Sometimes, part of working as a developer is advising clients on the more technical aspects of running their websites. This can get tricky when you have to convince clients to spend more money on aspects of their sites that they may not fully understand, such as hosting.
However, by carefully explaining the benefits of investing in their websites, you can often help your clients see the value in decisions such as choosing a more expensive hosting plan. Plus, you’ll help them become more independent site owners, which results in less burden on you over the long term.
In this post, we’ll talk more about the challenges of advising clients as a developer, especially when money is involved. Then we’ll share three key arguments you can use to convince your clients to upgrade their hosting plans. Let’s go!
The Challenges of Advising Clients as a Developer
If you’ve been hired to help someone build their website, chances are they don’t know much about the technical aspects of running it either. While your main job is creating sites, you’ll often find yourself acting as your clients’ adviser on a wide variety of related tasks.
This can be difficult for many reasons. However, one of the most challenging moments can be having to convince your client to spend more money on a key part of their site. If you don’t tread carefully, you could end up damaging your client’s trust or losing their business altogether.
This is especially true in cases where the issue at hand is a more technical element of site management, which the client doesn’t fully understand. They may feel like you’re trying to take advantage of their lack of knowledge, in order to pull more money out of them.
Educating them on the subject – whether it’s web hosting, the Block Editor, using WordPress in general, or something else entirely – can help them feel more comfortable. It will also set them up to make more informed decisions down the line, even after you’ve left the project.
At the end of the day, the best you can do is try to show your client that the benefits of your suggestions outweigh the added costs. By speaking to them respectfully and understanding their perspective, you should be able to guide them towards the best decision for their site.
How to Convince Your Clients to Upgrade Their Hosting (3 Key Arguments)
A client who doesn’t know much about hosting may want to simply opt for the cheapest plan they can find. For the sake of their site’s longevity, however, you’ll probably want to convince them otherwise. Let’s look at three talking points you can use to demonstrate the benefits of spending more money on hosting.
1. Better Security Can Protect Your Investment in Your Website
These days, most people have at least a general concept of basic cybersecurity. Chances are, even if they don’t understand the importance of a quality hosting plan, your client knows that they don’t want their site to be hacked, and they don’t want malicious files uploaded to it.
This makes security an easy entry point for convincing your client to upgrade to a better plan or provider. Pointing out key features such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates, threat detection with security scans, and/or a Web Application Firewall (WAF), and disaster recovery can demonstrate the advantages of a more expensive plan.
Plus, it takes time and money to clean up a site that’s been attacked. You don’t want to scare your client into spending more, but pointing out that paying for a secure hosting option is simply an investment in their site – just like a home security system – could help them see the value in it.
2. Increased Uptime Can Boost Revenue and Justify the Cost of Better Hosting
Shared hosting plans are cheap, but your client may not realize that storing their site on a shared server could hurt its performance. While they can easily account for the money they’ll save with shared hosting, it’s more difficult to understand the additional revenue a dedicated server could bring in.
When discussing subjects such as uptime and site speed, and how they relate to your client’s server, sharing data and statistics can help provide a clear and objective perspective. Anyone can look at the numbers and see that a site on a dedicated server tends to be more available than a site on a shared one.
Uptime is money, as is loading speed. If you can prove that a more expensive plan will provide a better performance, then you can probably convince your client that it’s worth the amount on the price tag. By maintaining or even increasing their revenue, a dedicated server can end up paying for itself.
3. Your Hosting Plan Can Impact Your Website’s Ability to Expand
Your client wants their business to grow and improve over time. After all, expansion is the key to just about any company’s success. What they may not realize is that a cheap hosting plan could hold them back when it comes to expanding the online aspects of their company.
Scalability isn’t the easiest concept to explain, especially if your client isn’t tech-savvy and doesn’t really understand hosting in general. Using metaphors to discuss the idea in everyday terms can help. For example, you might compare a shared hosting plan to living in an apartment, and a dedicated server to living in a house.
That way, your client can better understand how a dedicated hosting plan will give them more room to spread out. They know that without the ability to grow, their company can’t last. Highlighting their hosting plan’s role in that process will show them that better hosting is often a necessity, not a luxury.
Conclusion
Advising clients who don’t know much about websites can be challenging, or even downright frustrating. Telling them to spend more money on something they need but don’t really understand can be especially difficult.
Fortunately, there are a few talking points you can use to convince clients to upgrade their web hosting service:
- Better security can protect your investment in your website.
- Increased uptime can boost revenue and justify the cost of better hosting.
- Your hosting plan can impact your site’s ability to expand.
How do you talk to your clients about upgrading their hosting plans? Let us know in the comments section below!
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