FixMyWP Emphasizes Personalized Support and Education When Restoring Compromised WordPress Sites

TL; DR: FixMyWP represents a reliable and trustworthy lifesaver for inexperienced site owners, offering WordPress users on-demand repairs, à la carte optimizations, and ongoing maintenance plans. The company takes an individualized approach to troubleshooting and fixing various WordPress issues by thoroughly communicating with, educating, and supporting customers long after the adjustments have been made. We caught up with Owner Laura Spawn to learn more about the challenges WordPress users commonly face and how FixMyWP helps fill the void of personal WordPress support and optimized hosting.

With the rapid, meteoric rise of WordPress, hosting providers are clamoring to make the popular content management system more accessible to customers interested in starting their first website. The landscape is littered with one-click installations, thousands of free themes, and countless plugins.

Options abound for establishing your presence online. But what happens when it all comes crumbling down?

Many hosts make getting started with WordPress easy and affordable — but you’re likely on your own for maintaining and supporting your site. Because WordPress is so popular with site owners, it’s also popular with attackers who can exploit vulnerable plugins, poorly coded themes, and outdated versions of WordPress.

That’s where services like FixMyWP come in — helping bloggers and business owners concentrate on their passions instead of the tedious and frustrating minefield of website troubleshooting and maintenance. Whether your site has been compromised or you realize you may be in over your head, the company will handle everything from malware removal to performance upgrades — frequently within 24 hours.

Founder Makis Mourelatos noticed the need for helpful, responsive, and easy WordPress support in 2012, when he formed FixMyWP as the alternative to the other online companies offering quick-fix WordPress solutions that frequently missed the mark. When Makis left FixMyWP in 2017 to focus on new business ventures, he passed the company on to Adam Stevenson and Laura Spawn, a family team experienced with online businesses and dedicated to continuing and expanding the excellent customer support and WordPress services that Makis provided his clients.

“WordPress was already being used as one of the main platforms for business owners creating websites, and the need for personalized service was evident for issues like malware removal, plugin integrations, and general ongoing maintenance,” Laura said. “That’s how FixMyWP came about, with the goal of offering a personal touch and quality service to clients needing WordPress fixes and maintenance.”

Panicked site owners frequently come to FixMyWP looking for help removing malware in the form of pharmaceutical ads, MySQL injections, cross-site scripting, browser or Google warnings, and other maladies.

The company promises to clean, fix, and update your site within 24 hours. Site owners can fill out an online form and will communicate with a team member to account for payment and login information.

Once work starts, FixMyWP will deploy a temporary maintenance page alerting your visitors that work is being done. The company will scan the site both automatically and manually to find any vulnerabilities and malware. Once the damaging information is resolved, FixMyWP will update WordPress core files, themes, and plugins before running another security scan. After verifying the site’s ownership in Google Search Console, the company will submit a request for Google to review its work and remove your site from any blacklists. The support agent will notify site owners via email about the work accomplished.

Although websites are primed for future success and security, many customers opt to continue with ongoing maintenance through one of two plans:

• WordPress Junior covers weekly platform and plugin updates, along with database optimization, backups, speed optimization, and 24-hour email support.
• WordPress Ninja includes the above features as well as daily backups, uptime monitoring, weekly malware scanning, an hour of hands-on service, and a 20% discount on any additional maintenance needs not covered.

In addition to keeping up with the ever-increasing demand for WordPress support, Laura said the crowded market often presents a challenge when trying to show potential customers how FixMyWP differentiates itself with fine-tuned service.

“Competing with the larger companies that offer lower prices but less personalized service and customer education has been one of our main challenges,” she said.

However, FixMyWP’s signature strength is the return on investment its services afford website owners and online entrepreneurs — saving them time, money, and sanity.

“Investing money in ongoing services from a company like FixMyWP, which values great customer support, education, quality work, and maintenance solutions for WordPress sites can make all the difference for business owners,” Laura said. “With us, they have the ability to spend time on actually building their business rather than troubleshooting technical-related issues and keeping up on site security.”

Across the varied services FixMyWP offers, Laura told us one element is prioritized above all: providing transparent, personalized, and knowledgeable service to clients.

“We take the time to answer questions and provide as much education regarding WordPress site issues as the client would like,” she said. “This type of service tends to build customer loyalty.”

In addition to sending clients a detailed email about what their site’s problem was and how FixMyWP solved it, the company informs site owners through blogs focused on WordPress security and design. According to Laura, that responsibility to customers ensures more people are aware of emerging WordPress threats.

“Keeping up to date on the latest plugins, vulnerabilities, and security issues take up quite a bit of time, but it allows us to help our clients and educate them on what is going on behind the scenes with their websites, if they are interested in the technical side,” she said.

Beyond providing a one-time fix to remove malware and harden a WordPress installation against future attacks, FixMyWP will examine a site’s entire footprint — examining all code, files, and plugins to guarantee everything is up to the industry standards. Not only will websites be positioned for a stronger, safer future, but Laura will be on standby to help out if something goes awry again.

“We are confident enough in the quality of our work to provide continued support for up to two months after we complete a project,” she said. “That is our favorite feature to tell people about.”

Instead of perpetuating the business model of housing your website files with a separate company and seeking support elsewhere, FixMyWP and sister company HostMyWP are teaming up to offer more integrated solutions.

HostMyWP, which already optimizes its infrastructure to various WordPress and WooCommerce installations, will seamlessly migrate new customers’ content and files and uniquely tune and modify each website’s configurations to further maximize performance.

“We will be making that a core service that we offer through FixMyWP and HostMyWP,” Laura said. “Our new WordPress hosting plans, to be announced in the coming months, will focus on leveraging the latest technology, including Amazon Web Services, to provide the highest level of security and performance for business owners.”

Daily, weekly, and monthly backups are stored on off-site servers, and HostMyWP performs weekly malware scans and spam cleaning routines. Customers with multiple sites can also enjoy weekly database optimizations, a content delivery network, free site restorations, and an hour of dedicated WordPress management each month.

The team monitors for plugin conflicts and security updates, ensuring that administrators can focus on day-to-day business operations instead of tedious tech support. Since combining FixMyWP and HostMyWP teams, Laura said employee ranks have doubled in size and brought an increased energy and enthusiasm.

“We are excited to be adding more people to the company to provide a higher level of personal service to our clients,” she said. “Our company ideology is all about providing the best solutions possible when working on WordPress site — permanent solutions our clients can count on.”