In-depth guides to running WordPress properly
Long-form WordPress guides on the operational side of the job: what maintenance actually involves and how often, how to price and deliver care plans that stay profitable, how to manage multiple WordPress sites without losing a week to it, and how to keep a whole portfolio patched. Written from running one, not from summarizing other people.
Updated
Where to start, depending on where you are
The guides are written to be read on their own, but they answer different problems. Pick the line below that sounds most like your week.
"I have taken on more sites than I can keep in my head"
The point where manual management stops working is usually somewhere between eight and fifteen sites. This guide covers why it breaks, multisite versus a management tool, and how to design a workflow that survives the next ten.
Read the guide"I am doing the work but I am not sure I am charging properly"
Care plans are the most reliable recurring revenue in WordPress and the easiest to underprice. This guide covers structuring tiers, pricing against cost to serve, defining scope you can enforce, and defending a price at renewal.
Read the guide"I am not certain what maintenance should even include"
What the work genuinely consists of, how often each task matters, what it costs in time, and which parts automate cleanly. The place to start if you are inheriting maintenance rather than choosing it.
Read the guide"I am worried about security across everything I run"
Which sites are actually exposed, what to patch first across a portfolio, and how to respond when something does get through.
See security for multiple sitesPillar guides
WordPress maintenance: the complete guide
Everything WordPress maintenance actually involves, organized by what it is for rather than by feature. Written for anyone responsible for keeping sites secure,...
Read the guideWordPress care plans: what to include and how to price them
A care plan is a recurring maintenance service with a defined scope, a defensible price and a way of proving the work happened. Get those three right and it becomes the...
Read the guideHow to manage multiple WordPress sites
Why manual management stops working, multisite versus a management tool, how to design a workflow that survives growth, and the mistakes that cost people a weekend.
Read the guideWhat these guides cover
Between them the guides cover the full operational lifecycle of a WordPress portfolio, not just the update button.
The technical work
- Core, plugin and theme updates, and what to do when one breaks a site
- Backups, retention, and why an untested backup is not a recovery plan
- Uptime and performance monitoring that catches degradation early
- Vulnerability monitoring and patch urgency across a portfolio
The business around it
- Pricing care plans against cost to serve rather than competitors
- Packaging tiers and writing scope you can actually enforce
- Client reporting that makes invisible work visible at renewal
- Margin per account, and why the cheapest tier usually loses money
- Choosing tooling, and when a management platform starts paying for itself
Written from running a portfolio, not from research
The guides on this site are written by Usman Naim, founder of WPCentrify, who has managed WordPress sites for six years and currently looks after eighty-two of them. His formal background is in software engineering and cyber security, which is the part that matters for the vulnerability and patching material.
That shapes what is in them. The pricing guidance comes from having mispriced care plans; the update material comes from having broken a client site at the wrong moment. Where a guide recommends a tool other than ours, it says so, and there are no affiliate links anywhere on this site.
How they are maintained
- Every guide carries a byline and a last-reviewed date
- Competitor claims are checked against public vendor documentation
- Comparisons name who each product is genuinely best for
- No affiliate links, so nothing is shaped by a commission
- Corrections are welcome and the methodology is published
Questions about these WordPress guides
Start with the guide on managing multiple WordPress sites, which covers why manual management stops working and how to design a workflow that survives growth. If you are already doing the work and the question is commercial rather than technical, start with the care plans guide instead.
Security patches should not wait for a scheduled window. A full update pass, performance review and client reporting suit a monthly cadence for most sites. Restore testing and access review are quarterly. Version planning and repricing are annual. The maintenance guide sets out the reasoning, and the interactive checklist is organized on the same basis.
At minimum: updates applied and verified, backups taken and restore-tested, uptime monitoring with alerting, security patching, and a monthly report that makes the work visible. What separates a profitable plan from an unprofitable one is usually not the task list but the scope: defined included hours, a clear boundary on what counts as out of scope, and a response commitment you can actually meet.
No. They are written to be useful whatever you run, including a spreadsheet and a lot of discipline. The product appears where it is genuinely the answer.
Each guide carries a last-reviewed date, and each comparison page shows the date its facts were last checked against the vendor's own pages. WordPress moves quickly enough that a guide without a date on it is not worth much, which is why every one here has one.
Stop logging into forty dashboards
Connect your first site in under two minutes. No credit card, no contract.
Free during early access. Keep your data, export any time.