If you are a digital critical business, with a website you rely on for leads or sales, then that website needs expert care.
It is a key asset of your business. Just as you maintain your premises, or ensure your team are healthy and happy, your website needs looking after too.
Most businesses don’t have the luxury of an internal website development and maintenance team, so many struggle to manage things internally, only reaching out for help when things have gone wrong, and their business is losing out on revenue or leads.
Having a support and maintenance agency onboard for a small monthly cost, can remove the day to day maintenance from your workload, ensuring your site is kept up-to-date, whilst dramatically improving performance and security. It will give you access to experts to address any bugs or issues that arise, and immediate support in the event that your website goes down, to minimise the impact on your bottom line.
A good support and maintenance agency will be proactive, and won’t just handle the basics of plugin and WordPress Core updates. They’ll actively work to optimise your website’s performance, carry out preventive maintenance to make sure certain issues don’t arise, and they’ll be fast to act and supportive when you are experiencing problems.
Some businesses will be reluctant to find a partner after previous negative experiences with poor agencies, taking their money and doing very little in return, whilst tying them into long contracts.
“You only really know how good support is, when you have experienced a problem”
To root out the bad seeds, and to help you identify a quality support partner, here are some things to look out for when finding the right agency and plan.
Specialists Over Generalists
Look for an agency who specialise in WordPress. If they’re trying to be everything to everyone, and offering support for a multitude of platforms, they are unlikely to truly be expert in any one of them. You want a team who know the ins and outs of WordPress and work with it daily, and can manage complex integrations, or multisite networks.
Updates Done Right
We all know that WordPress and plugin updates are vital for security and ongoing functionality. But these shouldn’t be all that your chosen maintenance provider does, and when they do them, they should be done properly.
First they should be tested on a separate staging server with a clone of your website to ensure they don’t conflict with or break anything, then pre-update backups of your website should be made, and finally then the updates can be rolled out on your live site.
Staging Server
As mentioned above, a separate staging server with a clone of your site on is an important inclusion in a maintenance plan. It ensures any development changes and updates can be fully tested before being pushed to your live site. This can avoid things breaking or conflicting.
Security
Look for an agency obsessed with security. Find out what solution they use to protect your website, and whether they go above and beyond just a plugin like Wordfence, and opt for a more comprehensive firewall solution to screen traffic.
Proactive Optimisation
You want a partner who will continually look for ways to optimise the speed and performance of your website. These are such important factors for success, so make sure your agency is invested in making your site fast.
Backups
Regular backups should be part of any maintenance plan. They should be carried out frequently as part of standard practice, then additional backups should be carried out before any updates or major changes are made. These should be stored securely, and are there to recover your site should anything go wrong.
Managed Hosting
A good agency will probably provide quality managed WordPress hosting, which will be configured to maximise your website speed, making use of a CDN and server caching.
Easy To Contact
We’ve all experienced poor customer support in one way or another, and one of the main pain points is difficulty in getting hold of someone.
Make sure you choose an agency that won’t leave you speaking to an automated service, or on hold for hours upon end. Find a partner that offers real human support, and who work the hours that you do, so they’re always on hand when you need them.
SLA Response Times
You need a support partner that will jump straight to action when you report a serious issue, or your site goes down. The longer your website is down, the more money you stand to lose. So find an agency that promises SLA response times.
Fault Investigation, Finding & Resolution With Unlimited Tickets
Many support agencies will limit the number of support tickets you can submit in any given month. Anything additional will be charged at a premium.
Look for an agency that includes unlimited tickets in their monthly plan.
Some agencies might give you 1 hour of support per month, but what happens if you need 2 or more? Do you have to pay before your issue is fixed? Do the hours rollover, and can you use them for other things like improvements?
Liaise With Third Parties
When a problem arises, and one of your third party suppliers is involved, it can be a headache trying to contact them, and be a middleman between them and your support partner.
Find a support partner who will take that responsibility from you, and liaise directly with third party providers on your behalf.
No Lengthy Contracts
One of the biggest issues we hear of from clients who have been burned by previous agencies, is that they were tied into lengthy contracts, and once in them, the agency did very little work to earn their fee.
Look for an agency who doesn’t insist on contracts. They will be the ones who work proactively and effectively, keeping clients through effectiveness and being indispensable, rather than through contractual agreements. A good support agency will become an extension of your own team.
We hope this provides you with a useful list of things to look out for when looking for a WordPress support and maintenance agency. If you’re currently searching for one, why not add us to your list for consideration?
We’re the chosen WordPress Support & maintenance partner for over 100 clients, some managing multiple WordPress websites throughout their organisation.
We’re a WordPress only agency offering contract free support and maintenance plans. Our expert team is on hand to investigate, report and resolve. We prefer to keep things transparent and provide unlimited time. If there’s an issue we resolve it, no time rolls over and you don’t feel like you’re missing out.
We’ll handle everything technical and even liaise with third-party providers on your behalf, so you can tackle your day-to-day tasks, leaving the website technical support to us.
WordPress version 5.7 “Esperanza” was released on March 9, 2021.
Whether you’ve personally experienced your website going down or been witness to a website falling over due to high demand, fact is; it does happen and more than you might think.
Forget what you know about WordPress, we make it even easier. Want to know how?
