WordPress is free, open-source software, which makes it one of the most powerful, flexible content management systems (CMS) on the web. But that also means it doesn’t come with official support. In other words, if you run into a problem with your WordPress site, you’re on your own to solve it – whether it’s related to the WordPress core, a theme or plugin you’re using, or something more serious like malicious code.
As the most popular CMS, with a market share of over 40% of all websites, WordPress is the biggest target and the most frequently hacked CMS. Good WordPress maintenance service providers help keep your website secure from malware, data breaches, security breaches, and hacking attempts. With the possibility of a security problem taking your site offline for days, weeks, or even months and damaging your reputation with your customers, the benefits of proper WordPress maintenance for security alone far outweigh the costs.
Whatever your area of business, even the simplest site won’t just look after itself, and requires time and attention to keep running – and of course, the more complex your site gets, the more moving parts there are to go wrong. It’s entirely possible to find yourself spending hours of your valuable time per week on site management.
WordPress receives three major updates every year and additional minor updates throughout the year, which can include security fixes, performance optimization, and countless plugin and theme updates. All these need to be handled swiftly and appropriately.
You could try and keep on top of everything yourself, with all the time commitments that go with that. Or, you could enlist a dedicated WordPress maintenance service provider to take care of your site for you. A good WordPress maintenance service will deal with all of your site’s maintenance-related tasks, including:
- Removing unused files from your server.
- Speed optimization.
- Updating content.
- Automating routine tasks, such as database cleanup and cloud backups.
- Accessibility checks and compliance.
Your business website is increasingly critical for generating revenue and growing your bottom line. This is precisely why eCommerce stores immediately lose revenue if an important page (like the checkout page) on their site stops responding or if a feature (like the shopping cart or contact form) is broken. A good WordPress maintenance service can test and maintain your online website or store for you, ensuring it runs smoothly around the clock.
How are WordPress maintenance and support different? WordPress maintenance involves keeping your website up to date and taking care of optimization. Conversely, support is all about solving issues you may encounter with your WordPress site. To make sure your site runs smoothly, you need both.
Your best option is to partner with a WordPress website maintenance service provider that offers support and ongoing development. Valet, for example, takes care of all this for you and more. The team helps you free up your time so you can get back to the higher-value work you’re best at while they take care of the nitty-gritty details behind the scenes. With Valet, you get a team of professionals when you need them without having to worry about the costs of having a dedicated in-house IT team.
All of your WordPress maintenance headaches go away when you partner with Valet as your WordPress maintenance and support resource.
In this article, we’ll explain what you should look for in a WordPress maintenance service. We’ll also run the rule over some of the best WordPress maintenance service providers out there to help you decide which one you should go with and why.
What to look for in a WordPress maintenance service provider
Once you decide to offload WordPress maintenance to a professional service provider, the next step is to develop a clear understanding of what to look for.
Generally speaking, WordPress maintenance involves taking care of the different tasks required to monitor your website and improve its performance and security. More specifically, this might mean making sure:
- The WordPress core, themes, and plugins are up to date.
- You have a recent backup of your entire WordPress website and database stored in a secure location.
- Malware scans are conducted regularly.
WordPress websites require ongoing maintenance. Some tasks (like ensuring everything is up to date) must be looked at daily, while other tasks (such as database optimization or fixing broken links) happen weekly or monthly. For this reason, it’s a good idea to sign up with a WordPress maintenance service provider that offers everyday help.
If you’ve been running your WordPress.org site for some time, you might already have an idea of the different sorts of issues you run into. Ask yourself: “What problems have I encountered (or am currently encountering) with my WordPress website? What has given me the most trouble?”.
This is a good starting point to determine what sort of WordPress maintenance service provider you’ll need to enlist for your business. Jot down everything that comes to mind to get the best picture of the areas you need the most help with.
Some website owners might need a more all-around service that also offers ongoing support and development, with the WordPress maintenance service provider taking care of any website downtime you face, theme and plugin compatibility conflicts, troubleshooting problems, and your custom code needs.
Best WordPress maintenance service providers
WordPress maintenance service providers come in all shapes, sizes, and pricing brackets. It’s a good idea to evaluate the different options available to you so you can make an informed decision.
A quick Google search turns up tons of service providers. We’ve handpicked some of the best options for you. Here are five of the best WordPress maintenance service providers to choose from:
1. Valet
Valet is a WordPress maintenance service that offers professional website management, support, consultation, and development. The service is aimed at businesses that:
- Have a small or no IT team
- Don’t have the technical experience for WordPress maintenance and upkeep.
- Need to free up time to focus on core business activities.
- Need someone to constantly monitor checkout workflows.
What sets Valet apart from other WordPress maintenance services is that it offers WordPress maintenance as a core service in addition to full-service support and development. The Valet team works as your business’ long-term partner on development, as this customer review put it:
“The Valet Team allows me to scale up if necessary and gives me the peace of mind that they can handle anything that comes in or occurs and that they have my back.”
Valet Services
Let’s take a closer look at the different services on offer with Valet:
Core WordPress Maintenance
Valet provides essential WordPress maintenance services covering all the basics, such as ensuring the WordPress core and any themes and plugins you’re using are always up to date. They’ll also deal with secure offsite backups, daily malware scanning, uptime monitoring, vulnerability database security scans, and visual regression testing. Valet has access to your WordPress directly, meaning you never have to explain the problem – they’ll spot it and fix it.
This frees businesses from constantly having to monitor small site maintenance tasks or sign up for several third-party services that offer individual solutions for things like automated site backups or uptime monitoring. Signing up for a complete WordPress maintenance plan centralizes all these tasks and gets you better value.
eCommerce Maintenance
Unlike most WordPress maintenance services, Valet also offers eCommerce maintenance, which includes ensuring important pages (like the checkout page) load and work successfully, contact forms work properly, and that your custom workflows are functional.
Having someone on your team who constantly monitors essential eCommerce pages is an easy way to ensure you’re not missing out on sales due to a broken checkout process. eCommerce store owners can choose to use Valet’s baseline testing plan or ask for a customized automated test that’s unique to their workflow. Valet works with all major eCommerce platforms, including WooCommerce.
Professional Support and Development
Valet works as an extension of your team, making it easy for businesses to add WordPress professionals to their teams without having to worry about directly hiring them and paying salaries. Valet provides their own project managers, full-stack developers, and other resources.
This is especially beneficial for businesses with small teams and need a team member with professional experience to provide consultation, answer support emails, research, or handle development tasks for you. The biggest benefit of working with Valet is that you no longer have to worry about managing a project you don’t understand or being told, “We can’t do this.” or “We don’t offer this as part of our maintenance service.”.
Audits and Assessments
Valet provides standardized and custom audits and assessments that give you a broad overview of your technical debt along with a plan for improvement. You can also request website health assessments (two different plans) and speed assessments (three different plans).
Assessments include a complete report with observations and recommendations provided by a full-stack developer. It includes things like database review, theme code review, checking to see if you’re on the latest version of PHP, and much more. Once you get the report, you can review it and decide to either hire Valet to fix any issues with your WordPress website or take the report elsewhere.
Accessibility
As an online business owner, you need to ensure your website is compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act Title II and Title III. In fact, website accessibility has been a legal requirement for all website owners since 2010. It means you need to take steps to ensure your website is accessible to people with physical disabilities, situational disabilities, and socio-economic restrictions on bandwidth and speed.
Who is this WordPress maintenance service for?
Valet offers WordPress maintenance as a core service. However, the team also follows up with you on issues because they provide full support and development services. This sets them apart from other WordPress maintenance services in the market.
When you sign up for a Valet plan, you never risk getting stuck with an email that says: “Your website is broken and, unfortunately, we can’t help you resolve your issue. You’re on your own.”. The Valet team works as an extension of your own team, which means you can expect to have someone on board who’s familiar with your site’s infrastructure. You don’t have to worry about explaining what went wrong. Valet will take care of all of this for you in a friendly, personal manner, as this customer told us:
“I like working with the same 1 or 2 people. I feel connected and that someone knows the history of our website.”
Valet is equally great for:
- Businesses that don’t have someone with technical experience on their team to handle WordPress maintenance-related issues.
- Businesses that are simply looking to offload maintenance work to free up some time to focus on growing their business or improving their digital marketing and social media efforts.
- eCommerce store owners that need someone to make sure their checkout workflows and contact forms are working properly 24/7.
2. WP Buffs
WP Buffs is a 24/7 WordPress maintenance service provider for website owners and white-label partners. The company provides a variety of basic maintenance services and packages different WordPress plugins in with their subscription to help improve website performance. These include the premium plugins iThemes Security Pro, WP Rocket, BlogVault, and WP Smush Pro. WP Buffs also offers Google Analytics integration.
WP Buffs Services
Here’s a list of the WordPress maintenance services WP Buffs offers:
- Speed and browser optimization.
- Advanced website tech support, targeted at businesses that have eCommerce, membership, multilingual, staging, or some other sort of advanced functionality.
- Security using the iThemes Security Pro plugin.
- Core file and database backup.
- WordPress plugin, theme, and core file updates.
- 24/7 monitoring and emergency care.
Who is this WordPress maintenance service for
WP Buffs’ maintenance service and care plans are suited to small business owners looking for ways to free up their time to focus on core business activities. It’s also a viable option for anyone looking to white-label WordPress support services and maintenance.
It’s worth mentioning that the WP Buffs subscription plans include access to support via the members-only forum. Clients can make support requests via the forum and email, and the WP Buffs team will respond within 3-5 business days. This means you have to describe the problem you’re facing with your website. For website owners that aren’t particularly tech-savvy, it can be difficult to explain what exactly is wrong. This can be limiting when it comes to asking for WordPress maintenance and support. Valet, on the other hand, is a full-service partner that’s available around the clock to provide support to its clients.
3. GoWP
GoWP is a WordPress maintenance service provider that offers white-label services for WordPress agencies. In addition to website maintenance, GoWP also provides content edits and page builds.
GoWP Services
GoWP’s maintenance service plan includes basic WordPress maintenance-related tasks such as updating your client’s website (and the plugins and themes they use), taking WordPress backups, and ensuring website security.
GoWP uses Visual Validator for plugin updates, which takes screenshots of your website after it’s been updated to see if anything has changed on the front end. In case of any visual changes, the GoWP team is automatically notified. GoWP also offers manual updates as a premium offering.
GoWP’s maintenance service also comes with security monitoring, daily malware scans, malware detection and cleanup, attack prevention, as well as WordPress hardening.
The maintenance service takes daily backups of your website and stores them offsite. It gives you access to 90 days of backup history, which means you have the option to restore your website to a previous version whenever you’d like. Plus, you get full visibility into maintenance activity through GoWP’s maintenance page, which is accessible through the WordPress dashboard.
Who is this WordPress maintenance service for
GoWP is a viable option for WordPress agencies that are looking for white-label maintenance services. This way, they can focus on growing their operations while the GoWP team takes care of the tedious, behind-the-scenes work.
The service also offers website edits and page builds, which means they’ll take care of tasks like adding and editing WordPress blog posts, widgets, installing plugins, and building web pages using Elementor or Beaver Builder.
Unlike WordPress maintenance services like Valet, GoWP doesn’t offer advanced maintenance services such as helping you set up CDN, SSL, or HTTPS. In addition, their plans aren’t designed for more advanced websites like eCommerce stores or membership sites.
4. Maintainn
Maintainn is a WordPress maintenance and support agency that provides basic maintenance services such as security monitoring, real-time offsite backups, WordPress core updates, theme updates, and plugin updates. It’s owned and operated by the folk behind WebDevStudios and has been around since 2012.
Maintainn Services
Maintainn offers a variety of WordPress maintenance services, including everything from weekly updates to 24/7 security monitoring. The company also offers more advanced services (like hacked website repair) at an additional cost on top of the maintenance plan.
Maintainn also provides advanced maintenance services on their high-end plans, including:
- Uptime monitoring
- eCommerce and WordPress multisite support
- Version control
- Staging updates
You can also sign up for the support program separately, which offers custom development and technical services.
When you sign up for a Maintainn maintenance service plan, you can also access live chat and email support. Live chat support is available on weekdays from 9 am to 8 pm. However, with both support options, you have to explain the issue you’re facing to the support representative. This can be overwhelming for WordPress users who aren’t sure what the problem is!
Who is this WordPress maintenance service for
Maintainn is targeted at established businesses that are looking for a way to offload routine WordPress maintenance tasks such as weekly updates and security monitoring.
However, it’s not a full-service partner, like Valet, that works as an extension of your own team. Maintainn’s maintenance service offering is best suited towards website owners who are technically inclined but would like to free up their time to focus on business growth.
5. WP Tech Support
WP Tech Support offers emergency WordPress help and ongoing support plans, which include tasks like WordPress fixes, updates, backups, and security monitoring. The company offers four different plans for ongoing WordPress maintenance and support and three different one-time services.
WP Tech Support Services
By signing up with WP Tech Support, you can expect to get weekly offsite backups, WordPress core updates, and WordPress theme and plugin updates. You’ll get a daily security scan that checks for malware. The WP Tech Support team will also improve your website’s overall security by installing a firewall and brute force attack blocker.
However, malware removal is only available with the higher-end ongoing support plans. So, if you want a professional to rid your site of a virus or trojan, you’ll need to pay extra.
WP Tech Support offers clients on their Pro and Business plans 60 to 90 minutes of development time per month. For example, you can ask them to tweak CSS or HTML code. You can use this for small changes, customization, and improvements to your WordPress website. The team also offers performance tune-up and search engine optimization (SEO) for clients on the Business plan.
Who is this WordPress maintenance service for
WP Tech Support is aimed at webmasters who aren’t particularly technically inclined and need someone to take care of basic WordPress maintenance tasks while providing ongoing support.
However, it’s important to bear in mind that ongoing support is available through support tickets, which means that you have to reach out to the support department and explain the issue you’re facing. In other words, you don’t get a dedicated project manager who’ll check your site for issues or run audits and assessments to make sure everything is working properly. This can be a major limitation for website owners who aren’t sure what’s causing the problem they’ve encountered.
Valet, on the other hand, is a full-service WordPress maintenance service provider that’ll take care of everything for you. You don’t have to worry about explaining what’s wrong with your website. Valet’s WordPress professionals will help you with troubleshooting, management, support, and development.
Offload WordPress maintenance today
If you’re serious about running a WordPress website, generating leads, and growing your online business, it makes sense to invest in a full-service WordPress maintenance service provider.
Instead of going with a WordPress maintenance service that only handles basic maintenance tasks, it’s a better idea to go with a full-service provider, like Valet, that’s capable of handling everything for you – from troubleshooting to maintenance and support to development.
To recap:
- Valet is great for businesses looking for WordPress professionals to help with WordPress maintenance tasks and can also offer ongoing full-service support and development.
- WP Buffs offers basic WordPress maintenance services and is best suited for freelancers and businesses looking for a white-label solution.
- GoWP is a white label WordPress maintenance service aimed at agencies that might also need help with content edits and page builds.
- Maintainn is best suited for tech-savvy webmasters who need someone to handle WordPress maintenance-related issues and can clearly communicate the problem to them via support ticket.
- WP Tech Support is the go-to option for webmasters looking for WordPress maintenance services and might need support occasionally.
Valet does it all, and can help you with:
- Making sure your WordPress site is up-to-date, backed up, malware-free, and running smoothly.
- Running a complete website audit and assessment (health assessment and speed assessment) to improve site performance.
- Finding and fixing website accessibility issues to ensure your WordPress site is accessible by people with disabilities and socio-economic restrictions.Setting up a CDN and HTTPS on your business website or online store.
- Creating, setting up, and running automated eCommerce website testing workflows to ensure important pages load successfully every time.
- Linking you with onboard project managers, full-stack developers, and other WordPress experts for WordPress help, support, and development tasks.
Ready to offload WordPress maintenance to professionals? Get in touch with Valet today!