Top 6 Ways For Agencies to Build MRR

Most agencies have a predictability problem, not a revenue problem.

They land clients. They build great websites. Then they start over. New project, new proposal, new negotiation – while everything they just built quietly earns them nothing.

Everyone knows how that feels in a slow month.

The 2026 State of the WordPress Agency survey from The Admin Bar queried 622 agency owners and freelancers across 51 countries. The data tells a consistent story: agencies with recurring revenue in their model are more stable, more profitable, and more likely to grow — even when the broader market is soft.

But a lot of agencies still haven’t built MRR into their model.

Here’s what the data shows, and what you can do about it.

The Recurring Revenue Cliff

Before we get to services, look at this table. It may be the most important number in the whole survey.

The Admin Bar asked agencies what share of their total revenue was recurring — care plans, hosting retainers, ongoing services.

Here’s what they found:

Recurring revenue share | Consistently profitable | Rarely/never profitable
0% | 25.0% | 58.3%
1–24% | 29.7% | 16.7%
25–49% | 47.4% | 9.7%
50–74% | 47.8% | 4.5%
75%+ | 46.9% | 6.2%

Agencies with zero recurring revenue are unprofitable nearly 60% of the time.

That is a business model problem, not a market problem.

But once recurring revenue hits 25% of total revenue — not even the majority — the “rarely profitable” rate drops below 10% and stays there. One dollar in four being recurring changes everything.

The fix doesn’t require a complete reinvention. It requires a structural shift. And the services that create that shift are right in front of most agencies — they’re just not being offered.

What Many Agencies Still Aren’t Offering

The Admin Bar asked agencies which services they actively offer. The results — shown as a chart in the survey — reveal that fewer than half of agencies offer any of the following:

(The survey publishes service adoption as a visual chart, not a percentage table, but the pattern is clear: every service below falls under the 50% mark.)

eCommerce support

Graphic design

Copywriting

Performance optimization

Branding

Email marketing

Accessibility

Paid ads

Social media management

Conversion rate optimization (CRO)

Look at that list. These aren’t exotic specialties. They’re the services most WordPress clients eventually need — and the ones that most naturally become monthly retainers.

As we’ve written before: Clients don’t buy websites. They buy solutions. The agencies that get that are building recurring relationships around those solutions. The ones that haven’t are still hunting for qualified leads.

What the Data Says Drives MRR

Sure, not all services are equal. Here’s how the survey breaks down the real MRR drivers, from the strongest signal to the most broadly useful.

1. Accessibility — the most underused high-leverage service in the industry

Only 1 in 4 agencies offers accessibility work. Here’s what separates those that do from those that don’t:

| Offers accessibility | Doesn’t offer it
Hit $200k+ revenue | 26.6% | 11.0%
Consistently profitable | 47.6% | 38.1%
Declined in 2025 | 13.1% | 21.7%

Agencies offering accessibility are nearly twice as likely to exceed $200k in annual revenue. They’re more consistently profitable. And they reported revenue declines in 2025 at roughly half the rate of agencies that don’t offer it.

The reason isn’t hard to figure out once you understand what accessibility looks like in practice.

It’s not a one-time audit. It’s a system:

An initial audit against WCAG 2.1/2.2 standards

Remediation work — keyboard navigation, contrast ratios, alt text, ARIA labels, form labeling

Ongoing monitoring, because every content update and code change can introduce new issues

Compliance updates as regulations tighten (the European Accessibility Act is already in effect; ADA litigation in the US is not slowing down)

Regular documentation and reporting for clients who need to show due diligence

Every stage of that recurs. Regulations don’t freeze. Sites change constantly. Accessibility debt accumulates the moment you stop watching it. That’s what makes it such a natural MRR service — it justifies monthly engagement by design, not by hustle.

We’ve covered the practical side of building this service in our Comprehensive Accessibility for WordPress Agencies — tooling, testing approaches, and how to scope an ongoing engagement. The survey data is the business case. That article is the implementation guide.

Right now, the survey’s own summary puts it plainly: only 1 in 4 agencies offer it.

2. Retainer Pricing — the model that makes everything else possible

Pricing model | Consistently profitable | $100k+ revenue | Grew in 2025
Retainer | 51.2% | 59.0% | 56.6%
Productized | 44.4% | 51.1% | 55.6%
Value-based | 46.2% | 27.3% | 50.0%
Fixed-price | 36.4% | 35.5% | 47.4%
Hourly | 39.8% | 34.9% | 42.2%

Retainer agencies outperform across every metric. But the survey makes a point worth sitting with: the retainer model probably reflects a healthy agency as much as it creates one. Agencies with good systems and confident pricing are the ones who can successfully move clients to retainers.

The model isn’t a magic switch. It’s where you end up when you’ve fixed the underlying things – which starts with pricing.

As a WordPress agency, offering website maintenance care plans is one of the best ways to stabilize and grow your revenue. Care plans are the gateway retainer for most agencies — the first recurring line item that builds the habit of monthly billing on both sides of the relationship.

3. Charging more than $5,000 per project

There’s a clear break in the profitability data at $5k:

Project price | Consistently profitable | Rarely/never profitable
$100–$999 | 25.0% | 37.5%
$1,000–$2,499 | 30.0% | 13.6%
$2,500–$4,999 | 36.8% | 11.8%
$5,000–$9,999 | 56.8% | 2.7%
$10,000–$19,999 | 50.0% | 3.1%

Below $5k, about 1 in 3 agencies is consistently profitable. Above $5k, it jumps to nearly 1 in 2. And “rarely profitable” basically vanishes.

Higher pricing doesn’t just mean more money per job. It changes the relationship. Clients paying $5k+ are thinking longer-term. They’re more open to ongoing services. They give you the breathing room to do strategy, not just execution. That’s where retainers come from.

If MRR is hard to close, look at your project pricing before anything else. Nickel-and-dime clients nickel-and-dime you to death. The same logic that applies to hosting decisions applies to client selection.

4. Proactive Lead Generation

| Proactive acquisition | Passive word-of-mouth
Under $50k revenue | 26.2% | 45.6%
Over $100k revenue | 50.3% | 31.8%
Over $200k revenue | 24.8% | 11.6%
Consistently profitable | 53.8% | 33.1%

Agencies that actively pursue new business — through SEO, partnerships, referrals, community — are more than twice as likely to break $200k. They’re also significantly more profitable.

This is about pipeline control. Word-of-mouth responds to momentum. Proactive acquisition is something you run.

MRR can’t grow if the client pipeline is inconsistent. Recurring services need a consistent flow of new clients to replace churn and expand the base. Without proactive acquisition, even a strong retainer model plateaus.

5. Using AI in Your Delivery

AI sentiment | Grew in 2025 | Declined in 2025 | Optimistic about 2026
Significantly positive | 58.5% | 12.3% | 80.0%
Somewhat positive | 48.0% | 17.3% | 60.9%
Neutral | 43.6% | 21.8% | 47.1%
Negative | 28.4% | 43.3% | 13.4%

AI doesn’t create MRR directly. But it changes the economics of delivering it.

When AI cuts the time it takes to run a content audit, produce an accessibility report, draft a first pass of copy, or analyze performance data — the margin on a retainer improves. You can price competitively, take on more clients, and not burn your team doing it.

Agencies resisting AI aren’t just missing efficiency. They’re defending lower margins at a moment when their competitors are improving theirs.

6. Spreading your client base

Top 3 clients = % of revenue | Hit $200k+ | Consistently profitable
Less than 25% | 26.2% | 51.0%
25–49% | 14.1% | 41.6%
50–74% | 8.2% | 33.9%
75%+ | 5.4% | 29.4%

When 3 clients account for 75% of your revenue, you don’t have a stable MRR. You have 3 fragile income streams.

Real MRR requires distribution. Twenty clients each contributing 5% is far more stable than two clients each at 40%. When one churns, the math doesn’t collapse.

The Experience Paradox. A Detail Worth Knowing.

One finding from the survey that tends to get overlooked:

Years in business | Grew in 2025 | Consistently profitable | $100k+ revenue
0–5 years | 59.8% | 28.6% | 16.4%
6–10 years | 49.4% | 42.3% | 41.2%
11–15 years | 42.7% | 43.5% | 44.4%
16+ years | 43.8% | 45.9% | 47.7%

Newer agencies grew faster. Established agencies were more durable.

The instinct newer agencies have — move quickly, pitch harder, take on everything – creates growth but not necessarily stability. The agencies that have been around 16+ years have built the recurring structures and stable client bases that younger agencies are still working out.

This matters for how you read the rest of this data. MRR isn’t primarily a growth strategy. It’s a durability strategy. WordPress isn’t harder. It’s just more honest about what long-term growth requires. The same is true of your service model.

Build it early and you skip a decade of learning it the hard way.

7 Services that Fit Naturally into a Recurring Model

If you’re picking services to add this year, here’s how each one works as an MRR engine.

Performance Optimization

“Reducing the number of plugins is not only a cost savings measure, but can also improve performance & reduce the complexity of managing.”
Rocket.net – How Many WordPress Plugins is Too Much?

WordPress sites don’t stay fast on their own. Core Web Vitals move with Google’s updates. Plugins conflict. Images get uploaded at full size. New pages get built without performance thinking. The work never ends — which means the retainer never should either.

Clients who understand that their site speed directly affects their Google rankings and their conversion rate will pay for ongoing attention to it. You just have to show them the connection.

A basic monthly performance retainer:

TTFB monitoring

Core Web Vitals review

Cache management

Image optimization checks

Plugin health audit

Short written report.

This work compounds when the underlying hosting is fast. When your sites are hosted on infrastructure that just works — Enterprise CDN, automated backups, security monitoring — your care plans become pure profit. You’re not spending billable hours fixing hosting issues. You’re focused on strategic improvements that clients value.

If you’re running performance retainers on sites sitting on slow shared infrastructure, you’re fighting the foundation every month. The hosting decision is part of the retainer economics, not separate from it.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

“Effective landing pages bring leads. Your landing page must be dedicated. It should make it easier for customers to find what they need and complete a task, as well as for you to track conversions.”
Rocket.net – How to Create Killer Landing Pages That Convert Like Crazy

CRO is never finished. Every A/B test creates questions for the next one. Every landing page refinement surfaces new behavior. Clients who see a real lift in conversions become true believers in the process — and true believers become long-term clients.

It’s also one of the easiest services to justify in dollar terms. As a simple illustration: a client doing $80k/month in revenue whose checkout conversion rate improves from 2.3% to 3.1% gains roughly $6,400/month in additional revenue. Whatever your client’s actual numbers are, that math does your retainer pitch for you.

SEO and content systems

“SEO was all about keywords: Find the magic phrase, use it a bunch of times, and win. AI doesn’t play that game. When someone asks an AI for help, they describe their actual situation.”
Rocket.net – SEO Tip: Write For Real Problems, Not Just Keywords

Search landscapes aren’t static – especially lately. Competitors publish. Algorithms shift. Rankings move. Existing content gets stale and loses ground.

The key reframe is moving from “I’ll write you 10 blog posts” to “I manage your content system.” One is a deliverable. The other is a retainer. The work involved might look similar. The relationship is completely different.

Email Marketing

“Automated emails generate outsized revenue – up to 20x more effective than regular campaigns. With AI optimizing timing, content, and targeting, email delivers up to $68 for every $1 spent.”
Rocket.net – Top 7 WooCommerce Email Marketing Triggers That Actually Make Money

One of the most underappreciated services on this list.

Email requires constant attention: lifecycle flows, broadcast campaigns, list hygiene, deliverability monitoring, subject line testing, behavioral adaptation. None of that is a one-time job.

Email retainers also tend to stick. Once you’ve built a client’s automations and their subscribers are engaged with the sequence, they can’t easily fire you without disrupting something that’s actively making them money. That stickiness is a feature of the structure.

Paid Ads Management

“A $1/day PPC campaign is another blade in your Swiss army knife. A dollar a day can be a valuable tool for generating insights, boosting local visibility, and testing the waters without emptying your wallet.”
Rocket.net – What Could $1/Day PPC Ads Do For Your Agency?

Ads are inherently recurring — bid strategies need tuning, creatives need refreshing, audiences need refining, landing pages need testing. No client runs a paid campaign “once.”

Paid ads also tend to scale with client growth. As the business reinvests revenue back into advertising, your retainer grows with it.

Social Media Management

“Social Media is free, people are there, and businesses are there – 24/7. There are even free social media plugins available for your WooCommerce shop.”
Rocket.net – Top 3 WooCommerce Pre-Launch Social Media Tips To Explode Sales

Like ads, social requires continuous creation, scheduling, publishing, and iteration. What works in Q1 needs adjustment by Q3.

The main risk with social is scope creep. Define your packages around specific outputs — posts per week, platforms covered, response time — not vague effort language. Vague effort doesn’t price well and doesn’t retain clients.

Branding Systems

“Building a strong personal brand takes time and effort, but the rewards are substantial. By establishing yourself as a trusted authority in your field, you’ll attract more clients, foster deeper connections, and ultimately, build a thriving business.”
Rocket.net – The Value of Building a Personal Brand to Build Your Business

Most agencies treat branding as a project: discovery, identity, style guide, delivery. Done.

But a brand isn’t a document. It evolves with the business. Campaign alignment, messaging refinement, seasonal refresh, visual evolution — all of that represents real ongoing work. For growing clients especially, brand rarely stays static for long.

The Winning Agency Model

The agencies with higher revenue, lower volatility, and better profitability, share a common structure. One-off projects are feast-or-famine. Retainers mean stability.

The formula is: Hosting + Maintenance + Growth Services.

In practice, across all the data, that looks like:

Projects priced at $5k+ – creates the margin and relationship depth that makes retainers possible

Retainer-first model – keeps clients active and generating revenue between new builds

1–3 recurring services – accessibility, CRO, performance, SEO, email, or ads – as the MRR core

Proactive lead generation – consistently feeds new clients into the funnel

AI-assisted delivery – keeps margins high as recurring services scale

Diversified client base – no single client owns your revenue

That’s what separates a $50k agency from a $200k+ one. Not talent. Not hours. Architecture.

How to Start Without Overextending

The fastest way to dilute your agency is adding five services at once. Don’t do that.

Start with your existing clients. Before pitching a new service to a new prospect, look at who you already work with. Where are the obvious gaps? Performance issues on sites you built two years ago?

A client who mentions their email list but never does anything with it? Accessibility on a healthcare or nonprofit site? These are warm conversations, not cold pitches.

Pick one service that fits what you already do. If you build fast WordPress sites, performance optimization is an obvious first retainer. If you write copy during projects anyway, a content retainer is already in your workflow. Start with lowest friction.

Package it. Don’t price it hourly. “We’ll monitor Core Web Vitals, run a monthly performance audit, and send you a written report with prioritized action items” is something you can price, deliver, and improve over time. “We’ll help with performance as needed” is not. Hourly retainers are not retainers. They’re slow project work.

Attach a retainer to every new project from day one. When you scope a build, include 3–6 months of a retainer as the default close, not an upsell. It’s the natural continuation of the project. Clean data = smart decisions. Build reporting into every retainer from day one — clients who can see the value stay.

Report on it every month. Build a simple monthly summary tied to metrics the client already cares about — traffic, rankings, conversion rate, accessibility score. If they can’t see it, they won’t pay for it.

The Burnout Finding Worth Sitting With

The survey includes a table that most agency owners skip past:

Revenue band | Burnout as #1 growth barrier
Under $50k | 15.1%
$50k–$99k | 15.0%
$100k–$199k | 8.8%
$200k+ | 3.3%

The survey also found that women named burnout as their #1 growth barrier at more than double the rate of men — 16.9% versus 8.1%.

Burnout is real. But in an agency context, these numbers suggest it’s closely tied to underpricing and financial pressure. At under $50k, 15% of agency owners say burnout is their biggest barrier. At $200k+, that drops to 3.3%.

Burnout doesn’t go up with more work. It goes up with less money for the same work.

Raise your prices. Build recurring revenue. Stop starting from zero every month. The data suggests that fixing the business model fixes a lot of the wellness problems along with it.

What this Really Comes Down To

The 2026 data from The Admin Bar doesn’t suggest agencies need to become different businesses. It suggests they need to package what they already do differently.

Ongoing instead of one-time. Systems instead of deliverables. Monthly instead of finished.

The services that build MRR — performance, accessibility, CRO, SEO, email, ads, social, branding — are already within reach of most WordPress agencies. The gap isn’t skill. It’s structure.

Get recurring revenue to 25% of your total and you dramatically cut your chance of being unprofitable. Push it to 50% and you nearly eliminate it.

The agencies building that now are the ones who will still be growing in two years when others are still chasing the next project.

MRR isn’t a pricing strategy. It’s the difference between an agency that grows and one that just survives.

Data sourced from the 2026 State of the WordPress Agency survey by The Admin Bar. 622 respondents, 51 countries, surveyed February-March 2026.