Best WordPress Support Site

Having decent WordPress support is important for anyone with their business on the platform. In our post about WooCommerce Help we listed ways to look after your site including: Doing it yourself, getting your developers on a maintenance contract or using a support service. Now we’re going to look at how to find the best WordPress support!

The support services for WordPress have multiplied this year and it’s hard to know which one to recommend. We’ve put together a poll below to get some feedback about which service is best. Please vote below. There is also a button to view results of the poll.

If you have any further feedback please leave a note in the comments.

What do these support sites do?

They all have a variation upon the following features:

• Regular Updates to plugins and themes
• Core updates
• Fixes under 30mins / 1hr
• Domain / Hosting issues
• Regular backups
• Phone / Email support
• Security scans
• Migrations

There are also claims on many for performance optimisation and search engine optimisation. We think these claims need to be substantiated with a little more. What would that actually involve. Pro Tip: Installing Yoast WordPress SEO is not enough!

Where did they come from?

In the last few years there have been a number of WordPress support sites crop up across the internet.

The first support service to gain prominence was WP Curve. The founder Dan Norris made a name for himself sharing his entrepreneurial spirit and ideas about productizing services. Since then there have been a number of similar sites and many in the same mold.

The question is, are they worth it and which offers the best service. Let us know in the poll and comments.

There is a fantastic blog post by Brian Krogsgard about the rise of these maintenance services. Worth reading.

Advice to get the best support response

The most important elements to getting good support is to set your expectations from the start. In particular to three main facets of any paid work:

• Speed
• Quality
• Low Cost

You can pick only two! So, if you need the project completed ‘by yesterday’ then you can expect to pay a premium for it.

I would also suggest a thought about cost. Because we are so used to the app and plugin marketplaces it can be easy to de-value the cost involved in development.

This is an example of the support requests I’ve received in my time: “I’ve bought a plugin off codecanyon for $50 and I need to customise about half of the plugin so I think that you should do that for $25.”

A developers rate vary between $150 – 600 so try and use that as a guage of the development and support costs rather than the value of products in the marketplace.

I’ve explored some of these ideas in another article about how much does an e-commerce website cost.