White label WordPress maintenance: who looks after the site after launch?
White label WordPress maintenance means another team keeps your clients' WordPress sites updated, backed up and watched, under your agency's name. Your client sees you. You don't do the updates.
Picture the site you launched a few months ago. The last invoice is paid. Then the email comes in, and something broke. The build is the fun part. The upkeep is the part nobody plans for.
A WordPress site isn't done the day it goes live. The software under it keeps changing, and somebody has to keep up. If that somebody is you, it comes out of your nights and your weekends.
There's another way to do it. You sell the care plan, a team does the work behind you, and your name stays on it.
Here's what that covers, how the money works, and what to have ready before you hand a site over.
What is white label WordPress?
White label means somebody else does the work and your brand goes on it. Your client never sees the other company's name.
So white label WordPress is WordPress work done by a team behind you, and your client knows it as yours. It can be a new site. It can be fixes and changes. And it can be the monthly care that keeps a site healthy, which is what this post is about.
You'll see that care called a few things: white label WordPress support, a white label WordPress care plan, WordPress white label maintenance. They all mean the same thing. You keep the client, and a team behind you keeps the site.
It's like the kitchen in a restaurant. The guest knows the name on the door and the person who took the order. They never meet the cooks, and they don't need to.
Here's how it works with us at DeskTeam360. The team works under your agency's brand. Our name doesn't show up on the work, in the emails, or in the project system. We work inside your project management system, or we use ours.
White label is on all of our plans, so you don't have to be on the biggest one to get it. The whole picture of how an agency uses us is on our page about white label services for agencies
What agencies resell (care plans)
A care plan is a monthly service you sell to a client after the site is live. They pay you every month. You keep the site updated, backed up and working.
Care plans tend to be built from the same few parts.
- Updates to WordPress, the theme and the plugins Backups, so the site can be put back if something goes wrong Security and speed checks Someone watching that the site is up Small fixes and content changes
Some agencies add a monthly report, so the client can see the work got done.
Why sell it? Your client doesn't want to think about any of this, and they already trust you. Ryan Burch found that out.
Ryan founded The Tobie Group, a marketing agency in Arizona. He started with paid ads. Then his clients needed landing pages, custom builds and tech work, and he became the bottleneck.
Our team took on that work, from landing pages to advanced development. Then Ryan saw one more gap, and he put it this way: “Our clients trust us. We realized we were doing them a disservice by not maintaining their websites.”
After that, The Tobie Group started selling website maintenance to its own clients, with reports and updates. You can read how The Tobie Group went from ad agency to full-service provider in the case study.
Smash Wave Marketing is another one. They're a digital marketing agency in Jupiter, Florida. When they told their story, our team was building their clients' websites in WordPress and Elementor, then running monthly and quarterly maintenance on them.
What the team handles each month
Here's what website maintenance covers with us.
- Monthly WordPress core, plugin and theme updates Security monitoring and malware scanning Speed optimization Daily or weekly automated backups Uptime monitoring
Let me put each one in plain words, because your client is going to ask what they're paying for.
Updates come first. WordPress, the theme and the plugins all put out new versions. Some add features and some fix security problems. An update can also clash with something else on the site, so it's worth a look at the site after, to make sure nothing broke.
Backups are the safety net. A backup is a saved copy of the site. If an update goes sideways, you put the copy back.
WordPress's own documentation says it's a good idea to back up your site before you update it
If a client wants the long version, WordPress has a page on how WordPress backups work
Security monitoring and malware scanning mean somebody is looking for code that shouldn't be on the site. Speed optimization keeps the pages loading fast as images, plugins and pages pile up. Uptime monitoring means the site is being watched, so when it goes down, somebody knows.
And the work doesn't stop at upkeep. Bug fixes, content updates, image swaps and copy changes are on the list too.
So when your client emails you to swap a photo or fix a broken page, that goes to the same team. Web work with us runs from a quick homepage update to a full website rebuild.
Who does all this? The same people every month. Every plan includes a North American account manager, a team leader, 2 developers, 2 technical Virtual Assistants and 2 designers. Your account manager assigns each task to the right specialist, manages the timeline, and checks the work before you see it.
A few things sit outside our work, so you know before you promise them to a client. We don't do link building or outreach. And we're not a replacement for a marketing strategist.
The full list of what's covered is on our website care and tech support page.
Pricing models
There are two prices here: what your client pays you, and what you pay for the work.
What your client pays you is your call. Agencies price care a few different ways.
- A flat monthly fee for each site Levels of plan, where the higher level includes more changes A block of hours each month Care rolled into a bigger monthly retainer
I'm not going to tell you what to charge. I don't have a number I can back up, and your market isn't mine.
What I can give you is our side, because it's on our website. Website maintenance is included in the plan. There are three plans.
- Entrepreneur: $1,497 a month, 1 task at a time Marketer: $2,994 a month, 2 tasks at a time Agency: $4,491 a month, 3 tasks at a time
Every plan covers all the work we do. The only difference is how many tasks run at once. It's a flat monthly rate with unlimited tasks, so the bill doesn't change when a client sends you a pile of extra requests.
There are no contracts. It's month to month, and you can cancel any time. The Marketer and Agency plans are the step up for agencies with 5 to 25 people.
How to hand over client sites
The lie we tell ourselves is that it's faster to just do it ourselves. It's like, sure, one plugin update takes a few minutes.
Then one site breaks, and next thing you know your whole evening is gone.
Handing a client's site to somebody else is a trust thing, though. It helps to know who's on the other end.
Insourcing is our word for how the team is set up. Everyone comes into an actual office to work. It has new computers, three different internet providers and two backup power sources, so an outage doesn't stop your work.
You work with the same people every month, and they learn how you like things done.
The handoff takes a little work up front. Here's what I'd have ready before giving a client site to any team, ours or anybody else's.
- A list of the sites and which client each one belongs to What each client's care plan promises Anything custom on the site that an update could break Where the last good backup is Who talks to the client (with white label, that's you)
From there, here's how sending work to us goes. You drop the task into our request form or send an email. Write it out, record a Loom video, or attach a doc. Your North American account manager reads it, assigns it to the right specialist, and checks the work before it reaches you. Most tasks ship in 1 to 3 business days.
You look it over and ask for changes if it needs them. Revisions are unlimited on every plan. Then the next task starts. You don't deal with the team directly unless you want to. Bigger projects get broken into tasks and done in order.
Not sure yet that you want to hand this off? We have a longer guide on whether to outsource WordPress maintenance
Questions agencies ask about white label WordPress maintenance
Is white label only on the biggest plan?
No, white label is on all plans.
Is website maintenance part of the plan?
Yes, website maintenance is included in the plan. The plans are $1,497, $2,994 and $4,491 a month.
Which plan do I need?
Every plan covers the same work. The only difference is how many tasks run at once. That's 1 on Entrepreneur, 2 on Marketer and 3 on Agency.
Do you only work on WordPress sites?
No, the team builds and fixes sites in tools such as WordPress, Webflow, WooCommerce and React. The monthly update list in this post is written for WordPress.
What if a client wants more than upkeep?
Send it in. Bug fixes, content updates and new pages go to the same team. Bigger projects get broken into tasks and done in order.
Your name on it, without your nights in it
Your clients don't want to think about plugin updates. They want to know somebody they trust is on it. That somebody can still be you, without the updates landing on your evenings.
