As I’ve worked with my client’s sites over the years I’ve noticed other developers and agencies add discomfort hurdles into the way way they work with site owners.
When I inherit these new clients, I have to stumble over these hurdles before I can start working with them
This blog post is a plea to these people to NOT add discomfort hurdles when working with site owners.
What Is A Discomfort Hurdle
A discomfort hurdle is a technique used by some agencies and developer to lock in a client and make it difficult for them to move away and work with another developer.
You create a level of discomfort a client has to jump over to move to a new service provider, for some it’s such a pain in the back side they will stay with their current developer even if issues have arisen.
I’m going to get some push back on this post saying, it’s how you build the best site, but is it really? What you are doing is creating a few quid of recurring income in hosting and locking your client into your services making it painful to move away from you.
I understand why the hurdles are there I get it, you want the best hosting, you want to build the best site you can but NO! Let the client buy their own hosting and licenses so they are not locked in.
Example Hurdles
Here are some example of the hurdles I have seen:
- Developer or agencies owning domain names and holding them to ransom (don’t ever let someone control your domain!).
- Being forced to use an agencies hosting when they build a site.
- Owning software licenses and revoking them when they move away
- Locking down admin user names and password.
Why I Don’t Add These Hurdles
I don’t add these types of hurdles into my service offering because of the following:
- I don’t want the obligations, if the hosting goes down it’s me that gets the call in the middle of the night not GoDaddy.
- I don’t want to lock in every client I work with, there are some weird people out there 🙂
- I want my clients to move providers easily and quickly if they want
- I lock in clients with the quality of my work not via discomfort.
Wrap Up
Your work should speak for itself, your clients should stay with you based upon the quality of the work done not some stupid discomfort hurdle.
Talking about work, if you need help with your WordPress site or WooCommerce Store, get in touch.