s going to be changes.

And for example, we saw it a few years ago with the data privacy law in Europe. I’ve seen so many agencies offering legal checks for the cookie banners and things like that. To also add in maintenance, I don’t know, like seven years ago, that wasn’t a theme because it wasn’t mandatory, so nobody really cared that much. And it is the same with accessibility.

A few years ago, nobody, almost nobody cared about that. And I think now because of the law changes, this is going to change drastically and almost every professional is going to start doing things related to accessibility, and is going to care about that. And it’s also going to be able to offer that to their clients as an upsell, or as an extra value, they’re going to give in their care plans.

So yeah, I do think it changes. We don’t have a lot of changes because the basics are always the same, the updates, the backups, the monitoring. But there are things that, yeah, might bring big changes every once in a while and we have to adapt.

[00:38:12] Reyes Martínez: I just wanted to add that also with AI and no-code tools, I mean, it’s easier than ever to launch a website. But what happens after that? Because maybe we find that more and more sites are being left behind with no updates, no backups.

What I mean with this is that maybe, maybe not, there’s already a growing maybe opportunity, because there are more and more sites that we don’t know what would happen with them. And they will need maintenance for sure. So I think we are seeing a growing opportunity as well, there for people who want to manage or dedicate themselves to maintain websites, yeah.

[00:38:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it does feel like in the year 2025 when we’re recording this, there are some key bits of legislation which are coming. You know, the European Accessibility Act very, very soon going to be completely mandatory across the whole of the EU. I mean, basically it should be something that you’ve taken care of already, but nevertheless.

And so these kind of things I imagine, will become part of the platform, the ethos of doing maintenance in the future. So that’s kind of interesting.

Just for the last moment or two, minute or two, let’s talk a little bit about what you have. So Modular DS, I’ll put a link into the show notes, but is the URL, is it modulards.com? Is that where we would go?

[00:39:30] Héctor de Prada: Yeah, we could say dash EN for the English version.

[00:39:33] Nathan Wrigley: Lovely, okay, so I will link to that into the show notes. I’ll link to the English version in this case, just because I think that makes most sense given that we’re all talking in English.

This is what you do. This is that in a nutshell. You have a service that you can sign up to. Is it plugin based? Is it a SaaS? Is it a mixture of SaaS and a plugin? How does it work and what kind of things can you do?

[00:39:56] Héctor de Prada: It’s kind of a mixture. It’s a SaaS outside of WordPress, we are going to say, but it needs a connector plugin to connect your websites to Modular DS. So basically what you do is you connect your different websites, the ones you manage, to Modular, and then from there you can like centralise most of the maintenance tasks, do updates, for example, in all the sites at the same time.

And also you can automate monitoring, vulnerability analysis. You can automate client reports like the generation of this client reports. So it basically tries to help, yeah, agencies, freelancer to save time, to have a good maintenance business. And also, like we have been saying, to sell the maintenance business to their clients, which we all know is not easy. So that’s what we try to do.

[00:40:42] Nathan Wrigley: So if I were somebody looking after my site and a bunch of others, you cater to that market, but also you are catering towards the more agency owner, if you know what I mean, where they’ve got multiple websites.

Is it possible to, white label is often the word I hear surrounding this. Is it possible to sort of make it so that it appears your own? That seems to be something that people really like, but I don’t know if you offer that feature.

[00:41:04] Héctor de Prada: You can white label everything that goes to the client. Let’s say, client reports. Of course, you can white label that, like your agency logo, your agency email to send the reports. Also, you can white label the plugin. So in the WordPress installation, you can change the plugin info so the client doesn’t know you’re using Modular, if you don’t want them to know. So yeah, of course, that’s important for many professionals, yeah.

[00:41:27] Nathan Wrigley: You could definitely be checking that out. And obviously this entire episode really was to provide an education piece around what it is that you might need to do, especially for those people who are new. You may not realise that there’s an actual business opportunity here for you, but also that there’s a whole cavalcade of different things that you can do.

So just to reprise, plugin, theme, updates, plus up time monitoring, backups, client reports. There’s a whole laundry list of things in there.

Yeah, I think that’s everything I wanted to ask. So if that’s the case, I will say, Reyes and Héctor, thank you very much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:42:04] Héctor de Prada: Well, thank you, Nathan.

[00:42:05] Reyes Martínez: Thank you.

On the podcast today we have Reyes Martínez and Héctor De Prada.

Reyes has been involved in the WordPress community since 2015, with a background in journalism, digital communications, and early-stage startups. From 2021 to 2024, she was sponsored by Automattic to contribute full-time to global marketing and communication efforts for the WordPress open-source project. She led several initiatives during that time, including the experimental WordPress Media Corps. Reyes currently serves as Content Lead at Modular DS.

Héctor has been building websites since he was 12 and has worked with WordPress for nearly a decade, first as a freelancer, then running his own agency. Today, he’s one of the co-founders of Modular DS. He co-organizes the WordPress meetup in León in Spain, and writes a Spanish newsletter that keeps readers updated with the latest news from the WordPress ecosystem.

In this episode, we get into the nitty-gritty of WordPress maintenance. What it takes to effectively manage multiple websites, and why maintenance is such a crucial, if often overlooked, part of running a successful client business.

You might think that updating plugins and themes is all there is to it, but Reyes and Héctor explain that there’s much more involved: performing regular backups, monitoring uptime and performance, checking for security vulnerabilities, database clean-ups, and ensuring essential site features like contact forms continue working as expected.

We discuss best practices for educating clients, how to position ongoing maintenance as an investment rather than a cost, and solutions which can help automate and streamline these essential tasks.

We also chat about how the maintenance landscape is changing, with upcoming legal requirements around accessibility and privacy, and the emerging business opportunities for professionals specializing solely in website care.

If you’re a freelancer or agency owner looking to scale up your business, perhaps you offer care plans to clients, or are considering adding maintenance plans to your services, this episode’s for you.

Useful links

Modular DS

Meetup in  León, Spain

Cyber Resilience Act