Every year, over 60% of small and medium businesses across the world experience serious website security or compliance issues. Yet many still think of ongoing maintenance and legal updates as “optional extras” rather than a must-have for a functioning website.
For WordPress agencies, this mindset can be frustrating. You know that website care isn’t just a technical task, and compliance isn’t a one-time badge you earn and forget. Both are essential strategic safeguards for any website.
But how do you help clients see it that way? How do you turn pushback into recognition? In this article, we’ll explain why clients are often hesitant about investing in ongoing website compliance and maintenance, and we’ll show how agencies can shift perceptions to gain long-term benefits for both themselves and their clients.
Why Some Clients Refuse to Invest In Ongoing Website Compliance and Maintenance
From a client’s perspective, the website launch is often the finish line. They’ve already invested heavily in design, development, and content. So the idea of ongoing costs, especially for something they can’t see, can feel unnecessary, frustrating, or even a little like a scam.
If expectations aren’t set early, they may reject a monthly care plan simply because they don’t believe real consequences will follow.
Misconceptions That Fuel Resistance
Some of the popular misconceptions that fuel clients’ resistance towards ongoing website compliance and maintenance are:
“Small businesses are not targets for hackers.”
Many website owners assume hackers only go after big companies. In reality, small businesses are often easier targets because their defenses are weaker.
“We’ll deal with it if it happens.”
This reactive approach ignores the fact that recovery from a security issue, breach, or legal dispute is often much more expensive than preventing it. And sometimes impossible, due to lost clients’ trust and damaged brand reputation.
“Anyone can handle it; no budget is needed.”
While tools like iubenda or WP Umbrella make website compliance and maintenance easier, using them effectively still requires expertise and consistency. Keeping a website functional and compliant is the digital equivalent of keeping a physical store clean, organized, and aligned with the law.
Common Website Risks Most Clients Overlook
When a site falls behind on updates or ignores regulatory changes, a few risks occur:
- Frequent downtime when the site is not accessible for its visitors.
- Slow site with high bounce rates that’s not turning potential leads into conversions.
- Targeted hacks and data leaks due to security vulnerabilities.
- Broken forms, buttons, or functionalities due to outdated plugins.
- Legal fines due to breaking relevant regulations.
- Complaints and brand reputation damage due to data privacy disputes.
While a client’s website might escape all these issues, ignoring the risks can have a significant business impact, such as hurting revenue, damaging credibility, and slowing down long-term growth.
How to Make Clients Care About Website Compliance and Maintenance
To get clients to prioritize ongoing website care, WordPress agencies need to make the benefits clear, relatable, and easy to grasp. Here are some tips on how to do just that.
Practical Tips For The Onboarding Phase
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Talk about it from day one
Introduce website compliance and maintenance needs during your first meeting or onboarding phase. Setting expectations early prevents misunderstandings later and avoids clients feeling like they’re being trapped into paying for a service they didn’t know about. -
Use simple language and don’t assume awareness
What’s obvious to you may be new to your clients. Avoid assuming they know terms like GDPR, cookies, uptime monitoring, or backups. Explain these concepts in plain language and offer additional resources for those who want to dive deeper. -
Provide educational, sharable resources
As an expert, give clients easy-to-understand materials they can revisit after meetings. Written guides, short videos, or visual explainers allow clients to involve internal advisors (like their tech teams, legal counsel, or marketing experts). Even though they haven’t met you directly, sharing more about your work signals that you know your stuff and they can trust you to handle it. -
Show, don’t just tell
Use relatable, real-world examples like the ones in the table below. Clients comprehend and remember stories far more than technical or legal checklists.
| Scenario | Reaction | Consequence |
| A company site automatically loads tracking and advertising cookies without asking visitors for consent. | A privacy-conscious visitor files a complaint with their data protection authority. | The company is fined for breaching GDPR consent requirements. Negative press coverage leads to a drop in customer trust and sales. |
| A US-based firm’s website has no alt text for images and is not navigable via keyboard, making it inaccessible to visually impaired users. | A user with a disability files a lawsuit under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). | The firm must settle or pay legal fees plus damages. They are required to rebuild their site to meet WCAG accessibility standards. |
| A marketing agency receives a user’s request to delete their personal data, but ignores it for months. | The user files complaints with the relevant authorities. | The agency’s internal processes are audited, increasing operational costs, while facing potential lawsuits for damages caused by the data retention. |
| A website hasn’t updated its WordPress plugins in over a year. A known vulnerability in a contact form plugin is exploited by hackers. | Hackers take the site offline and replace it with spammy pages promoting counterfeit goods. Visitors report the issue on social media. | Google blacklists the site for hosting malicious content. Traffic drops to zero during downtime. Costly emergency cleanup and plugin updates are required. All while brand credibility suffers. |
| An e-commerce site experiences a server crash during a hosting provider’s hardware failure. No backups have been run for six months. | The site’s product catalog, order history, and customer data are lost. | Weeks of sales are lost while the site is rebuilt from scratch. Existing customers lose trust because their past order records vanish. Recovery costs (developer hours + lost revenue) far exceed what regular backups would have cost. |
| A business website gradually slows down due to unoptimized images, database bloat, and outdated caching plugins. | Frustrated visitors leave before important conversion pages load. Search engines rank the site lower. | Conversions drop significantly over a year. Google ads cost more per conversion due to a low Quality Score. |
Keeping Clients Informed Over Time
Once onboarding is complete and your client is subscribed to your care packages, your role as an educator doesn’t stop. The real key to reducing pushback is to show clients the work you do every month behind the scenes and why it matters.
Sending regular reports to your clients:
- Show transparency, that turns into trust, which turns into loyalty.
- Give context to your invoices (why are we paying for this service?)
- Keep your agency top of mind as the trusted compliance and maintenance partner.
Many agencies already know just how valuable reporting is for client relationships. But they still don’t do it consistently. The problem isn’t a lack of awareness; it’s the process itself.
Why Do Many WordPress Agencies Skip Reporting?
When done manually, reporting:
- Takes a lot of time to prepare.
- Requires repetitive work (pulling data from multiple tabs, spreadsheets, and team members).
- Is prone to mistakes (like mixing up client data or misspelling a client’s name or email).
- Doesn’t scale. With a handful of clients, it’s tedious but manageable. With dozens or hundreds, it becomes nearly impossible to do by hand.
Over time, teams start to see manual reporting as boring, repetitive, and even stressful – and that’s when it starts to slide down the to-do list. And when it does, client relationships often weaken.
How to Automate Reporting
To eliminate the headache of manual reporting, there are WordPress management tools that can automate the process almost entirely. WP Umbrella is one such tool that can really simplify WordPress maintenance and reporting. It automatically gathers detailed data about your ongoing website maintenance (such as plugin updates, uptime and performance monitoring, security checks, backups, and more) and turns it into professional, white-label client reports.
With WP Umbrella’s reporting feature, you can:
- Fully customize reports with your agency’s branding.
- Pick the format, a sleek PDF or/and a brief personalized email.
- Choose what to include or exclude, so clients see only the most relevant information.
- Integrate Google Analytics data for website performance insights.
- Schedule deliveries weekly, monthly, or quarterly.
- Send reports from your own email address with your signature.
- Add Custom Works: Highlight any additional tasks you’ve completed, such as cookie consent updates, accessibility improvements, SEO optimizations, tech troubleshooting, development work, or image optimization. These entries appear alongside automated maintenance data, showing clients exactly where your expertise adds value.
Once set up, the reports run themselves – keeping your clients updated without requiring constant manual effort from you. Clients see not just that their site is being maintained, but that you’re also proactively protecting them from legal risks, improving performance, and adding value month after month.
Takeaway
The key to client buy-in around website compliance and maintenance is education and transparency. Set expectations from day one, use simple language, illustrate real-world consequences, and keep clients informed with clear, frequent reporting.
When clients understand that these services prevent costly downtime, legal penalties, and performance issues, they stop viewing them as a recurring expense and start recognizing them as a smart investment in their most valuable digital asset – their website.
