Your time is valuable

Would you rather spend it troubleshooting a buggy plugin or a broken theme update than creating fresh, compelling content or optimizing that important landing page?

Another way to think about it is like this: could you learn to fix everything on your car? Sure, but a great mechanic could do it in a lot less time. If your air conditioning breaks, do you disassemble the unit and try to find the fault? Of course not! That’s why there are trained HVAC technicians. Would you be able to master programming, user experience, responsive design, data analysis, industry trends, search engine optimization, and so on? Probably, but why not let us take care of it for you? 🙂

Security

WordPress itself is a very secure platform but, unfortunately, the same can’t always be said for the hundreds of thousands of themes and plugins developed by the community.

We have years of experience working in the community and know which plugins and themes are well maintained and which have a history of being trouble (cough, JetPack, cough). We also know the warning signs of a poorly coded plugin or theme and can steer you to safe and well maintained alternatives.

Security is about more than just knowing which plugins are safe. It involves making sure your WordPress configuration is locked down, verifying that your host (server) is well protected, making sure you’re not unknowingly infected with malware and if you are, safely and completely removing it. We take a comprehensive approach to security that typical users simply don’t have the time or resources to implement and maintain.

New features

Every day thousands of plugins and themes are updated with new features. Your competitors are taking advantage of them. Shouldn’t you?

So many sites simply get things running and leave it that way. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, they say. Those sites are missing opportunities. Whether it’s the contact form you could add conversion tracking to, the landing page that could use some A/B testing, or the images that need to be optimized, there are so many things to be improved by staying on top of updates and implementing new features and functionality.

Optimization

By now everyone knows that speed affects performance; from your ranking in the search results to your conversion rates, having a site that is fast and efficient matters.

Barrel Roll does more than provide great WordPress maintenance services. We’re your partners and we actively seek out ways to improve the way your site performs. This could mean installing a great caching plugin, optimizing your images, reducing the number of elements loaded on each page, reviewing your analytical data to see where visitors are having trouble, or just working with you to improve the general user experience.

That means getting it right on mobile, too. So many websites still aren’t responsive, or mobile friendly, and that’s hurting your bottom line.

Backups

You’ve just updated a plugin or theme and your site crashed. It’s completely unusable. Time to restore from a backup. Oh wait, you don’t have one.

That’s a scenario you don’t want to be in. Having a reliable, accessible backup is critical in an emergency, or even if you just made a change you don’t like and want to revert your site back to a previous state. Many hosts now provide integrated backup solutions but we usually find them lacking in several ways. One, they are sometimes stored on the same server as your website. What happens if that server crashes or your host goes out of business? Bye bye website. Two, the backups aren’t always automated, and they don’t usually store many of them at a time. What if you need to restore from a week ago, or a month? Three, you can’t configure the backups. Almost every server backs up on a schedule that you can’t control and creates the backups without your being able to modify what gets backed up and when.

At Barrel Roll, we backup our Advanced Members weekly and store them securely on an off-site server that you can access any time. We’ll even restore the data for you if needed. Premium Members get daily backups, and all backups are stored for at least a month. Want to keep them longer? You can download them at any time and keep them forever! Finally, we’ll work with you to configure the backup to suit your needs.

We’re here for you

Sure, your host might provide some basic assistance with WordPress, but do they work with it day in, day out? Are they going to carefully review your site and help make it the best it can be? (No, and they shouldn’t.)

Most hosting companies won’t provide any support for WordPress beyond making sure your site is up and running. Some specialty hosts will go a little further and help with basic configuration and technical issues but they usually stop there, and they should! Great hosting companies focus on delivering the best support, performance, and uptime that they can; they don’t worry about what the best WordPress plugins are or what’s going on with current WordPress core development.

We see ourselves as partners with our members. It’s in our mutual best interest to make sure your site grows and improves over time. We actively review each of our member sites on a regular basis, and our Premium members get even more attention with ongoing search engine and performance optimization.