Back in the day, I would have never thought I would be coming back to WordPress as my primary base of website design and development.

As a newbie to entrepreneurship, starting out on my own, eyes wide open to the wonders of pursuing my own passion in helping individuals and companies with their tech, IT, and cybersecurity needs, I’ve always had the issue of putting time into the design and development of a website.

“What a time sink,” I always catch myself saying.

It came down to Wix or WordPress. Who wouldn’t be lured by the prospect of not having to code, no need for updates, and yet still being able to retain your individual flair when building a website?

We started with Wix

I was so baited. Thanks to the “work smarter, and not harder” attitude that is etched into my bones from spending 13 years in hospitality, I went with Wix.

Six months down the road with Wix, I realized I had not made the smartest choice. Basing my decision on the assumption that I would have everything in my arsenal to get a website up and running quickly without paying a single cent more for apps was nothing but a fantasy.

The functionality was there, yes, but the apps’ inability to talk to one another left a bad taste in my mouth. That, and if I wished to do something more like SEO or and website security, I was pretty much left hanging.

I had to look for a new solution — and quickly.

Switching things up

So, I switched to WordPress obviously. Now we have control. A little too much control, even. But after more learning and a few weeks later, a new problem arrived.

With two new team members, we were certainly not going to spend time manually clicking on WordPress plugins and its core software and update it.

Or performing backups twice to different places: that was more time spent, and that means more money wasted.

Again, it came down to two options.

Sidenote: Why are we at crossroads when it comes down to brands and products that start with the same letter? First the “W’s”, and now, the “M’s”.

Ok, back to it. One option was self-hosted and the other was in the cloud.

Obviously, when you are a small startup, you need to save more money. And a self-hosted solution presents a lot more problems.

Yes, you get lifetime updates, at a lifetime price; but we would still need to assign a team member and allow time to manage the server and troubleshoot issues for the server that the management software is sitting on.

We run an IT and cybersecurity business, so we are already doing that for our clients. We don’t need to burden ourselves with yet another server.

Time is money, as they say. So, we needed to spend time on our core business and not maintaining our own server for managing client websites.

That just does not make sense, even for a control freak. There are only so many hours in a day.

That was why we decided to go with ManageWP.

ManageWP just makes sense

Website maintenance and WordPress suddenly became a lot more attractive.

With ManageWP, we get to automate so many basic tasks like updates, backups, uptime and performance monitoring, and even SEO ranking! All at once, and not manually or individually.

Cost savings

Alright, now you must be thinking: “I can pay a virtual assistant (VA) to do the updating, backup, etc. Why pay ManageWP?”

Well, can you find a VA that is willing to work for $1/hour to manage 20 websites? And to take about 30 minutes to 1 hour for each website to complete all those tasks manually? AND provide a report?

And to do that daily or even weekly?

Even if you are not too good at math, you can come to terms with the fact that even at $8/month (for all the plugins for one website), you are saving yourself a ton of billable hours you’d spend on a VA.

Why take money from your client, just to bleed out when you hire help – to help your clients?

Yet another no-brainer as to why ManageWP is going to be your rockstar.

Security monitoring

Worried about the security of your website? You should be.

Online criminals are doubling down on hindering individuals and SMBs from operating normally.

With built-in scans, ManageWP covers our first layer of security.

Next, backups make up the second layer of your company’s cybersecurity plan.

The general rule of a good backup, be it for computers or websites, is the 3-2-1 rule: 3 copies, 2 different media, 1 off-site (not on the same server as your website)

That is also the reason why we don’t ever recommend our clients to use the same server for emails and their website, as a website is another entry point for cyber threats.

Incremental backups are the best way to go. Yes, you are no longer monitoring the process, but you won’t want to slow your website down by having it make full copies.

Frequency of backups? Monthly to hourly. Pick one.

Did I mention the 90-day retention period of your backups? The benefits just keep coming.

In this day and age, you would think everyone who has a website and a company would have all this in place.

Surprise! Less than 40% of SMBs actually do have processes like this in place. When disaster strikes, make sure you have a partner like ManageWP or an agency that uses their solution to aid your company.

Downtime help

Cost savings and security are not the only things ManageWP have helped us with. Site downtime can cause your business to lose money. When your employees and clients don’t have access to critical data, they can’t do their work, and that means bye-bye moolah.

Without ManageWP, I don’t think that we would have reached this point in time where we can focus more on growing our business as opposed to micro-managing low-value tasks for our clients.

Final thoughts

The key takeaway for us is how much time that we save by being efficient with our processes.

And as an advocate of how technology can help us all to increase our productivity, ManageWP has scored a really high 5-stars from us, just by helping out with these time-consuming, yet vital tasks.

We can see that they are listening to the community in how the product evolves, too. Best practices like making a backup before any updates? Built-in.

In the future, we are confident that we will definitely see them making giant leaps in further assisting us in the way we manage our websites.

Our parting words are these: don’t get left behind. Get tomorrow’s technology, today.