What Enterprises Must Know About WordPress Retainers

As a business owner, you are probably occupied with managing your team, daily tasks, and making sure that your company’s goals are met. Each aspect of your business requires your attention, and this is why it’s extremely difficult to be effective everywhere, especially when it comes to supporting the web presence of your company.

Entering WordPress Retainers – the ideal choice if you run a website that needs constant technical expertise development and maintenance. A WordPress Development Retainer Plan is a long-term development, support, innovation, and investment in your WordPress website, and in your company altogether.

The Need for WordPress Retainers

Let’s start by looking at fixed-price projects and how they work. Your WordPress website is built, and now what? Do you have a plan and a roadmap to scale it? Is every stage of your work strictly defined or are you working with assumptions?

Here’s the thing. Initially, most of the fixed-fee project growth is completely based on presumptions. The discussions and communication with the devs for a fixed-price project can only take you to the final stage of the project, and that’s it. You’re on your own after that. Your WordPress site might be perfect as it is currently, but with continual changes, core updates, and business goals alterations, there are always unplanned obstructions along the way.

The main goal of the DevriX team is to optimize and enhance your entire business process through different approaches, during the development process, and after the product is launched. We’re not just building web projects – we are making custom-tailored solutions for business demands that are part of growing and evolving companies.

Who Are WordPress Retainers Designed For?

In a nutshell, WordPress retainers are designed for the ongoing needs of companies that need stable expansion and growth. The retainer service is for companies that want to evolve, to innovate, and for those that know the value of using the modularity of WordPress towards constantly improving their digital presence.

A WordPress retainer project will only work if a client is interested in having a technical partner that provides expert advice, and to work together with the agency to push the project forward.

Retainers work brilliantly for big projects because they often require ongoing work, monitoring, and improvements even after the first version of the project is launched. For example, products such as SaaS solutions, Multisite systems, larger publishers that are in a constant need of development work, as well as theme and plugins and developers.

WordPress Retainers are not suited for companies that are looking for a one-time project, which in most cases, are small corporate websites.

DevriX Retainers: How They Work

DevriX provides WordPress Retainers and technical support for Enterprises and fast-paced companies. So far, we’ve developed WordPress solutions and scaled platforms that generate up to 900,000,000 page views per month. That includes a lot of maintenance and Core updates, but hey, building a reliable and scalable WordPress solution is not a one-off project.

Our WordPress Retainers let you hire our team and allocate monthly resources towards activities related to WordPress consultancy and troubleshooting, plugin development, scalability, performance optimization, security, marketing and more. In a nutshell, you’ll get a full-stack team that will solve your problems and grow your business.

Each of our web projects is different, so managing our client’s expectations, as well as meeting our deadlines in the process requires serious project management and planning as one of the major components to our success.

With the Retainers project presented, and with a defined contract, we’re ready to kick-start the process and define the plan:

• Deliverables: In our project planning, we include every step from start to finish, and each step is broken down into separate tasks.
• Roles: When we define separate tasks, we determine who will be responsible for each task. We also include tasks for the client, such as reviewing a milestone or a mockup approval.
• Deadlines: Each of our project plans includes milestones, due dates, priorities, and deadlines for each of the deliverables.

The Discovery Session

We will start with a meeting, where you will most likely speak to a lead designer, development lead and a marketing expert. Together we will pinpoint your primary business goals and develop a strategy that we will follow. Then, we will brainstorm together the best symbiosis between the latest technology that is right for your project and the best UX practices. Thus, we’ll develop the best possible solution for you and your clients.

The Design

The design is built iteratively. We will work closely with you until you are fully satisfied with the end product. After we define the corporate branding requirements, our designers will come up with several mockups with various color scheme variations that you can choose from.

We are especially proud of our UX enhancements. Our design process is focused on features that are the perfect equation between visual presentation and functionality.

Functionality

Providing an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is one of the most important milestones we’ll go through together. You will test your MVP right after our Quality Assurance engineers make sure we’ve built the desired crucial features of the project. We will present you with an initial version of the product for you to use and test. This will allow you to identify what part of the process can be optimized. By doing so we drastically improve time management and the project scope right from the start.

Reviews and Iterations

A WordPress Retainer plan means that the budget of the project is not written in stone. The client decides what is worth reiterating over or building further and which features are ready to use. We will update you on the progress weekly so that you can monitor everything closely and communicate with us immediately should you need something altered.

Server Setup and Scalability

The configuration is extendable, we can start with a lower-cost package and grow it as the traffic and user base scales. The performance of your website is crucial, and our work is an ongoing process of constant optimizations and refining as your database grows. With a Retainer plan, we can monitor your website performance daily and take action at any given moment.

Ongoing Maintenance and Feature Development

Building a great website is just the start. Our team of experts will become your support every step of the way to a profitable and accomplished business presence strategy. We will conduct marketing research, track your overall performance and suggest improvements that maximize your conversion rate.

During each of our Retainer projects, we have daily and weekly internal status meetings, where we check our progress and define the next steps of our projects. Of course, we touch base with our clients on a regular basis and keep them posted about their WordPress product.

Our clients can suggest new features, and if the suggestions are practical and feasible, they’ll be added to the project plan. Of course, this requires an additional set of testing and configurations, as well as adding new functionalities that will increase the budget of the WordPress product.

Bottom line, we have a development workflow that works, and management tools and techniques that help us to get the job done! Even more important is our preparation, the relationships with our clients, communication, and of course, the focus that helps us complete the complex systems that we are working on.

Enterprise Websites on WordPress: Six Tips for Successful Growth

An Example

We’ve been working with one of our clients since 2015 where the initial request we received was for a media website that operates in 6 locales with 30 editors. The client had a budget of $50,000.

We built the project as per the initial requirements. In the process, we left a buffer of 80 hours for revisions and handed it to the content editors. Once the product was in their hands, they started submitting large volumes of content to the database.

While observing their writing habits, we realized that the editors were used to a different work style. Simple operations were made in a complex manner. So, in order to facilitate things, we proposed to them a custom-tailored editing module, which combined three steps into one. Given the significant amount of data, the accepted suggestion resulted in hundreds of hours that we saved per month for their whole team.

Just that initial optimization allowed the team to drastically increase the amount of content, without having to hire two or more full-time professional content writers.

Since the project was distributed on a retainer model, it allowed us to build an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) first. We also worked in close collaboration with the team before going live with the public faced solution.

Bottom line, an ongoing development process allows us to learn more about your business and with that, efficiently implement new features that will drive up your business’s revenue and make your WordPress installation remarkable in every possible aspect.

The Numbers

It’s been almost 5 years since our CEO and chief WordPress architect Mario Peshev coined the term “WordPress Retainers”, and these are just some of the retainer statistics for last year alone:

• Our average a retainer contract is 20 months. However, we do onboard new customers, and the contract length is projected to grow to approximately 3 years.
• 93% of our revenue is supplemented by retainers. This service is not just our “offer”. As a matter of fact, our marketing team often says we are the WordPress Retainers company.
• Our average revenue from a retainer is $85,000. Since we switched to a recurring revenue service model, we’ve scaled our team from about 12 to 42 people.
• As time went by, retainers have improved our work quality. The long-term contracts allowed us to invest in tooling, ongoing performance and security improvements, and R&D for clients in certain industries.
• Our impact is boosted after the first few months. The first two months is when we prove ourselves and align communication. Once we study the business model deeply, our team proactively suggests business, marketing, and automation solutions that deliver high ROI.

The Benefits of Our WordPress Retainers Service

It’s pretty straightforward – We are the best at what we do.

There are numerous ways for us to execute a project and we choose the best one to serve your goal. Our high-end projects are detailed, with thousands of lines of custom code, and weeks or even months spent on optimizing the platform for speed, security, and user experience.

The above is just the tip of the iceberg. What’s the difference between other WordPress development agencies and DevriX?

We Are Globally Recognized as Top-Level B2B Partners

We ranked second in last year’s Clutch.co’s annual report of the most highly recommended B2B companies per countries! We are among together with top-notch companies that provide IT services, web development, marketing and design, and at the same time, we are also the chief WordPress Development Agency on the list.

We Are Professionals with Years of CMS Experience and a Solid Background

Choosing DevriX as your digital and technical partner means that you get over 150 years of accumulated online experience as a competitive advantage for your business – a big team of developers, marketers, sales executives, QAs, designers, SEO specialists, content writers and projects managers.

A retainer plan would provide you with access to all of these industry experts as if you’ve hired them in-house, but without the recurring hiring costs and the inability to stop/start using them as you wish.

Taking Care of Everything

We assign designated project managers for every partner that we work with. The communication, documentation, processes, and deadlines are all tracked internally. There is no need for the extra management overhead from your side. You inquire. We provide.

Diverse Partnerships

We HAVE worked and still working with a wide range of companies from the aviation industry to retail to media. This provides us with a unique business point of view and assures we’re well informed of everything that is going on in numerous industry verticals today.

The business perspective that we get helps us provide solutions and suggestions based on the best global practices. This allows us to create and maintain an internal partnership network and cross-promote services and products accordingly.

We Are Virtuous at Sales

No matter how you phrase it, business is all about making money, and your website is the presentation you give your potential clients. Having a sales and marketing team in-house at DevriX gives you the opportunity to take advantage of our specialists and build the perfectly optimized online conversion machine.

The Tech Jargons Is at the Minimum

Yes, we are geeks, but, we are also business-savvy and work with a wide range of non-tech savvy, but very successful businesses. This is why we try to keep the tech jargon to a minimum and focus on solving business problems instead. We will transcribe your needs to our developers so that you don’t have to.

The Main Goal of Our WordPress Retainers Service

Our WordPress retainers service is a win-win solution, both for our clients and for us as their technical partner. We build long-term relationships with the clients, as well as providing them with the best strategies for their business success.

With retainers, we can outline clear goals in long-term milestones and work on every task in between. Our work continues as long as our clients need the service. Each week, we provide them with the improvements that we’ve made, and with each day, they get results.

With WordPress Retainers, you have a technical partner by your side. On a Retainer plan, you are not simply outsourcing technical tasks You are collaborating with a digital technical partner that wants to push your product forward. We consult on improvements, we consult, work on new features and enhance the existing ones.

Let’s Start

We have developed our Retainers service for businesses that want to delegate the technical work to a certified team of WordPress contributors. We’ll make sure that your what is developed follows the best coding standards to allow us to maintain and scale it with time. We’ll also innovate with new features while optimizing the platform for the best possible performance.

Check out our Retainers Plans here. We love challenging and complex projects.

The DevriX team has the technical background to build virtually anything on top of WordPress. From 3rd party API or CRM integrations, extensible plugin and theme frameworks or migration from a proprietary system – that’s what we regularly do on a daily basis.

We’ve also developed various PHP-driven plugins for financial management, role and capabilities control for WordPress multisite, a CRM platform, and we’re savants with the most popular community plugins.

Following the WordPress Coding Standards allows us to be consistent in our work. We also work together with other PHP, platform and plugin developers in solving challenging development problems.

Signing a long-term contract with us will provide the team with enough time to get familiar with your business and your technical framework while building the right solution tailored specifically to your needs. We don’t play around with artificial constraints and don’t overcharge for features that are not fundamental to a project.

Each of our decisions is in line with your business goals. At DevriX, we also deploy a great number of tools to make sure that the end product is stable – log analyzers, uptime, and server management monitors and scanners that make our team more productive and your platform more stable.

The longer we work together, the more we understand what drives your business. You can focus on growing your business while we look out over your technical stack!

Take a look at our business guide or contact us for one of our sales agents to reach out and answer any questions you might have. As a distributed company, DevriX is responding nimbly to provide you with an extensive business consultation and analysis.