WordPress assistance in hosting services?

Since we entered the world of Hosting services, we have always approached customers who not only needed Hosting services but also assistance support.

Even those who did not need it initially over the course of time, months or years, then explicitly requested WordPress assistance in order to solve problems looming in their installation.

This often happens because the end user of WordPress is not necessarily a technical figure, but rather an editor, a columnist who has skills in the world of online publishing but not technical skills in programming or systems and by virtue of this he deals with aspects purely editorial rather than technical.

The maintenance of a WordPress installation is objectively quite easy, and very rarely problems can arise in updating plugins without carrying out tests in the staging environment.

However, there are rare situations in which updating a plugin, for example, can generate functionality or performance errors and if the owner of the blog does not already have a technical figure for the development and maintenance of the WordPress blog, qThe first potential resource he will most certainly turn to will be his WordPress hosting provider.

Does Hosting also have to provide assistance and support on WordPress?

We have had many cases in which a new customer contacted us to solve an application type problem as his old supplier was not willing to put his hand to the code or the application as they say they had no contractual obligation and were indemnified. from application assistance duties.

Obviously, if we examine the various cases from a purely legal point of view, the Hosting providers who have denied assistance to their customers have always been absolutely right; however, it certainly cannot be said that a perfectly legal behavior is productive regardless of the Hosting who decides to make use of the rigidity of a contract.

The reason is soon said, the customer may feel annoyed in being treated only as a number, or he may simply not be sure of the response of the Hosting provider, and in the absence of the relationship of trust, the customer comes from a competitor (in many cases from us) that we are happy to welcome them with open arms and to do everything possible to solve their problems, regardless of competences and contractual obligations.

In some cases, even, the problem was so evident and obvious that it would have been enough to simply edit the wp-config.php to solve it in a couple of minutes, in other cases it would have been enough to reset the cache plugin settings to see solved the problems of updating the contents.

How much would it cost the Hosting service to take charge of the problem? Certainly the time to access the ticket and examine the application problem. If you have a good background in management and maintenance of a WordPress site, you are able to identify the problem within ten minutes and resolve it within a short time.

This would certainly have shown excellent service to the end customer, who would have remained their customer instead of rushing to our hosting solution to solve the problem that the old provider flatly refused to solve.

On the other hand, on more substantial requests, such as installation of complex plugins, creation of new plugins, addition of new features, it is obvious that a Hosting company that has deliberately decided to do only hosting has not only the right but also the duty to deny the request if it is expensive and not in line with the hosting skills.

However, there are ways and ways to deny a request, the first being to use an unpleasant legalese that refers to reading and understanding the contract, or decides to explain that there are possibilities to solve problems already known in a short time but that for the creation of new features or addition of new plugins you could rely on the various collaborators who are external to the Hosting company.

Selected contributors for WordPress support.

Over the years of our performance-oriented Hosting company we have had the opportunity to notice developers and SEOs who over time have become invaluable figures for our company in support of our customers.

It happens quite frequently that the customer does not have a trusted reference figure, a webmaster, a developer, a "handyman", and that he finds himself in the situation of having to do some operations at the application level such as the installation of plugins, the creation of new plugins and the implementation of new features, an SEO-level revision after a sudden crash or the resolution of a bug that has become no longer postponable.

The market certainly offers many solutions regarding support and assistance services for WordPress, but how many services are really valid?

For a customer who wants to activate additional features to add a store section on their site, perhaps by installing WooCommerce, we certainly have several attractive possibilities on the market, but which are more valid than the others?

And if instead the customer needs to implement an alternative analytics or advertising management system to existing commercial solutions, it would be good to rely on a WordPress expert who only knows html, PHP and MySQL or perhaps it would be appropriate to approach a developer who knows more modern, asynchronous technologies like Node JS and Mongo DB to integrate with WordPress?

Having to deal with developers every day allows us to make a selection of the best figures with which to establish a partnership in mutual assistance with the aim of making a customer fully satisfied and identifying the most suitable professional for their needs.

Got a problem with Google News and Google Discovery? We have the right figure.

Do you want to develop a new plugin from scratch? We have another suitable figure.

Do you need non-blocking technologies that can handle large volumes of traffic? We know who to direct you to.

In short, comparing and interacting with hundreds of developers and SEOs has allowed us to make countless knowledge of developers that has allowed us to select them to then recommend them to our customers if they need them.

It would be fair to say that we don't actually do WordPress support; however, numbers and facts in the hand probably we do much more than most (and perhaps all) of the companies and support agencies on WordPress in Italy.

After all, with over 5000 WordPress websites and good SEO positioning for issues related to WordPress Hosting, it is normal to have many requests in the order of ten a day.

End customer satisfaction is the goal.

In an increasingly vast and competing market, it is no longer possible to be verticalized only on one or two services and to respond in legalese to the end customer who makes a request that is not contractual but still needs it.

You cannot answer a customer who asks for the implementation of an e-commerce system to contact an external developer, not because the answer is incorrect, but because out there it is full of developers or self-styled developers and that in some cases it is could go to a figure too skilled and out of budget for the needs of the end customer, in other cases the customer could come across non-technical figures who would limit themselves to assembling a dozen plugins, where it would have been more appropriate to develop an ad hoc plugin from zero.

Knowing how to solve the small application problems already known is a favor that is done to the end customer but also and above all to oneself, giving perception of the added value and difference between the various hosting services.

Knowing how to direct the customer towards the best solution to their problem that cannot be solved by the Hosting service is an added value that allows the Hosting company to provide effective solutions to the problems or needs that have arisen.

If you are looking for a starting point to find the best solution on the market selected for your needs and problems, contact us.