Field notes for WordPress agencies
Pricing math, backup architecture, care-plan economics, and the engineering under safe updates — written by the team building the tool.
The quarterly client review: 20 minutes that stops churn
Care-plan clients leave after quiet months, not disasters. A 20-minute quarterly review with five numbers and three questions catches it, and the maths on who gets a call versus a note.
Reading a plugin changelog for risk before you hit update
A four-minute routine for reading a plugin changelog, the words that should slow you down, and a Batch / Canary / Hold sort that decides how each update runs across 60 client sites.
The incident post-mortem your client should actually get
When a client incident earns a written post-mortem, the six parts it needs, what to leave out, and why the 45 minutes pays for itself on a $150/month care plan.
Plugin sprawl: auditing 60 client sites for abandoned plugins
Closed plugins keep running on every site that has them. A 60-site audit in five steps: inventory, de-duplicate, check each slug, classify, act. Inactive installs first.
Malware cleanup: bake it into the care plan or bill per incident?
A cleanup is 3 to 8 hours of unplanned work. Here is the arithmetic for pricing it per incident, as a retainer at about $10 a site, or as a hybrid, plus the contract clauses.
WordPress 7.2 for client sites: what to test before you update 40 of them
Beta 1 is out, the final is due 8 December. Here is what changes for client sites, which five items to test, and how to update 40 sites in a week without a Christmas rollback.
Uptime SLAs you can actually promise on shared vs. VPS hosting
What 99.9% means in minutes, what WP Engine, Kinsta and Hosting.com actually commit to in their SLAs, and the care-plan clause you can sign without betting your margin on a server you don't run.
Backup retention: how many restore points a care plan really needs
Seven daily backups don't survive the day-sixteen phone call. The three retention windows a care plan needs, what a year of restore points costs across 60 sites, and how to write it into the plan.
WPClientHub is on Product Hunt today: what it does, and what it doesn't yet
WPClientHub launches on Product Hunt today. What is live, what is not live yet, what it costs with the arithmetic, and how to test it on your two worst client sites.
Staging vs. no staging: which care-plan sites actually need it
Staging every site costs about 25 extra minutes per site per update round. A three-bucket rule for which care-plan sites earn staging, and what the rest get instead.
PHP 8.2 loses security patches on 31 December: a Q4 audit for your client portfolio
PHP 8.2 leaves security support on 31 Dec 2026 and about 62% of WordPress sites run 8.2 or older. A six-column audit, a target version, and a ten-week calendar for 60 sites.
Client portal vs. email: why agencies end up with a ticket queue
Email support breaks in a predictable order as an agency grows. Here is where, what a client portal changes, and when plain email is still enough.
Leaving a self-hosted MainWP dashboard: what you gain and what you give up
An honest ledger of what a hosted dashboard gives you over self-hosted MainWP, what you lose, and a four-question test to decide.