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.
Migrating off ManageWP: a checklist that doesn't lose a backup
A step-by-step checklist for leaving ManageWP without ever leaving a client site without a verified, restorable backup.
ManageWP vs MainWP vs WP Umbrella vs WPClientHub: what 25, 50 and 100 sites cost
What ManageWP, MainWP, WP Umbrella and WPMU DEV list publicly at 25, 50 and 100 sites, with the arithmetic shown and the assumptions stated.
From freelancer to agency: the systems you need before site 25
Before site 25, build four systems in order: a site record, a standard care routine, recurring billing and a single front door for client requests.
SSL expiry, domain expiry, DNS drift: the outages nobody monitors
Certificates, domain registrations and DNS records fail rarely and completely, so give each renewal a named owner and keep a one-page expiry register.
PHP upgrades across 60 sites without a weekend of rollbacks
Inventory your sites, sort them into three lanes, upgrade in batches of ten and define your rollback trigger first, so PHP upgrades stop eating weekends.
Turning forty signals into one health score (and why worst-first sorting matters)
A site health score is a triage tool, and its value comes from weighting by consequence and sorting your whole portfolio worst-first.
Core Web Vitals for client sites: the three numbers to track monthly
Track LCP, INP and CLS on the same three pages per client site each month, and decide in advance which movement triggers a closer look.
The real cost of per-site pricing for WordPress management tools
Per-site pricing looks cheap at 10 sites and punishing at 100. We run the actual numbers across the major tools and show exactly where the curves cross.
Where should your WordPress backups actually live?
Vendor-cloud backups are convenient — until you churn, they have an outage, or a client asks where their data actually is. The case for storage you own.
White-label reports: what to brand, and what to leave alone
Brand the cover, the header and the sign-off, but leave every measurement exactly as recorded, and put one decision on page one of every monthly client report.
A maintenance checklist your clients will actually pay for
Clients don’t pay for "maintenance." They pay for visible, verifiable work. A concrete weekly/monthly/quarterly checklist that survives the "what am I paying for?" email.
Dunning for agencies: recovering failed care-plan payments without awkward emails
Failed care-plan payments are usually expired cards, not lost clients, so a short, polite recovery sequence protects revenue and the relationship.
Safe WordPress updates: screenshots, diffs, and rollbacks explained
Restore point → update → screenshot → pixel diff → verdict. What actually happens inside a safe-update pipeline, and where each step can lie to you.