Why Should You Teach Your Clients How To Use WordPress?

If you are selling websites built on WordPress, then why should you train clients how to use WordPress on their own? Aren’t you negating your business that way?

In this episode, Justin Meadows explains how giving your clients WordPress training is beneficial not just for them but for your business as well.

In the video:

Download WordPress Training PDF Training

Why Give Clients WordPress Training

The very best clients are those that focus their time on their business, not messing around in WordPress, trying to figure out how to upload content or any such thing. They are happy to hand over the job to you, the expert, and pay you to sort it out for them.

So why give them the basics of WordPress use and risk losing them as clients?

The answer: asset control.

A website is a presales tool that helps a business reach their market and encourage them to take the next step—to buy. It is an investment, and an expensive one at that, that your client has made. And since the website is their asset, it is just right to give them complete control of it.
They should have the capacity to make changes to the website in case of emergencies. They should also have the ability to leave your service whenever they want.

Yes, that’s right. Clients should not be trapped into your services. Doing that is just plain wrong. If they think it’s in their best interest to leave you, they should be able to. In fact, go as far as offering them free migration. When they leave you on a good note, they’d certainly think of you and might come back to your service if they don’t find themselves in a better situation.

It will also leave open the opportunity for your clients to refer people to you.

So offer WordPress training to clients so they can control it themselves and leave whenever they want. But provide a service so good they wouldn’t think of leaving.

How To Incorporate WordPress Training To Your Services

You can choose to add WordPress training into your services in two ways: you can offer basic training for free as a part of your service. It will add a bit of extra value to your services and help boost that “surprise and delight” factor for your clients.

But you can also offer a more advanced or customized training to them. You can add it in your proposal as an optional extra. It’s a great opportunity not just in getting a little more value out of the project but also in providing a great service to your clients.

It’s ideal to leave both options open so they can choose which fits their needs most. Either way, it’s a win-win situation.

The Best Training Methods You Can Use

How do you go about training clients the basics of WordPress use?

We highly recommend using Video User Manuals. It’s a fantastic service that covers all the basics of WordPress and all the plugins you are most likely going to use. It’s inexpensive. It is regularly kept up-to-date and it’s as simple as adding a plugin to your website and making a few changes to it. Video User Manuals also come in three different accents. We install this for free in every website we’ve built.

Take note though that a few nonstandard plugins and other customized things are not included in this training.

For a more advanced training, you can add a PDF document containing step-by-step instructions and screenshots. Or you can also use Loom.

It’s a tool you can use to record instructions and give feedback to designers. Using it is pretty simple, too. Just click on your browser and wait for it to record. When it does, just talk while using your mouse to show what you are talking about. Once you are done giving out your instructions, click “Done.” The video will upload in the background and save the link to your clipboard. You can then send it to the client.

Webinar training is another option you have. It allows you to conduct a live interaction with clients and screen share. Clients can ask you questions directly and you can give them an immediate answer.

If possible and you are willing to, you can pay your client a visit in their office to show them how to use WordPress with their own computer. The choice depends on things like what works best for both of you, how much you want to charge, how much they’re willing to pay and what you are willing to do. The point is to offer these things to your clients to help them gain control over their website. Doing that helps both you and your clients.

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