Imagine that you are working on an important project for one of your biggest clients. Suddenly, your team must stop working on it and urgently deal with problems caused by hackers on a small client’s website.
Nobody likes working in emergency mode. However, without an adequate operational strategy, when a customer’s site is under attack or crashes due to a failed update, you must rush to take emergency action.
This approach may be a serious obstacle to your agency’s growth because it distracts your team from your core business. It reveals the lack of a clear growth strategy. It can cause loss of income and business opportunities, reduce productivity, and undermine the trust between your agency and your clients.
Switching from firefighting to future-proofing can help your business grow and make your workflow more efficient and reliable. This post aims to help you understand the differences between the reactive approach (fighting problems as they arise) and the proactive approach (getting ready for the future). You will learn how moving from the former to the latter approach can prepare your business for success.
The proactive approach to future-proofing: what it is and what it does
A future-proofing strategy requires a careful analysis of risks and opportunities, as well as proactive planning of the necessary steps to maintain security. It also involves regular site maintenance and a set of tools and services that may help your agency plan and schedule activities before potential problems occur. In short, if you take action before things go wrong, you won’t have to deal with many issues.
By adopting a future-proofing approach, organizations anticipate potential problems, mitigate risks, increase resilience, and keep up with the competition.
Like any organization, web agencies must spot and figure out the risks ahead of time. These risks also include:
- Security vulnerabilities and cyber attacks
- Compatibility issues that may arise after an update
- Inadequate management of credentials and access
- Lack of backups
- Performance issues
To prevent most problems from arising, agencies that take a proactive approach to WordPress site management automate repetitive tasks, schedule activities, implement best practices against common security risks, and choose a secure and reliable hosting infrastructure.
Automation and monitoring
Updating the core and extensions of your WordPress website, monitoring site uptime, performing regular malware scans, and backing up site files and databases require a considerable amount of work each month. Neglecting these tasks is not an option, as keeping a site secure and up to date is vital for an online business. However, manually performing updates for each client site can be challenging and may mask costs that grow over time.
Luckily, some helpful third-party services and software tools can automate most repetitive tasks. Because there are many different tasks, you should sign up for many services and learn how to manage different dashboards. This may take some time, and there are usually fees associated with these services.
Yet many of these tasks could be handled by your hosting provider. Kinsta, for example, offers a wide range of automation features and built-in services, freeing agency owners from the responsibility and costs associated with automation and monitoring tasks.
Let’s take a closer look at these services and tools.
1. Automated and secure updates
If you’ve been using WordPress for a while, you’ll be familiar with the tedious and risky process of updating the core, plugins, and themes. Updates can fail due to fatal PHP errors or connection interruptions. Additionally, conflicts may arise between plugins or the theme after the update, causing the site to crash or malfunction.
Therefore, updating any part of a WordPress site — the core, a plugin, or the active theme — must always be done with caution. After each update, it is also necessary to thoroughly check the site’s functionality.
The ideal update process consists of the following steps:
- Back up the site before updating it.
- Perform the updates in a staging environment.
- Check that the staging site works and displays correctly.
- If everything works as expected, push the staging site to production.
- Ensure the live site works correctly and the pages display as expected.
What should you do if something goes wrong during the process? You must restore the site from a working backup, identify the problem, and start again.
How long do you update your clients’ websites each month? This additional workload incurs an hourly cost, which is the average cost of working time in your industry.
Fortunately, WordPress can now automatically update the core, plugins, and themes, and even roll back the core and plugins in case of failure.
However, even WordPress automatic updates do not eliminate all the potential risks of failure. For example, suppose a plugin update is performed correctly, but the new version is incompatible with other plugins or the current PHP version. In that case, WordPress may not be able to perform a rollback. This means that, even with WordPress automatic updates enabled, it is essential to create backups and regularly monitor the uptime. This is where Kinsta Automatic Updates come in.
The new Kinsta Automatic Updates add-on helps your agency to keep your WordPress sites up to date, relieving you of all related concerns and duties. Thanks to visual regression testing, the add-on automatically checks the site’s appearance before and after plugin and theme updates. If there is a mismatch between the snapshots taken before and after the update, the add-on cancels the update and rolls back to the previous version.
Kinsta will send you a notification email detailing the outcome of the update. If it fails, the email will provide a list of plugins that have not been updated.
In addition, you will regularly receive an email summarizing the updates made to all sites within your account.
2. Automatic backup and one-click restore
Your WordPress site is always at risk of security breaches and interruptions. That’s why you must always have at least one recent clean backup of your live site.
How frequently you perform backups depends on the type of website you manage. One weekly backup may be sufficient for a showcase website or personal blog with a few new posts published monthly, while news or big e-commerce websites that are updated several times a day may need hourly backups.
Manually performing a backup is not always easy and may require a specialised professional. For this reason, it is crucial to use plugins or tools that automatically back up the site at regular intervals — weekly, daily, or even several times a day, depending on your needs. These tools should also allow you to quickly restore the site from a backup with just a few clicks.
However, WordPress automatic backup plugins such as UpdraftPlus and Duplicator come with fees that can significantly increase the cost of maintenance.
Kinsta customers do not need to worry about purchasing a premium backup plugin licence, because Kinsta offers six types of backup, either free or available as premium add-ons. Depending on your plan, these backups have 14 or 30 days of retention, and one-click restore to production or staging.
All plans include free automatic daily backups and manual and system-generated backups. Premium add-ons are available for sites that publish content multiple times daily, including hourly and six-hour backups, and the option to store data on popular cloud storage services.
Kinsta backups are accessible via MyKinsta. This eliminates the need for expensive third-party plugins, streamlining management from the same hosting interface.
3. Uptime monitoring
When your website goes down, you lose sales and clients, and your brand reputation is at risk. Reacting to a website outage is not the solution. A system that monitors uptime and alerts you immediately when one of our sites is unavailable is vital.
Several third-party services offer uptime monitoring and security scans. While these services typically provide free basic plans for personal websites, commercial licences for multiple sites can quickly become expensive. You also need to learn and use an additional dashboard, which comes with its own complexities.
What if your host took care of the uptime monitoring behind the scenes, so that you wouldn’t have to worry about it?
Kinsta monitors every WordPress website hosted on our platform every 3 minutes, which means 480 times a day. If the system detects that a site is unavailable, our engineers are notified and immediately begin working to fix the issue. Often, the problem is solved before the site owner even realizes there is one.
Additionally, enabling monitoring notifications in MyKinsta will ensure that you receive an email when a site, DNS, or SSL error occurs or a domain expires.
Site monitoring is free for all Kinsta customers, regardless of their plan. In addition to regular uptime monitoring, Kinsta offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee as part of our SLA.
4. Security checks
Malware infections constantly threaten websites, as they can compromise security and damage your reputation. In addition, you should be aware that search engines may penalise you.
This is why security scans are so crucial for WordPress websites. They help you identify potential threats early on, before they can affect your site’s security. Therefore, planning an effective malware removal process is vital to quickly restoring your site’s security.
You can use a WordPress security plugin to monitor the security of your site. Examples include: WordFence or Sucuri Security.
Once again, Kinsta customers can rest assured that they won’t need to subscribe to a third-party service or install and configure a complicated security plugin. Kinsta has a range of proactive measures to keep your WordPress sites secure, including malware detection, a free malware removal guarantee, and vulnerability alerts.
Our systems constantly scan for malware and other vulnerabilities. If a vulnerability is found, our engineers are alerted and start work immediately to eliminate it free of charge. In addition, you will receive an email notification whenever a vulnerability is detected in a plugin or theme on your WordPress sites so that you can take prompt action.
ClickUp is a great example of a team that has optimised its workflow through hosting automation and security checks. Lydia Minehan-Tubic, HTML and CSS Engineer at ClickUp, shares their experience:
Knowing that Kinsta enterprise hosting could reliably take care of specific WordPress security measures on our blog meant our DevOps team could prioritize the security of our platform.
Strategic planning
Not everything can be automated when managing a WordPress site. On highly complex sites, especially those with custom code, incompatibilities may arise that must be handled manually. The same applies when you have implemented integrations with external services that may stop working following an update or a manual change to the code.
In these cases, having staging environments where you can safely test changes before implementing them is crucial.
Staging environments also enable agencies to provide proactive maintenance packages. Rather than charging client companies for each intervention, agencies can offer comprehensive maintenance packages supported by high-level hosting. These packages can significantly increase revenues without creating unmanageable workloads.
1. Staging environments
Staging environments come in handy in many situations. One common use is to run WordPress, plugins, and theme updates in a safe environment to ensure everything works correctly. Once you have updated and tested your website, you can push the staging to production.
Staging environments are essential for complex site changes, such as custom code that may not work as expected after a plugin update, or when upgrading to a new PHP version. In such instances, making changes directly in production is not a viable solution.
If your host does not provide staging environments, you can always use a plugin such as WP Staging, which is ideal if your site runs “on a weak shared hosting server”.
Kinsta customers don’t have to worry about this either, as all WordPress sites come with a staging environment. This allows you to develop your site, perform updates, and run all the necessary tests before moving your site to production.
In addition to the standard staging environments that are included free of charge with all Kinsta plans, our customers have the option of adding the Premium Staging Environments add-on to their plan. These feature 12 CPUs, 8 GB of memory, and the same number of PHP threads as your live site.
In addition, staging environments integrate seamlessly with our local development suite, DevKinsta. Combining DevKinsta with staging environments enables you to develop locally, move your site to a Kinsta staging environment, and continue development and testing in a secure space before moving your site to production.
2. Expert support
Sooner or later, managing a WordPress website will inevitably involve complex problems. This is particularly true for complex sites, such as e-commerce platforms, membership websites, and multisite installations with hundreds of subsites.
The reasons for this vary and do not necessarily involve malfunctions or cyber-attacks. For example, you may be launching a promotional campaign that quickly goes viral, about to appear on a high-impact TV show, or experiencing a particularly profitable holiday season. In these cases, your site could be overwhelmed with requests, and you may need immediate support to ensure the allocated resources are sufficient to handle the sudden surge.
Having access to expert hosting support gives you a real competitive advantage, allowing you to capitalise on sales opportunities. This is particularly important when complex technical issues arise that you cannot fix alone. Rather than hiring specialised engineers, enterprise-level support can assist you with the most challenging problems.
A specialised WordPress hosting support service is a key part of a thorough strategic plan. It enables quick responses to complex problems, which reduces site management costs and builds customer trust and loyalty.
Kinsta offers expert support via live chat from the MyKinsta dashboard. Our expert WordPress engineers are available 24/7.
When choosing a hosting provider for your WordPress site, be sure to compare user reviews on independent platforms such as G2 or Trustpilot.
WP Umbrella provides an excellent example of how Kinsta’s support can help agencies grow. They provide a service that enables you to manage dozens of sites from a single dashboard with a wide range of features, including safe updates, uptime monitoring, backups, and maintenance reporting.
Aurelio Volle, Co-founder at WP Umbrella, emphasises the importance of providing fast and reliable support:
We offer our customers an uptime monitoring solution, and it happens that our robot is sometimes blocked by the firewalls of the hosts. We made a ticket, and within hours, the problem was solved. Believe me, having contacted several hosts, it is rarely so easy. At Kinsta, we feel that the well-being of the client is at the heart of the relationship, and this is something that I greatly appreciate.
3. Proactive maintenance plans
A carefully planned, all-inclusive strategy enables your agency to minimise the time spent on website maintenance. Agencies can offer their clients comprehensive WordPress website maintenance packages while keeping their workflows efficient by automating repetitive tasks. It’s a win-win strategy: agencies can monetize their activity more effectively, and their clients will have well-performing and secure websites.
Establishing strong relationships of trust with your customers and generating recurring revenue are the keys to helping your agency plan for growth more effectively.
f.technology provides a good example of how agencies can offer high-value service packages by choosing a premium hosting provider like Kinsta. Their agency provides WordPress site development and maintenance packages utilizing Kinsta hosting. By leveraging Kinsta’s automations, such as Kinsta Automatic Updates and automatic daily backups, expert support, staging environments, and security features, f.technology can offer a comprehensive package of enterprise services.
In the words of Franco Farnedi, Founder and CEO at f.technology,
The hosting provider is key to our tech services as it influences everything we offer. This is why we push our clients to switch to Kinsta. It’s important for us.
Customers can customise their plans by adding extra services, such as off-site backups, premium personalised support, and customised project management. By avoiding repetitive, lower-value tasks such as automatic environment updates and backups, f.technology can focus on activities that add the most value to their services, offering their customers comprehensive packages at competitive prices.
Infrastructure
Without adequate infrastructure, growth is unrealistic. This is why choosing a premium hosting provider offering the most advanced infrastructure, services, and tools for developing and maintaining WordPress sites is essential for a modern, growth-oriented agency.
Now, let’s take a closer look at the key elements required for infrastructure to support businesses in modern markets.
1. Managed hosting for WordPress
Premium managed WordPress hosting allows agency owners to launch a new site in minutes, saving them time and effort. Managed hosting comes pre-configured, meaning your agency won’t need to deal with the intricacies of setting up and managing a server — the host will take care of that for you.
Premium managed hosting provides extra services for maintaining a WordPress site’s security and performance. These include one-click installation, automatic backups, staging environments, DNS management, and support.
Kinsta provides Premium managed hosting for WordPress tailored to agencies’ needs. In addition to standard managed hosting services, Kinsta offers a variety of extra features that enable your agency to manage multiple WordPress sites as a team with minimal effort.
MyKinsta dashboard: A centralised dashboard that combines all the features needed to launch and manage WordPress websites. It provides an overview of all sites and enables users to perform bulk updates (plugins and themes) and request migrations of existing WordPress sites. The sections dedicated to individual sites put everything users need to manage a WordPress site at their fingertips:
- Domain management
- Backup management
- Redirect management
- Plugin and theme updates
- Website analytics
- Caching and CDN management
- APM tool
- User management
In addition, MyKinsta offers extra tools, including Search and Replace for the site database, a PHP restart function, and WordPress debugging.
Integrated development tools: Kinsta provides standard and premium staging environments, the ability to clone sites, SSH access to your site, a local development suite that integrates with Kinsta hosting, and much more.
Multi-user management: In MyKinsta, you can grant different levels of access to your team members, depending on their role. Business owners can assign site or business-level roles, covering everything from administration and development to billing.
Expert support: We have discussed this previously. Specialised technical support is essential for any online business and particularly important when managing many client websites.
2. Server-level security
Your web host must have state-of-the-art security measures in place. The security of your customers’ websites is non-negotiable. If you don’t prioritize security, you will constantly be on the back foot, particularly when managing multiple websites.
With passive, reactive, and proactive security measures, Kinsta lets you rest easy knowing your site is in good hands.
Passive security measures prevent malicious traffic from reaching your clients’ websites. All Kinsta users benefit from Cloudflare WAF with DDoS mitigation, regardless of their plan. Other passive security measures include free SSL certificates, SFTP connections, two-factor authentication, IP blocking, and additional security features.
Reactive security measures allow you to respond quickly when something goes wrong. Kinsta employs several such measures, including six types of backup, a hack-fix guarantee, and 24/7/365 expert support in ten languages.
Proactive security measures are what distinguish a firefighting approach from future-proofing. These monitoring and automation activities allow you to intercept and neutralise threats before they reach your site. Kinsta supports the latest PHP versions, malware detection, Kinsta Automatic Updates, vulnerability alerts, and staging environments.
Kinsta’s commitment to security is certified. The company complies with ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, GDPR and CCPA certifications. Check our Trust center for the details about Kinsta’s security certifications.
Summary
Your core business does not handle routine website maintenance or platform security. However, without a proactive, forward-looking strategy, your team will spend hours dealing with emergencies as they arise.
This is where a managed premium hosting service like Kinsta can make a difference. Kinsta has developed a comprehensive suite of tools and services specifically designed for agencies that manage dozens or even hundreds of client websites, ranging from small blogs to e-commerce websites with millions of monthly visitors.
Our client agencies are welcome to join our Agency Partner Program, specifically designed for digital agencies that want to scale smarter, with premium hosting, lifetime commissions, qualified leads, and co-marketing support. Check it out!
Kinsta
Carlo is a passionate lover of webdesign and front-end development. He has been playing with WordPress for more than 20 years, also in collaboration with Italian and European universities and educational institutions. He has written hundreds of articles and guides about WordPress, published both on Italian and international websites, as well as on printed magazines. You can find him on LinkedIn.
