website support at wibble: a day in the life of Sophie

In this web design blog post, I will go through the day-to-day tasks I undertake for Wibble in providing our award-winning web design and development support. Wibble are a Belfast web design studio but our services don’t just stop at that, we offer a hugely important service – WordPress website support, which basically is providing WordPress website help to our clients on the island of Ireland, in the United Kingdom and all around the world.

Here we are, 7 months in as a Wibbler and I think I finally qualify to explain to everyone what exactly I do in my 9-5 job, 5 days a week.

The setup with Wibble allows us to choose the days we come into the studio, which is the best thing for me when I’m not feeling the cold winter mornings (even though we’re currently in spring). My days in the Belfast web design studio usually consist of a Tuesday-Thursday as these are typically the days I get a balance to work with both the web developers and web designers on our team. As enjoyable working from home is, when the weather just isn’t playing ball, I really love to get into the studio and have the team around as we all love a good chit-chat over our teas and coffees. I am very lucky that the team here at Wibble are very helpful, both in the studio and from home when it comes to working with me through my daily tasks and aiding me in providing website support for our web design clients.

Let’s kick off my morning

Every morning starts off with a cup of tea for me, a dash of milk and 3 sugars really kick starts any day. From here then I travel into the City Centre to park the car and make my trip to the studio.

Mornings in the studio typically start off the same way every day, everyone gets a hello coming through the door and then we all hear about the adventures of Dean’s coffee choice that morning and the rating of Aisling’s jambon. A great way to start any day! After my greeting and the catch-up on the coffee and jambon chat, I set up my workspace.

Providing website support using our ticketing system

My first task of the day then is to open up my three main dashboards that we use for managing all the WordPress website support tasks that we handle – Toggl, Emails and Freshdesk. These three dashboards will stay open throughout each day to ensure that I stay on top of the web support requests that come in. Typically overnight, our monitoring system has delivered notifications that we have received a ticket update, notifications of site monitoring updates that we can then look into, updates and backup notifications that have taken place through the night and any emails that clients have sent through to us. We offer many services that the web support team manage or are involved in including managed web hosting, WordPress web development and the Wibble Rescue Package – our managed WordPress migration and mangement service.

Once I have checked through my emails then it is time to look through Freshdesk – which is our ticketing provider and allows us to provide award-winning web support to our global web design clients. Using this application allows us to check if any clients have changes or enquires about their sites – it is the heart of our web support management. Wibble prides itself on the level of WordPress web support that we provide and giving thorough and prompt responses is a key part of this.

I assume responsibility for the allocation of all web support tickets that come in. Typically, with most ticket requests that come through both Tony and myself take on the job of resolving and closing said ticket. We are also able to assign tickets out to dedicated web developers should the support request need to be moved up to the next level of web support or web development.

As per our service level agreement, we aim to have each ticket responded to within one working day and closed within five days. Anecdotally, we close the vast majority of tickets much quicker than our SLA requires. Tony and I are both the key support agents here at Wibble and recently we set up our own dedicated channel in Slack that is linked to our Freshdesk to improve our efficiencies and responsiveness to open tickets. Having this new channel also allows us to dedicate specific tickets to one another and also gives us private thread chats dedicated to each ticket that we can discuss the specific topics and issues that arise in each new ticket. As I stated, Wibble prides itself on the level of WordPress web support we provide but this is an example of us always trying to improve and strive for a better service for our clients.

Wibble Support Packages

Another role here at Wibble that I am responsible for is the running of the Wibble Support Package – our key WordPress management service. The Wibble Support Package covers managed web hosting on our servers, automatic backups and off-server storage, security patches and all required WordPress core and plugin updates plus hundreds of security and monitoring features that you really must have on a website. My job with the support packages is to ensure that all of our sites are regularly checked for vulnerabilities and updated frequently. The process we follow for running this managed WordPress service is the “Golden Gate Bridge approach“.

For site management and control, we avail of a private Asana board that contains all our WSP sites and has regular alerts of sites that are needing updates. The process I take when running the updates includes the following:

1. A thorough manual check-through of the site’s main sections and testing forms. I will also aim to check through the structure of the site to familiarise myself with the expected layout of content hierarchy. I check images load, fonts are rendering and dozens of other visual checks prior to running the WordPress updates. This manual check of the website gives me a benchmark for comparison of the site after the update has run
2. Upon completion of my required check-through, I then run a secure backup of the site – this is a fallback in the unlikely event that the update would cause issues to the site and we have to roll back to a previous version
3. Once the backup has been performed, I utilise our WordPress management tool and run through each required WordPress update manually – I carry out any theme, WordPress core or plugin updates that are required
4. Then it is time to go back to our site to manually check the updates did not cause issues. I then carry out my second thorough check-through, checking all required features of each site and again checking the structure and the overall look of the site after the update to ensure everything is as it should be
5. Once I am happy with my second check-through then I navigate to Eve (our internally built CRM) and send through our notification email to inform our clients that the WSP for their site has taken place. This provides a notification to the client and a log of when updates were run on each site. Knowing that your website is being monitored regularly for bugs and updated (by a human, not automatically) delivers peace of mind for our managed web support clients
6. My final step then is just to update my Asana list with documentation of the WordPress update time and date.

To run the WSP updates takes from 15-45 minutes per site, depending on the size of the site. This time is increased if we are also running checks and updates on development sites for our WSP+ sites – The Wibble Support Package Plus is an upgrade that clients avail of which involves us running all updates on a development version of the site first and ensuring there are no issues before we push the updates to the live site. The safety net of running all WordPress updates on a development version of your site is a service we strongly suggest is used for business-critical and e-commerce sites.

Final thoughts of a website support agent

What are my final thoughts for my day as a Wibbler? To keep it short, every day is different!

The best aspect of being a Wibbler is not knowing what I will face daily which keeps every day exciting. Some days I’m faced with ticket requests that really take me through every aspect of WordPress management to find the solution, some days I get to write custom code and push changes to sites through git commits and automatic deployments. I really do go through all the emotions some days but at the moment I love having a job that constantly throws me curve balls and have the team of Wibblers here to guide me to find the solutions.

Managed WordPress web support

Wibble provide un-paralleled WordPress development and subsequent website support to any WordPress project – built by us or built by another web design studio. Our website support offering includes ticket and phone support with an SLA, a dedicated website support team, fully managed WordPress updates and most importantly – an entire team of web designers, developers and project managers with years of WordPress expertise.

Our Google my Business reviews speak regularly about the amazing support that they receive and sing the praises of our team of web support agents. If you want your WordPress website managed by a team of experts or need dedicated website help and support, get in touch for a website quotation or you can start a project.