Don’t Make Problems Worse: Avoid These 7 Obstacles to WordPress Support

Keep an eye out for these mistakes and warning signs – you might make your support issue get worse before it gets better!

Every business’s website is the core of its digital presence. If you’re a web agency or developer, you have to deliver a consistent experience across every user touchpoint. Your business clients will look to you to identify, address, and resolve issues across every aspect of the web experience.

If you’re running your own agency that means that you’ll find yourself responding to questions from clients. Many of these will be urgent. Responding to them will often take a great deal of time and energy. Make sure you don’t fall into one of the seven traps that await WordPress agencies who do their own support.

7 Things to Avoid When Performing Support Work for Clients

If you don’t have your own White label WordPress development team providing support service to your clients, the responsibility for handling support tasks falls on your shoulders. You may not know what the problem is or how to solve it at first – but make sure you don’t make any of these mistakes while troubleshooting the solution.

1. Waiting for Paid Support Teams

Some WordPress support agencies will have you wait days (or weeks!) for a tech support solution. If you are already paying for WordPress support, you should not have to wait this long.

Any agency that takes this long to adequately resolve a support request is either overworked or underprepared. In the first scenario, they take longer than expected to complete tech support tasks because they don’t have access to scalable resources and expertise. In the second, they simply don’t know how to fix the problem, and make you pay while they learn how.

Neither one of these is good for your agency’s reputation or your client’s business. You need a white label WordPress development support team that will respond to your needs promptly and get tech support tasks done on-time.

2. Supporting Pay-Per-Ticket WordPress Support Services

Paid WordPress support offers a reliable solution for providing businesses with scalable tech support services for their websites. However, the system you use to pay for those services can make a major difference in the quality of service you earn.

One popular method is the pay-per-ticket system, which has web agencies paying their support provider for every individual support ticket they address. The problem with this approach is that it incentivizes the support team to close tickets even if they aren’t completely addressed. At its worst, support teams may charge for incomplete work, knowing that clients will call in again – and trigger another charge.

When looking for a good WordPress tech support provider, prioritize vendors that offer unlimited WordPress tasks over those that stick to the pay-per-ticket model.

3. Getting Bad Information from YouTube

YouTube is undoubtedly a useful platform, but it’s not well-suited to the needs of WordPress professionals looking for tech support. There are thousands of videos on WordPress development subjects on the platform, but it’s almost impossible to tell which one of them applies to your specific use case.

Every WordPress site runs on unique layers of plugins and data. What works for one website owner may not work for another. With YouTube, you may spend hours searching through videos that almost hit the mark, just to find out that nobody can help you with your specific problem.

4. Getting Worse Information from Strangers on Forums

Forums offer a better content factor than YouTube because it’s easier to skim a forum post than a 10-minute video. If you’re a fast reader, you can figure out whether a particular forum thread is relevant to your situation or not.

The problem with forums (which applies to YouTube as well) is that there’s no way to tell how competent the people giving advice truly are. If twenty WordPress users are trying to solve a technical problem on a forum, it’s entirely likely that not a single one has the professional experience necessary to solve the problem on their own – otherwise, they wouldn’t be on the forum in the first place.

5. Relying On Techy Friends & Family Members

Everyone has a few friends who “get” technology. Even web agency owners may have a few people who play a close role advising their usual day-to-day technology concerns. However, relying on friends to handle WordPress support isn’t sustainable. These jobs take a lot of work, and your unpaid support team members will eventually decide they’ve helped you enough.

Yes, your friends probably do have some relevant knowledge. If they have experience running a WordPress blog, it may even be useful knowledge. But putting that knowledge into practice takes work, and you’ll be doing enough of it to warrant paying for it.

6. Ignoring the Problem

Some web agency owners will immediately jump into action to solve a technical problem with their clients’ website. Others will take their time before responding, assuming that the problem may simply go away on its own over time. Business owners do not typically respond well to this approach.

However, this situation may come about in another way. You may be aware of a problem that your client isn’t. It might seem easier to let it slide and pretend there’s nothing wrong, but it’s virtually guaranteed to impact your reputation someday. That day may be years down the line, but it may matter more at that point than it does now.

7. Trying to Fix Something Before You Know How

It may be tempting to try to fix the problem before you’re sure exactly how to go about it, but this is a risky endeavor. You may end up making it worse, and turning a small problem into a large one. Unless you have a solid background performing WordPress maintenance and development tasks, you will want to outsource to an expert.

Even if you do have a solid background in WordPress development and maintenance, it still may not make sense to do all the work on your own. The time it will take for you to study the problem and identify a solution is time you could spend interacting with clients, building relationships, and earning more revenue for your business.

High-Quality WordPress Support and Maintenance is a Must-Have

As a web agency or a business that performs its own WordPress tasks, you want to make sure your digital presence is always up and running. A compromised website can damage your reputation and drive customers away. Make sure your company is ready to handle any technical issues that come its way with white label WordPress development support from UnlimitedWP.