Relieving The Pain Of Self-Managed WordPress

I used to manage a server. And it kept me up at night. I worried about the software. I worried whether all of my tools were up-to-date. I had to come running if something went awry (which happens with technology, because, well, it’s technology).

I was trying to build and run a growing digital agency, and there I was managing a WordPress server, fighting fires, and wasting valuable time on tasks other than designing killer sites for my clients. I was doing work that a) wasn’t advancing our business, and b) wasn’t driving revenue. It was work that, to be frank, wasn’t worth doing.

Our goal at Saucal is to design beautiful websites that attract new business to our clients. That promise was tough to deliver on when I was managing our server.

Then one of our clients was hacked. I stayed up through the night fixing it. That was the breaking point. I knew there had to be a better way.

After shopping around to find a solution (and to relieve the stress of managing the servers myself) we found WP Engine. After a call with a member of WP Engine’s sales team, we moved to WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting platform.

And the difference is night and day.

The first thing I noticed is that WP Engine knows WordPress cold. You won’t find that anywhere else. Other platform providers are generalists. They don’t know WordPress, they simply say they do. You’d be hard pressed to find another company that knows WordPress inside and out like WP Engine does. It’s that expertise and that core competence that helps WP Engine offer the amazing support we’ve come to expect in the more than two years we’ve hosted our site and several customer sites on the platform.

Along with incredible support, we get a terrific user experience. Staging helps us design sites before pushing them to production, so we can ensure they’re perfect before deploying. And the availability of both automated and on-demand backups give us peace of mind that we’re not going to lose our hard work and we can restore to any point we choose. And the UI is simple and intuitive, it makes adding customers and additional staff to access the install a breeze.

If you’re anything like me, you used to hate migrating WordPress sites. It was a time-consuming, complicated hassle. A migration could take us on average two to three hours. That’s no longer the case with the WP Engine Automated Migration plugin, which automatically migrates a WordPress site to WP Engine’s platform with just a few clicks. It’s whittled our migration time down to between five and 10 minutes—really just the setup time.  This time savings allows us to onboard more customers faster, and focus on what we do best: start building sites.

And unlimited transferable developer installs let us work on any number of client sites we want without incurring additional hosting costs. It saves us a bundle and lets us scale. These installs are also great for experiments.

Sure, it sounds cliché to say we want a platform that just works; but WP Engine just works. And it works out of the box without any of the headaches.

It’s a time saver. It’s a money saver. And it’s a morale booster because our dev team loves it too. In fact, one of the first questions our developers ask when working with new customers is: “Is the site on WP Engine?”

Hosting no longer has to take up space in my mind; I can focus on other things. WP Engine lets Saucal do what we do best, which is create amazing, revenue-driving sites for our clients. It’s a platform that always makes us look good and lets us focus on our customers. And the WP Engine platform is scalable, meaning we know when we and our customers grow, WP Engine can grow with us.

And on top of all that, we have no more hacked sites. That lifts a huge weight off of my shoulders. We know our sites, and our customers’ sites, are safe.

Mitchell is founder and COO of Saucal