How to Sell Maintenance Services on WordPress

Hi Indie Hackers! I noticed that while there are a lot of articles on the web about the business strategy of running WordPress maintenance services, there's nothing about how to implement subscription billing. So I took a stab at writing a blog to complete the puzzle. I would love to hear any feedback you all may have in the comments below :)

One of the easiest ways to earn a consistent revenue as a designer or developer is by providing maintenance services that cover the mundane tasks that business owners don't want to deal with. In this article, we'll cover step-by-step how to set up your entire maintenance subscription billing flow - from your pricing page to the checkout to the customer portal.

A Functional Pricing Page with Checkout Form

When it comes to customer acquisition, one of the most overlooked paths to growth is updating pricing every so often. So first thing's first, you want a functional pricing page that displays your most up-to-date pricing model on your website so that users can pick and purchase a plan directly from your website. Like this one!

Before Creating a Pricing

1. Create a Stripe account & add all of your products and plans. If you have multiple tiers, create a 'Product' for every tier you may have., and add the sb_service and sb_tier metadata tags for each. Learn how
2. Sign up for Billflow & connect to Stripe
3. Install and activate the Billflow WordPress Plugin. Learn how

Create & Configure Your Pricing Page

1. In Billflow, create a new 'Pricing Page'
2. Select the service from Stripe that includes all of your tiers. Once you do, you'll be taken to the billing page details where you can configure the page to look exactly how you'd like it to on your website
3. In 'checkout' section of this page, add the redirect URL you would like newly registered users to be taken to upon purchasing a plan. You can always come back to this after creating the page.
4. Save the page & copy the WordPress shortcode in the 'Embed' section at the bottom of the page
5. In WordPress, add a shortcode block on the designated pricing page and paste the shortcode into it

Visual learner? Watch this to learn how to set up your products & pricing.

Customer Billing

The last thing we need to do is embed a customer portal where our clients can go to update their plan. This will keep the customers in control while reducing overhead operations for you.

Create & Configure Your Customer Portal

1. In Billflow, create a new 'Customer Portal'
2. If you offer multiple different plans that you'd like your users to be able to navigate between: select the Stripe service they'd choose from (this must match the service they're currently on)
3. Configure the embed to your liking & add CSS to match your brand if needed
4. Save the page & copy the WordPress shortcode in the 'Embed' section at the bottom of the page
5. In WordPress, add a shortcode block on the designated billing page and paste the shortcode in it
6. Trying to only make this page visible to logged in users? Add loggin_in_only="true" in the code snippet. Learn how

Conclusion

With the right tools in place, you can run a smooth business without overcomplicating your tech stack and overhead operations. Looking for additional resources on the business and pricing strategy? Check out this article.

Test it out for yourself for free and let us know what you think!

👉 View a live demo of the plugin 👈
🎥 Watch the tutorials 🎥

So what did you think? Let me know in the comments below :)

Full article with all illustrations can be found here 👈