June 20, 2020 by Editor Team Leave a Comment Interview With Ryan Sullivan, Founder of WP Site Care, the Leading WordPress Support and Maintenance Services In WPCity, we aim to empower business owners to build a powerful website and successful online business through our easy guides and recommendations on the best WordPress themes and plugins. And just as we emphasize on working with the best tools, we encourage having the best support services. This is why we have Ryan Sullivan with us. Ryan is not new to many. He is the brains behind WP Site Care, one of the leading WordPress support and maintenance services. WP Site Care is a team of WordPress experts who provide 24/7 malware scans and daily cloud backups. They are dedicated to helping website owners optimize their sites’ performance. We will learn what drove Ryan to offer WordPress support services, how his team is able to provide the best services to website owners, and see if we can source some advice from him. You can get more of Ryan from the WP Site Care blog or catch him on twitter, @ryandonsullivan. Hello Ryan, Thank You So Much for Taking Some Time Out From Your Busy Schedule for Us. Could You Please Tell Us About the Starting of Your Career? What Inspired You to Choose WordPress? I came up with traditional IT ranks. I started out working at a local internet service provider, then got certified and moved to IT for a small business. From there I started in Systems Administration and management at a health care company. During that time in health care, I was buried in the world of Microsoft servers and products and was looking for something more interesting and less frustrating. As a hobby, I started a blog and needed a platform for it, and I found WordPress. It was relatively simple to make small changes and eventually put together a pretty nice website. I didn’t think of WordPress in a business context at all at first. How Do You Come Up With the Idea of WP Site Care? Why Do You Feel That WordPress Support and Maintenance Service is Necessary for Online Entrepreneurs? After I felt really comfortable with WordPress, I started helping out friends with their blogs and websites. I started to notice something interesting. The same people kept coming back for help over and over again, and a subscription/retainer model made immediate sense to me. I was already super familiar with the model because Red Hat had been doing the same thing in the Linux world for a really long time, but I hadn’t seen it in WordPress yet. I knew the people I was helping were either too busy creating content, or simply had no desire to dedicate the time needed to learn the technical piece of managing their website. Could You Please Tell Our Readers What Support an Online Entrepreneur Should Expect When He Took a WordPress Support and Maintenance Service? I think about this question all the time. First and foremost I believe trust is priority number one. The technical pieces and deliverables are important, of course, but if there’s no trust, then there’s constant pushback and friction in the working relationship, which isn’t good for anyone. Someone looking for ongoing WordPress support should at the very least expect holistic website management including proactive management of plugins, themes, and WordPress itself, a rock-solid backup solution, malware protection and removal, and guidance and consultation from true WordPress pros. What Types of Support WP Site Care Gives to Site Owners and How Your Team Ensures the Quality of Support? I believe quality is what ultimately sets us apart from a lot of the competition. All of our team members go through a rigorous training and interview process, and we maintain custom documentation and knowledge bases for every single one of our clients. Every website has certain quirks and gotchas, and we share those internally for every single website we manage. We want to make sure clients get a consistent experience no matter who is working on their website. Whom Do You Provide the Support More? What Type of Customer Does Mainly Ask for the Support and What Problem Do They Face Most Before Getting the Service? The bulk of our clientbase is made up of three core groups: Freelance developers, publishers of all sizes, and marketing teams within larger companies. The range of support varies greatly but we’ve definitely seen a trend in eCommerce-related requests increasing. Even our publishers are starting to look at eCommerce for ways to diversify income from native advertising, and eCommerce isn’t easy, so we find ourselves working with that more and more. Your Company Provides Support for Different Problems of WordPress Related Sites. So What Difficulties Do You Face in Terms of Providing Support? Having talked to lots of other agency owners, I don’t think our challenges are unique. We’d like to get to a place where troubleshooting can happen on-demand and in real time with the client, but we rarely have that degree of bandwidth, and find that live troubleshooting can present its own challenges too. As far as process goes, there might be little improvements to make here and there, but we’ve been doing this long enough that we’ve ironed out most of our most pressing technical issues. How Easily and Quickly the Site Owners Can Get Support From WP Site Care? It’s easy. They send an email. They’ll hear back from us quickly. That’s it 🙂 From Your Experience Can You Share With Us the Most Common Mistakes WordPress Site Owners Make? Honestly, the most common issue I see that covers a lot of technical domains, is people going too far down the wrong path before asking for help. We see lots of people build elaborate DIY systems that are a nightmare to maintain, and it all could have been prevented had they asked for some guidance and asked questions from a team of pros at the beginning. Like asking how to replace the head gasket on a car engine when some new windshield wipers were all you really needed. So, What is Your Future Plan With WP Site Care? What Variety of Services Your Customer Would Expect From WP Site Care? We have some big things coming that we’ve been working on for well over a year. I can’t share too many details yet, but look for WP Site Care to take on all the day-to-day needs of website owners later this year! What is Your Top Advice for the New Online Entrepreneurs Who Just Are Using WordPress for Their Business? Source your materials from a trusted source. There are a lot of really poorly-built plugins and themes in the world, and starting with good products, even if a small initial investment is needed, will save you so much time and grief later on. Plant your garden with good seeds! And of course, sign up for WP Site Care 🙂 Winding Up In Ryan’s words, a common mistake among website owners is “going too far down the wrong path before asking for help.” Doing things the DIY way is not bad. But when you get stuck, ask for help. Investing in the services of an expert early enough could save you a lot of headaches in the future and prevent significant setbacks. You also get to focus on running the business and taking it to the next level, while the experts take care of the tech challenges. As you invest in top-notch support and maintenance services, ensure you are always using the best tools from a trusted source. Cheap plugins and themes may be friendly to your budget, but they could turn out to be expensive in the long run. Have a look at the WP Site Care support services, follow Ryan on Twitter, and read the WP Site Care blog to learn more from the expert. Read Other Interviews: Interview With Steven WattsInterview With Chris BadgettInterview With Kimberly LipariInterview With Jean-BaptisteInterview With Jan KochInterview With Maddy OsmanInterview With Alex PanagisInterview With Adrian SpiacInterview With Bard WilliamsInterview With Scott BolingerInterview With Robert AbelaInterview With Dave MacdonaldInterview With Ashan JayInterview With Mikko Saari
