You’ve decided to hire a WordPress maintenance company and stop wasting time fixing your site every time a new version of WordPress comes out? Smart decision! After some googling it seems like there are dozens of nearly the same companies, offering the same “best” service for the same low price. Wrong! We thought so too, but after comparing 25+ WordPress maintenance services, it’s obvious there are vast differences between the companies. Some data we got is astonishing and sheds new light on the entire WordPress maintenance business. Get the best service for your buck by accurately comparing maintenance services based on your precise needs.

[box type=”light”]You’re busy, right? Let’s not keep you waiting;
• Learn how much money you’re losing by doing maintenance on your own
• Filter through 30+ companies to find the best one for you
• See who we recommend[/box]

[tweet]Compare +30 #WordPress maintenance companies on price, response time, location, services & more[/tweet]

I just click “update everything” and … it’s all good!

That’s an understandable approach. In most cases, it works out fine. It’s also a calculated risk you’re obviously willing to take. That’s the bottom line here – risk and consequences of things going sideways. If you’ve been around computers long enough (more than 5 minutes) you know things eventually do go wrong.

If you’re updating your cat’s blog and the process fails – who cares (ok, except Snuggles)? It’s a cat blog, not your livelihood. But if you’re updating a business site that supports your business as a marketing asset or actually is your whole business – can you afford to be down for an hour, three or maybe even a few days? What if you’re updating a site for a client? Is “let’s hope for the best” gonna cut it? Probably not!

[box type=”light right”]It seems unreasonable to risk prolonged periods of down time if you can almost eliminate the risk for $55 /month.[/box]

Paying $55 per month (that’s the average price across all services we analysed) is like insurance. If everything goes well (and it probably will), it’s sort of “wasted money”. But, if anything goes south, even a little it’s a minuscule price to pay to get it fixed. The monthly fee is in most cases lower than a one-off fix fee! Bottom line – if a site means anything to you, leave the maintenance to professionals and spend your time doing business, not wrangling code and obscure bugs.

[tweet]Avg monthly price for #WordPress maintenance services is $55. Well worth it, if you ask us.[/tweet]

I do my own maintenance as good as they do!

While doing WordPress maintenance is not brain surgery it’s still a job that can be done in an amateurish way (politely said) or a professional one. If you see yourself in the latter group that means you:
a) are a seasoned WP professional with years of experience in various scheduled and unscheduled (urgent) tasks ranging from DNS issues to plugin compatibility problems
b) have plenty of free time, more-less always and value your work at around $20 per hour

How did we get to $20 per hour? The average cost of monthly maintenance is $55. If the company spends a bare minimum of 2 hours per month on your site (and with “small fixes” often offered for free they can spend a lot more), it means they charge 20-ish dollars per hour. Hence, that work can be outsourced and done for the said amount, despite you thinking that your time is much more valuable. It may be, but in this case, people are willing to do it for less, so that’s the market value.

[box type=”light left”]If you’re taking care of your site, and especially if it’s more than one site do yourself a favour – realistically calculate how much is that costing you.[/box]

You could be charging $100 per hour for doing some other work, but you’re not. You are doing maintenance instead and losing money. To make matters worse if this kind of work is not your speciality it means it takes you a lot longer for the same task than somebody who is highly specialised in maintenance related work. At some point, you’ll have to invest in some tools and plugins, so you’ll waste even more money. When dissected, “saving money” all of a sudden turns into “losing money”. So, if you’re taking care of your site, and especially if it’s more than one site do yourself a favour – calculate how much it costs you. Be fair to yourself while crunching those numbers.

[tweet]Doing #WordPress maintenance & fixes on your own probably means you’re losing money[/tweet]

WordPress technical support & more than just maintenance

Although the focus of this roundup is maintenance if you look at any of the listed companies’ websites you quickly realise they offer more than just maintenance. In fact, for the (often low) monthly price many offer so much more that we don’t quite understand how’s financially feasible for them.

“Unlimited small fixes” is something you’ll often find and as ambiguous as “small fix” is we’ll assume that these support providers will assist you with practically any WordPress issue besides building a new site. Some even offer free migrations. So if you’re looking for technical support for WordPress and thinking of hiring a freelancer to help you, think twice before doing that. Getting a monthly support/maintenance service for a few months might be a lot cheaper and a more pleasant experience.

[tweet]Avg price for a (small) one-off #WordPress site fix is $58. Monthly rates are cheaper![/tweet]

How to find the best WordPress maintenance service?

Finding the best company that will take care of your WordPress site isn’t that easy. Although most of them offer the same basic package, details like price and specific services vary. If you take the time to look deeper you’ll realise a lot of these “companies” are a one-man-band operation. We value their efforts! But there’s only so much one person can do and sooner or later he needs to sleep so having at least a few people available is a huge plus. We didn’t include any company size data because there’s no way to verify it.

Another “thing” we stumbled upon is a lot of name changing. One could call it rebranding but honestly, it’s just changing the service name and domain. There’s nothing wrong with that but if you visit bestdogfood.com and send them an email, and they reply from bestcatfood.com it doesn’t instil confidence in their services.

How did we test the companies?

After gathering the data available from their sites, we tested their response times and general demeanour when addressing potential customers. So, we came up with a simple email that we sent to each company on the list. Here’s the original email:

Hi, 
My name is Ivan, and I run a personal travel blog for about a year now.

So far, I haven’t had many problems, but for the last month or so, my site has been loading quite slowly. I noticed the changes myself, and people have started complaining about it and yet some popular plugins I’ve tried haven’t helped me much.

I was interested if I subscribe to your monthly plan, would you be able to speed up my blog and solve several other issues that I’ve been experiencing?

Can you also tell me where are you from? I want to make sure that you can help me with the blog at any time during my working hours.

Thank you for your time, 
Ivan

[box type=”light right”]Some companies have automated email responses which we didn’t consider. We were interested in emails sent by actual support agents.[/box]

All emails were sent around 2pm GMT+1 time. Yes, that might seem unfair because it’s normal business time for some companies and the middle of the night for others. However, problems with sites happen all the time so, 2am or 2pm – it’s not really an excuse. Also, since we didn’t know where most of the companies were located we couldn’t customize the sending time to be more friendly. We also hope that emails are prioritised so things like “my site is down” are taken care of before everything else.

As emails started coming back, we noted down the exact time it took them to respond. Those response times, as well as complete emails, are available in the table. As you can see most companies really did their best to describe what they offer and were more than polite. Some, on the other hand, replied with a very short email.

Please note that many companies are available for live chat and phone calls. Contacting them through those channels will surely give us a faster response, but we wanted a uniformed approach for all test subjects.

[box type=”light”]There are NO affiliate, referral or sponsored links of any kind in this article. So, click away ;)[/box]

Find the best WordPress maintenance company for your needs

[box type=”light visible-xs”]Unfortunately our tools for filtering maintenance companies are not optimised for small screens such as the one you’re using right now. Please open the article on a bigger screen to fully utilise our tools.[/box]

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Recommend me someone!

Sorry, don’t have a crystal ball to do that (as we don’t know any details about your needs) but we’ll give you an easy recipe. Filter companies by location. That will provide you with some choices in your timezone, which, we believe, is crucial. Write an email with what you need and expect; be as specific as possible. Send the very same email to all companies. Be sure to ask if they provide a 24/7 service or what their hours are. Based on their responses you’ll end up with two, maybe three companies. Chose the one that you like the most or let the price be the deciding factor.

[tweet]Doing #WordPress maintenance on your own? Do it smart! Ensure visitors don’t see a broken site[/tweet]

If you decide to do maintenance on your own that’s fine; many people do. Just remember that it’s a chore like any other. If neglected or not done at all it’ll come back to bite you big time at the worst possible time. Be smart, make backups, keep things updated and install a maintenance mode plugin while you’re doing work so that visitors don’t see your site broken.