The old system for WordPress maintenance was that, after every update developers would take over to ensure your site was kept running smoothly. But, this system is now outdated, it’s slow and limits how functional, secure, and appealing your WordPress site is or can be. This old way of maintenance meant you’d always be playing catchup with updates rather than being on top of them.
Updates happen often with WordPress, not just with the platform itself, but for every plugin, theme or add on your site uses. With constant updates, the maintenance model needed to change to something more continuous and agile—DevOps was born.
WordPress DevOps: What Is It?
DevOps has become somewhat of a blurred term, it means different things for different development teams, but to put an umbrella term on things, DevOps is simply the continuous development of a website or application to ensure maximum functionality and minimum downtime.
We only need to look at some of the largest WordPress businesses in the world to see why WordPress DevOps is necessary. Sony Music, Vogue, and The New York Times that are three of the largest businesses that use WordPress, it would be odd to think that maintaining these sites would only require the click of an “update” button. Simply relying on updates leaves a WordPress site vulnerable to crashing and crashing for large businesses represents a large amount of revenue and user trust lost.
WordPress has over 40,000 plugins in it’s repository, not to mention other apps, addons, and you may be even considering a new theme for your site. Adding any new feature to your site while ensuring it doesn’t harm your sites functionality takes testing and preparation. Which is why DevOps has become so important.
When Should You Hire a WordPress DevOps Team?
Hiring a DevOps team is mostly for medium to enterprise level businesses. Why? Because it’s mostly needed in the following situations:
- Your business is struggling to manage multiple projects, vendors or integrations
- Your business needs assistance with an important and critical deployment
- You’re looking to scale your website
- Bug fixes are overwhelming your time
- You are constantly adding new features to your business
- You would like to customize your website
Essentially, if you would like to grow your WordPress site while avoiding all of the glitches that come with updates, deployments and features—DevOps is recommended. Many businesses find that hiring a WordPress DevOps team would’ve been a good idea after a large update causes their website to crash or after an influx of bugs from new features.
What Does A WordPress DevOps Team Actually Do?
Before you even consider hiring a WordPress DevOps team, you need to fully understand what they can do for you. This is also to help you realise that a DevOps team is not the same as general WordPress developers.
A WordPress DevOps team constantly updates your site so that’s always fully functional through critical debugging, adding new code, analyzing and verifying third-party code and testing and feature deployment.
Before you hire a development team it’s important you have set goals as to what you want to achieve during the hiring process. Aside from a user experience that is smooth, your goals will likely be to do with the implementation and successful maintenance of new features to your site.
An Expert DevOps team should remove all errors to do with your site, 404 errors, page crashes or feature malfunctions should be a thing of the past after hiring a DevOps team. All new deployments will be strong and your infrastructure will be strong.
How to Hire a WordPress DevOps Team?
With the popularity of WordPress as a blogging or eCommerce platform, it’s no surprise that WordPress DevOps teams or engineers are in demand, the only problem is it can be difficult to find the right team for your business. Hiring means you’re entrusting the functionality of your site to an external team, so they need to be reputable, have many years of expertise, and be cost-effective for your business.
To spot a worthwhile DevOps team when you see one, look for the following aspects:
18/5 or 24/7 Tech Support
There’s no point in hiring a DevOps team that only has 8 hours of tech support. How can they provide “continuous development” if they don’t have enough tech support hours to do so? I’ve included both “18/5” and “24/7” here as companies that offer this often mean the same thing. Many WordPress WordPress DevOps that offer ‘“24/7 tech support” really mean they provide 18/5 support with the possibility of 24/7 tech support if you subscribe to those services.
Large Work Portfolio
The WordPress DevOps team should have plenty of evidence of previous work with other WordPress sites. Ideally they will have either case studies to learn more about previous projects or provide links to sites they’re currently maintaining. If so, visit the sites for yourself to see if their user experience is smooth and that any custom features function well. Consistency is keen with DevOps, so check the sites of a few of their previous WordPress clients to ensure they’re thorough yet adaptable.
Positive Client Reviews
Read previous reviews and testimonials that clients have left about the DevOps team. These reviews may be on their site or on third-party review sites such as Clutch.co. Here you want to learn as much as you can about what the team is like to work with. How quick were they to provide maintenance updates? How efficiently did they communicate? How well did they listen to the WordPress clients goals? Were there ever any problems releasing new features?
If the majority of reviews are positive, then you’ve found a quality hiring choice. Reviews on third-party review sites or Google Maps.
To speed up your hiring process, and the growth of your WordPress site, I’d recommend the WordPress DevOps team at CodeClouds. They’re a global company that has a rich work portfolio full of previous WordPress DevOps work. They have over a decades worth of web development industry experience, in which 5 of those years have been specializing in WordPress. If you’re looking for an expert WordPress developer, they are a reputable choice.
