June 24, 2020 by Editor Team Leave a Comment Interview With Steven Watts in 2021, Founder of Newt Labs, the Leading WordPress Support Services Creating a website in WordPress and keeping it up to date sometimes becomes challenging for many entrepreneurs. Site’s loading speed, security, and other maintenance issues are always important, and they can impact your audience’s impression anytime as well as can hurt ranking in search engines. Here arises the necessity of expert suggestions. Today we have Steven with us to give you a guide from his experience. Steven is the founder of Newt Labs, one of the leading WordPress support services. Newt Labs is a remote team of WordPress support professionals who are always there to provide solutions related to WordPress site fixes and security. They also offer all in one support services from hosting to development to ensure the smoothest site experience to their clients’ audiences. From this conversation, we will know top tips for choosing the best support service for websites, how their services are different from others, and trying to fetch the best advice from him. You can get more of Steven Watts from the Newt Labs blog or catch him on twitter, @bboywattsy. Hello Steven, Thank You So Much for Taking Some Time Out of Your Busy Schedule for Us. Could You Please Tell Us About the Starting of Your Career? How Did You Come Up to Choose WordPress? Learning how to build a static website and then looking for ways to allow prospective clients to edit their content for the sites I built led me to WordPress and some of the other content management systems out there. WordPress came out on top due to being the most user friendly and with its low barrier to entry it had me editing the template files such as header.php and footer.php to weave in my html going from a static site to a dynamic one in next to no time. From there I started building sites directly into WordPress and went on to learn about things like custom fields and before I knew it I was providing clients with unique user-friendly websites. How Do You Come Up With the Idea of Newt Labs? Why Do You Feel That Expert Support and Maintenance is Necessary for WordPress Websites? Many of my clients needed hosting and WordPress update maintenance and help with other technical aspects such as backups after they had their sites built. I was building sites and looking after them on the side whilst working full time for a web development agency. As I built more sites this became unsustainable and so I decided to focus on one thing and do it really well so I quit my job, stopped building as many sites, and focused on support, maintenance, security, and hosting for existing clients. And I also offered this service for new clients that already had a site built. WordPress needs to enable its users to edit and build out its content or focus on growing their business. By providing a WordPress support and maintenance service we enable our clients to do exactly that without anything technical getting in the way. Imagine having peace of mind knowing that your site is up to date, secure and effective, and if anything were to happen or if any questions arise you know exactly who to turn to. That’s Newt Labs in a nutshell. Could You Please Tell Our Readers What Features Are Important While Choosing Expert Support and Managing Service? WordPress support for fixes, help and advice, testing of updates, backups, and security monitoring are the core services I would advise looking for. If you’ve got a decent amount of traffic and your site is working well for you then I also advise going for WordPress optimised cloud hosting to help speed up and provide your site visitors with the best possible experience. If a site care service offers all of these then you can rest assured that all of your technical aspects are handled in one place and you know exactly who to turn to when needed. How Does the Newt Labs Team Ensure the Great Performance for the User’s Website? To be honest, it’s mostly down to hosting, we use state of the art servers and optimize them for WordPress using the latest technologies and things like server-level caching. If you’ve got a slow site this is the first place I would look to as it is most likely to make the biggest difference and will give you a good foundation to build upon. In addition to things like hosting, functionality, and cleaning up plugins we also do routine tasks such as cleaning out and optimizing the database. We actually have an infographic, which will give you a good idea of how to get started with speeding up your WordPress site. Whom Do You Provide the Service More? What Type of Customer Does Mainly Ask for the Services and What Problem Do They Face Most Before Getting the Service? Our target audience compromises of business owners and content managers. People that don’t want WordPress getting in the way of their vision and work efforts. I would say that security is one of their biggest concerns, that and peace of mind knowing that everything is looked after as best it can be whilst they focus on doing the work they love. Can You Tell Us Which One Service Differentiates Newts Labs From Other Maintenance Services? Good question. I actually have my own term for the service we provide. You may have heard of managed hosting, well we go one step further with what I call fully managed hosting; not only do we host WordPress sites but we also provide all of the things you would expect from a site care service such as fixes, updates, and security monitoring. From an agency background of using collaborative tools such as version control and working with a highly established client base, our focus has been on doing everything manually such as testing WordPress core, theme, and plugin updates locally. Then testing them on staging and finally rolling them out on the live site to ensure everything is fully tested and any potential nasty surprises are minimized, whereas other site care agencies may just click the update button in ManageWP and then check if there are any issues directly on the live site..! How Do You Help Your Clients With Best Practices Such as the Management, Security, and Hosting of Their Websites? Ok, so we basically just do everything for them, this is the fully managed WordPress approach I touched on just now. Obviously there can be extra costs and clients may not want to step up to a more comprehensive plan, for example, they want to stick with their current host and not opt for a cloud firewall, and that’s fine as long as we educate and help find what will work best for them. As we’re keeping on top of updates and monitoring for security some sites can get away with not having an extra layer of protection such as a firewall as we are already doing enough to keep hackers at bay and as a large number of backups are in place. We can easily roll back should the worst happen, but it’s about realizing how your site visitors will handle the event should anything happen – are they happy to be patient whilst the site is down, or will they lose all trust and abandon ship. There’s actually a lot to think about when it comes to things like website security and having processes in place should the worst happen. By making sure our prospective clients are fully aware of everything that can happen and the services we provide they can choose to take advantage of all of it, some of it or none of it. Education is key! How Easily Can Site Owners Get Support From Newt Labs? All they need to do is email us on our support address, which goes into a ticketing system so we can respond and track the issue until it’s resolved. We don’t do phone support as we don’t want to be running around putting out fires and never actually getting anything done. By answering support tickets in-between jobs we are very productive and end up exceeding our clients expectations. Of course, if a site goes down clients need to get in touch with us right away so we have live chat for that. We also have uptime monitoring so if a site goes down we’ve usually resolved any issues before the client or their site visitors even realize. So, What is Your Future Plan With Newt Labs? What Should Users Expect From Newt Labs in the Future? We’re always looking to add value for our clients, such as providing access to premium plugins and increasing the number of features. Currently, we’re working on making the business more scalable and efficient so we can get more done in less time, grow our business, and provide our service to as many people as possible. We’re currently moving our hosted sites to new servers to test and roll out the very latest version of Ubuntu. But once that’s done we’re thinking about consolidating some of our higher-tiered packages to make things simpler and more streamlined for prospective clients such as simply having site care with or without hosting and nothing in-between. I’m sure we’ll have more plans in the future to help our clients and we stay ahead of the curve so watch this space..! What is Your Top Advice for the New Web Site Owners Who Are Using WordPress for Their Business? Stop tinkering around and just launch it. You can always make it look pretty later, it’s the content/service/product people are after so if you have an idea just go with it and get some feedback. Once you’ve proved there’s a need for what you’re offering then you can start thinking about adding features and taking it to the next level! If you’re new to WordPress be sure to check out our free email course which points you in the right direction such as joining the WordPress community, finding support, and putting things into place to help make your site secure and effective. Wrapping Up Waiting for the perfect time is not an option when you have a great idea of the content, product, or service. Steven encourages you to start. And he stated, “once you’ve proved there’s a need for what you’re offering, then you can start thinking about adding features.” And in this process, experts are always there to help you. When it comes to security and support, an expert service that will provide all at the same time is much better than searching for other options. This could help you to reduce the extra pressure, and you can focus on your growth. It is challenging to find the best support and maintenance service, as you will depend on them. Sometimes it gets costly, but if a site care service offers all of the core services, you can rest assured that all of your technical aspects are handled in one place. Have a look at the Newt Labs support services, follow Steven on Twitter, and read the Newt Labs blog to learn more from the expert. 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