MANAGED HOSTING FOR WORDPRESS

Transforming an Agency Business Model for Growth Without Growing Pains

Australian digital agency MyWork uses its partnership with WP Engine to scale operations and transform its business model from cheap and basic to reliable and responsive.

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Site:

https://mywork.com.au/

Industry:

Web agency

"Hosting our clients’ sites on WP Engine is something we actively promote on our website. We name-drop WP Engine on purpose because it’s got such a good reputation in the industry.”

—Dan Brett, Owner & Managing Director, MyWork

6

Core agency team members

1,000+

Active client sites maintained by MyWork on WP Engine

20+

Average increase in Google PageSpeed scores for client sites after migrating to WP Engine

The Client

Brisbane-based agency MyWork has been designing and developing websites using WordPress®^[1] for businesses of all types and sizes since 2009.

The full-service agency and WP Engine Agency Partner provides everything a company needs to bring a digital presence from nonexistent to an efficient growth engine, including initial website design, specialized eCommerce and marketing services, and ongoing site support and maintenance.

The Challenge

Scale operations, elevate offerings, optimize workflows, and improve client experiences while maintaining a lean agency team.

The Solution

Move all clients to a small handful of trusted providers, including WP Engine’s Managed Hosting Platform for WordPress, where MyWork now maintains more than 1,000 individual client sites.

The Results

For MyWork, partnering with WP Engine marked a turning point in the agency’s ability to deliver reliable, high-performing websites while scaling operations efficiently.

Although MyWork's switch was initially in response to a crisis, it has since become a core component of its business model, enabling MyWork to serve more clients, optimize agency efficiency, and strengthen existing client relationships.

Reliability that inspires trust

For nearly a decade, MyWork self-hosted its clients. During that time, they informed customers of the risks of self-hosting and encouraged many to migrate to cloud hosting, recognizing that a single failure had the potential to wipe out client sites on a large scale.

Unfortunately, that catastrophic failure event came to pass in 2018, forcing the agency to rebuild both the thousands of lost customer sites and the trust that had fractured with those clients.

“It wasn't our particular server that had a vulnerability, but it was one of the others in the network. As a result, several of our servers got hacked, and all the websites went down.

"We suddenly had thousands of customers without websites and no way of getting backups. At the same time, our technical director happened to be overseas in Germany, so not great timing,” said MyWork Owner and Managing Director Dan Brett.

“We decided rather than just doing what we had been doing, we were going to go all in on cloud hosting and managed cloud hosting, move all those websites, and rebuild them on WordPress and WP Engine. We haven’t had any such issues since we moved everybody to WP Engine; the proof is in the pudding,” said Dan.

Knowing that self-hosting was simply too difficult to maintain on a large scale moving forward, MyWork relied on WP Engine to provide the stability their clients expected, creating a foundation of trust that the agency could confidently build on.

That reliability also made conversations with clients easier. Even when legacy clients didn’t fully understand the technical details, they valued the peace of mind that came with knowing their websites would remain secure, accessible, and fast.

Operational efficiency for a small team

With a small team managing thousands of websites, efficiency is vital for MyWork. Specifically, WP Engine’s seamless migration process and Smart Plugin Manager tool have become cornerstones of efficiency.

The Site Migration Plugin has simplified client onboarding, allowing anyone on the team to handle migrations without specialized development expertise.

“The migration tool is so simple. You just install it on both ends and press go,” said Dan.

“So it saves a lot of time and a lot of resources that otherwise would have been put towards a more technical process. Now, anybody in the business can do a migration because it's so simple.”

MyWork’s business model provides each of its clients with one hour of development time per month, which clients can bank until the end of the year for a total of 12 hours of built-in development work per year. Those banked hours provide an opportunity to proactively reach out to clients with ideas for site optimizations or updates, many of which can be completed quickly with tools like WP Engine’s Smart Plugin Manager.

By automating updates, creating backups, and ensuring compatibility, Smart Plugin Manager reduces the risk of site breakage and frees up MyWork’s limited team resources.

“Smart Plugin Manager just makes the upkeep of plugins a lot easier,” Dan said.

“It’s following best practices, so you’re not leaving plugins for two or three years and then trying to do an update, and it breaks everything.”

These efficiencies add up. MyWork has continued to grow its client base and build trust with existing clients through these proactive conversations, without adding a tremendous amount of extra work to its lean team.

Performance that drives client success

Today, when MyWork onboards new clients to WP Engine’s Managed Hosting Platform for WordPress, they see immediate, measurable gains in website performance.

“We always quantify that in terms of a Google site speed test. We’re increasing clients’ websites from the points perspective on Google Page Speed from, say, hovering around 60 up to 80–90,” Dan explained.

Even clients who don’t fully understand the role of hosting in performance see the tangible benefits of their sites loading faster. For many clients, faster-loading sites directly translate into more traffic, better conversion rates, and increased business growth and visibility.

This improvement in performance and visibility is especially beneficial to the small and mid-sized businesses that make up the bulk of MyWork’s client portfolio.

A partner, not just a host

Instead of offering hosting as a standalone service, MyWork bundles it into every website and ongoing support package, ensuring clients receive reliable, high-performing hosting while creating a more predictable recurring revenue stream for the agency.

“We don’t really sell hosting as a separate service. The bread and butter core products we sell are all bundled in with hosting, and ongoing support is part of that,” Dan explained.

“That includes keeping client plugins up to date, which we do through Smart Plugin Manager. We package that into our cost.”

By baking WP Engine’s offerings into its pricing packages, MyWork ensures consistent client service and creates a more scalable, profitable agency business.

In the years since the disaster that prompted their switch, MyWork has both avoided similar issues and turned reliability, performance, and automation into competitive advantages. WP Engine has become a trusted partner in their growth, giving them the tools, support, and confidence to scale without sacrificing quality.

“If there's, say, a critical error on the website, I just jump onto the WP Engine support and the guys there will have a look. While we don't necessarily have a huge team ourselves to do those more technical tasks, having them there as a backup is fantastic because they're available 24/7, very knowledgeable, and always available within a couple of minutes,” said Brett.

“It’s certainly convenient when you've got clients panicking because they've lost an image they deleted yesterday or something like that.”

From boosting client site speed and hardening security to enabling a small team to manage thousands of sites, the results speak for themselves: MyWork has built a thriving business on the foundation of WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting.

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