 I figure we might as well get started. Hopefully the rest of the, everyone else will show up in a little bit. Yeah, probably the after party. Yeah. Well, so the point of this talk is going to be covering how best to handle support issues for a website, whether it's your own personal website or if you work for an agency protecting your client in the best way possible, including sometimes protecting your client from themselves. The first thing we should probably cover is that my name is Ben. I work for a digital design and marketing agency called The Design and my role is the support specialist where people call in and they have issues and my job is to tell them that the world is not ending and everything will be okay and help them try and figure out exactly what went wrong. So the first thing to kind of ask yourself is what exactly is the role of support? Our job is to be the first line of defense against any kind of issue the client might have, whether or not it's slow page loading speed, malware, any kind of attack on the website as well as general optimization and answering any kind of questions that they might have. Now one of the big things to remember is that with support when people reach out to us it isn't just another number, it's not just another person, it's a unique client, it's your own website, it's not only you but it's them. You need to make sure that you understand exactly what the issue is, what the problem that you're dealing with is rather than just treating everything as a cookie cutter solution. One of the more important things to remember is even though the client or even though something might be burning down in flames around you, even if it seems like the world's ending for the client or for your team or anything, it's about having a cool professional exterior, being able to look them in the eye or talk with them over the phone or email and tell them not only is everything going to be fine but that it's in good hands, that you understand exactly what's happening and that you'll get to the bottom of it and solve their problem. Whether or not it's dealing with pages suddenly not loading if their site goes down, if all of a sudden their entire site has turned into just Russian Cyrillic. That has happened and it's not the end of the world. It can seem like it, it can seem like everything is blowing up but it isn't. It's an individual problem that you can solve if you put your mind to it and it's about convincing people that it is possible. Now the other big thing is you end up with situations like we had a client about five months back who was originally three different companies that had combined into a single entity and they wanted to have translations on their website for five different languages. The person that they had put in charge of that didn't exactly understand how to do that. Pretty much every week for the past four months now we've had them reach out by email, call in and every time we can't figure this out, this is the end of the world, our clients are going to be devastated, what's going to happen and it's just hey, it's fine. We can work through this. You just need to know that it's this. As simple as knowing you need to plug in the right information into this section or you need to know that you've put, you accidentally checked hide languages so that's why suddenly your German translation isn't showing up on the website. It's knowing that even though it may seem like the world's ending for the user it's really just about making sure that they understand that you are focused on it, that you can give them an answer and provide a solution to their issue. Now some of the easiest ways to handle and kind of head off any potential issues you might have are plugins. Easy to implement. A lot of them have customization which allow for a lot of flexibility and there's a lot of specialized groups that will help kind of prevent certain issues like brute force attempts on websites or any kind of low page optimization, any kind of slow loading speeds, resource hogging, scripts, pretty much anything you can think of, there's a plug-in for it. One of the more important ones that we use at my agency is WordFence. It's a malware protection as well as providing a brute force prevention system where one of the most common things that people will have is their site goes down and you look at it and it's like well it went down because you have 500 login attempts in two seconds and it takes a while for that to kind of recover and reset and one of the things that I like about WordFence is that it actually lets you sit there and say okay after five login attempts that IP is locked out. So even if it's a bunch of different computers hitting the system all at once, throwing an admin password 123 into the login screen, it still keeps it from going down. It also helps with preventing specific IP addresses. You can stop really standard passwords like admin or password 123 or even if they start getting a little smarter and start throwing in actual usernames as long as it recognizes that it's not the proper password or anything like that, it can track and monitor it, it can let you know what's going on. And you can also whitelist and blacklist different sites, IP addresses, so it really helps kind of cut down on the potential impact on the site itself as well as the resources that the server has to use to try and keep the site up under any kind of strain. Now even with the free version of it, it's extremely easy to use, it's got a lot of robust features. There is a pro version which does live tracking of IP addresses, it does live monitoring, but for a regular website or even a client's website, this is pretty much a great package within just a single plug-in that helps protect them. Actually one of our clients was being hit pretty regularly and their site kept going down and we were asking them, well what's going on, what's happening? We went and looked at the server logs, we went and looked at the site and it was pretty standard. They were having a bunch of different IP addresses, probably a bunch of different slave computers running a brute force attempt and does everyone know what brute force means? It's essentially where you have either a program or a group of computers all running at the same login screen, running through different lists of potential passwords, username combinations and the point of it is to A, get into the website, B, if they can't get into the website, take down the website and essentially just keep cycling through that until either it's exhausted, it's a list of potential password combinations or it's gotten in, at which point either you're dealing with now someone has access to your website and we've had a situation where what ended up happening was the client had actually gone in and turned off word fence, they didn't have their brute force protection and their site kept going down and we were really, we were like, well we installed this, we set this up, what's going on? We were like, oh no, no, I didn't think that was effective. They had decided to install a couple new systems and uninstall the stuff we had put in and we had to very kindly explain that there's a reason why we use this, we put it back in and within the hour their site was back up, everything was functional and it had locked out the brute force IP addresses that had been running. So really solid towards any kind of protection for your website and pretty much any kind of system that can help protect the login side of your system as well as protect your overall site from any kind of attempt on it. Now when it comes to page optimization, I know that there's a talk that's going to be going on after this one who is going to be specializing on the ins and outs and details of not only page optimization but site level optimization. When it comes to building a website, maintaining a website and you're dealing with low to medium traffic levels, we would recommend using a caching plugin in this case, so fastest cache, total cache, super cache. These plugins essentially help speed up your page optimization by creating static images of your website and storing them to increase load time for the client to help make sure that your files are actually zipped and as contained as possible to make transmission from, to and from the server as easy as possible. What ends up happening is that you can typically see if you're using Google Insight or any kind of a Pingdom, you can see a pretty reasonable spike in your actual load speed just from caching and there's browser caching which works fairly well, it works pretty well but it helps if the user themselves has something that when they go to your site there's a backup. Caching plugins actually let you have a static image that pulls up even if your site's down which is really beneficial for the client as well as for the user because for the client their website doesn't look like it's down which gives them time to figure out the issue and solve it. For the user they can still use parts of the website and not have to worry about it suddenly disappearing on them. Now once you move into higher traffic levels caching plugins tend to fall off in regards to their effectiveness, at that point you'd be looking at moving towards a CDN solution like a cloud flare where they handle the loading and caching and essentially the bulk of the weight that goes towards calling towards a plugin or towards a website and then beyond that you can use systems like reverse proxy, any kind of static but like I said there's going to be a talk that goes into much more detail for that after this one. One of my new favorite things to do we recently discovered that users occasionally whether it's clients or whether it's people on your own staff tend to think that they can fix anything as long as they have access to everything and one of my favorite things to say is a little bit of knowledge can go a long way towards making big problems. We actually earlier this week we got a phone call from one of our clients they had gotten into the back end of their website and they were updating their plugins and when they went to add some new content the essentially the content editor was locked up it was the text options were gone we had set up advanced custom fields to handle certain parts of their pages those were gone and they made an excellent leap of knowing that they had just updated plugins something stopped working so the plugins must have caused it unfortunately their solution to that was to delete all of the plugins on the site. So and I'll give them credit the knowing that it's a plugin issue that's most people would just assume that something we had done would have caused the issue but when you once we fix the website we restored all the plugins got everything working the client was very happy. One of the things that I would heavily recommend is using a user role editor plugin or some sort of system where you can specify user roles and levels and go right down to individual detail level of this level of user has access to these aspects of it they can update plugins but they can't access the plugin page to deactivate or remove plugins they can you can specify that they can't access the actual editor so they can't mess around with any of the PHP or any of the code which is really nice for not only support but also for our developers because if they've made some custom changes or there's very intricate work there and say one of the marketing team wants to add a new banner to the website we can make sure that they have to go through a developer to make sure that there's no issues with adding certain lines of code or that's not going to conflict with something additionally it helps protect certain aspects of the site so you can say these people are handling sales so they can access WooCommerce or Shopify and that helps make sure that they they can work on specific areas that they are specialized in while also limiting that access from users who wouldn't know or would want to go in and make changes and disrupt sales campaign or any kind of analytics so it really is a robust and almost necessity when it comes to protecting the integrity of the website and it another big thing is that it actually helps if someone does successfully get into the website and they're not meant to be there if they aren't able to get access to what I like to call a super user which is typically a support or developer where they have full access to everything usually those roles are going to be hidden and therefore the only way to get into them is if you get into one of the actual accounts that is attached to it otherwise if someone manages to get into a standard account they're limited in what they can access which goes a long way towards protecting the client themselves one of our favorite things to use and it is it's it's it's saved us a couple of times when it comes to websites that have gone down or been kind of mishandled main WP it essentially works as a pretty it's like a multi tool it's kind of like a nice Leatherman I guess would be a good way to put it the system allows you to connect child sites in this case our client sites but if you're working as a independent developer or any kind of small business owner having this work as a personal hub goes a long way towards keeping all of your sites managed it helps prevent missing if something has gone down it keeps track of what plugins need to be updated on one what sites you can actually sync all of your website simultaneously so if there's a major update or if you're going through quarterly peace of mind and just maintaining everything it's a great way to kind of go through and say okay great let's update the to the newest version of wordpress for all of our client sites then let's see what plugins across the board need updating are they still using this plug-in it's outdated hasn't been used in like six months hasn't been updated in eight months we can go ahead and uninstall it directly through here without actually having to go on to the client website additionally it allows you to add users so for an agency this is great when we up when we upload a new site and get it live and everything's going we add it to main wp and then we go into main wp and we can tell it okay add all of these users from this list and it'll run through add all of the users in with their passwords their username and it'll send a notification to that user that they've been added to the website so it's really great and it's a big help if say a client decides to take the website and skedaddle and delete all of the accounts in it but they don't take main wp off we can put our accounts back in and say hey you you you still you you know you kind of just walked off with this project we we we would like to you know get our money for it we can so please don't take us out again or in the case of a brute force attack if all the accounts are removed and you can't access the back end of the website anymore you just go in here and you run it and it'll pull back in and all the sudden it's like oh yeah we're good now everything's okay it's got a lot of really great features you can actually connect it to wordfence and then monitor wordfence through main wp and it'll give you alerts on websites if there's issues or if wordfence notices something's going on you can actually change all of the settings of any of your security plugin and another big thing is that you can actually set up backups so when I was saying you could sync all of your plugins and versions of wordpress usually when I'm doing that I'm very cautious about running a lot of different sites through a lot of updates and changes because it's very easy for a conflict between two plugins or the newest version of a plugin to cause an issue with the site what you can do is create an automatic backup right before you run those updates and then you'll get an alert if there's an issue with that site so you basically you back everything up you sync everything together and then you can go through and see what if anything went wrong go to those specific sites and restore the backup so you can go in and figure out okay was it this plugin what exactly triggered the conflict that brought the site flag the site it really is great for any kind of monitoring and maintenance now when it comes to keeping everything under control and maintaining the best best any kind of performance best kind of practice is my favorite thing of all time documenting there are a lot of times when people will say one thing and then do another and it's really great to have in writing when they said that one thing so that when they say that they did that thing and told you that thing you can say well actually we have a document that says that when you do any work on a website when anyone requests anything for a website getting that in writing in a secure saved system is huge it goes a long way towards not only protecting yourself but also protecting your client because if something happens and a change is made and it messes something up you're being held accountable as well as the client is being held accountable if the client asks you to do an update to the system and the system goes down it's a lot it holds you accountable as saying well we asked you to make these changes what happened why is it no longer functioning oh well we made this update this update this update we've got it all documented here everything's there for you to read and it also is really great it's a must in support because you're constantly dealing with clients who want you to solve all the problems and it helps you keep track of exactly what's been asked of you what helps maintain the progress so when you're regularly providing updates you can say great news we completed this plug-in are we installed this plug-in we made these changes to your websites layout if you want to go ahead and take a look at this let us know what you think and it basically provides a sort of peace of mind not only for yourself but for the people you're working with and I this this goes for any business any whether it's your own personal business whether it's an agency whether it's the client's business documentation any kind of CYA you can have is gold one of my personal things when it comes to talking with anyone and this is something that can be applied not only to work and support but also to any aspect of life it's something called the four step it's how you work with someone to address a problem understand the problem work with them towards getting them to understand your take on the situation and getting them to agree with you for support what this usually means is when someone calls in and complains about an issue it's it's an issue it is something extremely important to that client to that user to that co-worker it is an important it's an important problem that could be the end of the world for them even if it's just another ticket for you you handle it like it is their problem it is it is what's theirs is yours and it's making them understand that not only are you listening but you're repeating it back to them when they say my website's down it's been down for this long you say okay so your website's been down it's been down for this long what kind of errors are you seeing what kind of what kind of issues are you seeing can you send me a screenshot of this or all of a sudden this text changed I don't know what's going on and everything's ruined and all these things are missing okay let's take a look at this I understand what's happening it it seems it's it's very important that we look at what text is missing where is it missing from what pages have been affected are there any pages that weren't affected because not only does it show that you are actually paying attention to the client but also you're clearing up any kind of miscommunication you're getting more specific details and you're getting it all in a efficient calm manner goes back to what I was talking about at the beginning where well it can be burning down around you everything can seem like it's the end of the world but you put on a calm professional exterior internally you can be like I've never seen this before this is uh oh no no no no no externally you are don't worry about it we've got this this isn't the first time we've seen this we can take care of you it's okay after that you are acknowledging what's going on you are you are reiterating everything that you've gone over you are saying okay so based on everything we're talking about this is the issue you're looking at in particular we had this goes back to the client who was trying to translate their site into five different languages they called us one day and told us that they had somehow lost all of their translations and that it was the plug-ins fault that something had happened when they were translating and all of a sudden no longer were they able to translate but all the different pages had disappeared for all the different languages Chinese German Spanish I think they were doing portuguese at the time when it had gone down that was the other thing every time we talked with them they were adding a new language in but what ended up happening is we went through step by step I was like okay what were you working on last oh I was working on this in this page okay did you see this or did you see this oh I saw this could you provide me a screenshot of what you can see now to make sure that what I'm seeing is the same thing you're seeing yeah okay and then five minutes later you get the picture and you look at it and the first thing I noticed is okay I'm seeing different I'm seeing different like buttons and tabs and stuff than she's seeing and going back and forth I was able to determine that the problem was she had accidentally changed her user role down a level and the end result was that her user no longer had authorization to make any changes so it had made all of the different options invisible so that was a that was an easy solution but that was it was good to kind of go step by step and figure out what was going on what was interesting is after we did that and fixed her user role the translations weren't showing up on the site anyways so even though she now could make changes the translated pages weren't showing up properly so from there we were able to say okay let's take a look at what's actually happening let's take a look at the pages let's take a look at the plugin we figured out that it that was problem a but we now know problem visa thing and the end result of that is that you have to be able to say this is going to take some time we're going to have to look through this we're going to have to get a developer in we think that there might be an issue with the code itself that might have happened as a result of a b and c it's okay we can get a development team on this we just need to let you know that it's going to take this amount of time at this rate we can get this scheduled for you within the next week as long as we get your approval in that you've managed to address the problem you've managed to tell them that you're going to take care of it that you're going to look into it you've also offered them your solution of we'll get our team on this it's going to take this long at this rate but you don't end with that you never want to end with saying it's going to cost you this much because at that point the user and the client all they want to say is why is it going to cost this much you want to reassure them that not only that you know the issue that it's it will cost them but you have your team ready to get on the issue and you're leaving it up to them to choose to accept your solution if you follow these steps most clients will without a minute without blinking they will tell you okay let's get this done because at the end of the day they know that you are a professional that you listen to them that you were able to provide them with a solution and that you were able to do it calmly and in a very very personal manner when it comes to talking with anyone really it's all about making sure that you get your message across that you are being personable that you were showing that you actually genuinely care about what's going on and most people immediately they they respond to that that's that's one of the biggest things we like i said we've been working with this one client for about five months and even though we're talking with them weekly about different issues or different problems that the translators having they come to us and they they're great they're they're very cheery because they know that when they come to us it's going to cost them money but they're okay with that because they're getting a level of service of professionalism of we can take care of you and that goes miles to helping uh any kind of situation but that's uh that's pretty much what i've got i would love to hear any questions you guys might have about anything and uh hopefully i have answers for them yeah go ahead if i may may i ask you to put your psychologist hat on here for a moment sure thing what is the motivation from your perspective for the tinkering that occurs is it one we can make this change and save money because we won't need tech support to do that is it two hey i know something about wordpress and i can fix this myself like what's the motivation that that caught that initiates all these little tinkering that eventually results in the ticket and now you've got to fix the problem yeah so the thought process it it can be varied the thought process behind tinkering with someone's website until the point where they need to put a ticket in sometimes you have clients who owned their website previously and it might have been an html website it might have just been really basic scripting and they see wordpress's ability to add content to add new pages with the click of a button and it goes into a much more simplistic solution to them sometimes they read an article about top 10 new plugins for this and they download all 10 thinking that it's going to improve their website it can come down to sometimes they just don't want to pay for any kind of support but most of the time the people who do that they end up being the most frequent contact because they will repeatedly say well i'd rather do this than pay out a pocket for this and end up creating an even bigger issue so it just comes down to the individual person yeah uh well we prefer using main wp just because it's uh it's a fairly easy system to implement all you require is having a main a main wp hub on one website we've actually have a dedicated site that acts as our central hub for that and then you just download a main wp child plugin to the user's website and you can add an external security certificate to it the other thing we really like about it is the fact that it allows you to connect a lot of different plugins and extensions into main wp to monitor different aspects of a user's website like i was saying you can connect wordfence but you can also hook up different user role categories you can connect it to the user role editor system to be able to externally modify user roles and limit aspects of certain parts of the website on top of that it's just it's really robust and between the two we've used main wp longer but i would be willing to look into manage wp further and see if it has any kind of it's it's a pretty it's it's free and then you can you can purchase further extensions in and expand it further it's sort of similar to trying to think of a good example pretty similar to using something along lines of like a WooCommerce where you just kind of bring something in and then you can add different subscriptions and stuff to it no that's right yes we currently use desk we're in the middle of transitioning to a new system but that's all kind of up in the air right now mainly we use desk we've been using uh it's desk it's part of the sales force system but the system itself is pretty simplistic we actually have a contact form on our website that works as a support access point so people send a ticket in through our our businesses website and then we receive a notification at desk we also have the support supported the design forward automatically to my work email so the second a client reaches out not only is it in our system but it's also brought personally to my attention so i know immediately what's going on and it goes a long way towards kind of monitoring and tracking you can set it for pending solutions you can create custom tags so you can say when you respond to someone you can put a tag saying waiting on client response waiting on approval ready to invoice waiting to be scheduled needs to be scheduled so it's it's very nice towards that but like i said we are considering moving towards a newer system just because desk itself is transitioning to a new system itself so we've we implemented that for certain clients we personally don't have a chat box just because we mainly are using it's our main support system is myself and one other person and we're regularly handling about a dozen cases a day if the workload would increase to the point where a chat system would be more effective that would make more sense for larger scale clients it's a great solution exactly yeah it's it's once you reach a certain level of users reaching out it is more sensible to have a more immediate uh face-to-face or well text-to-text sort of solution but i personally i i really enjoy utilizing email because it's a it's to me you can get more details in and it gives not only yourself time to think about solutions but it gives the client time to think about what's going on look into things and kind of understand that they have to not just get an immediate answer because sometimes the immediate answer isn't the best answer yeah no problem so uh wordpress.org is a great resource that's pretty much any kind of plugin that's been created is going to be on there and from there they usually post regular articles about different types of plugins so you can kind of see comparisons in there but they also keep a full list and uh links to the users or to the creator's website to sample sites to be able to look over everything so i'd recommend checking wordpress.org yeah yeah that's that's a great point sometimes uh if you go to the if you go to add new on your website to add a new plugin and you search for something i heavily recommend that the first option that you get is not the one you go with because sometimes it's just whoever's got more uh more views rather than the actual reviews and score and the big thing is knowing that it's compatible with the latest version and how regularly it's updated honestly anything more than a month is a little it's i start leaning away from it just because there's a lot of stuff that happens in the span of a month and if an issue comes up or there's a new version of wordpress you want to know that they're on top of it no problem yeah if i may just follow up on that sure i'm sure this is something that experience would solve for me but i've done that i'd look for it at plugins and it's like trying to find one person in the super bowl i mean you start you start out and yeah there's the key word okay so you type in a key word and and you get them but sometimes the key word out of the title may not lead you to the function that you're looking at is there's some other indexing system or a consumer's reports assessment of plugins that will will look at plugins like categories and give you a sense of that is that so uh that exists yeah i just said google it and it'll be like an article like that's usually a lot of good articles okay so that was yeah yeah no no no that's for that was that was like that was pretty much what i was going to say is no yeah a lot of the time your most your best resource is going to be other users they will you'll see all kinds of articles blogs people who dedicate themselves to reviewing plugins do you have any other questions or you can go ahead and i can take one more all right you look at the top three things that people reach out to you for support and is there something that client could have done to prevent that call so i guess an example would be if somebody's website's been breached maybe they need to look at their security passwords to make sure that they need to be stronger versus weaker that's what i'm sort of looking at more based on if if we're calling you for support and we have an issue is there something we could have done preventative wise so that we don't have to call you like a fan so i'd say top in regards to the top three things that could top three preventatives for a client not messing with what's been put on the site there's a reason why it's been added one of the things going back to word fence it has a you can set a strong password system so that they have to have a password that is 12 characters with one symbol one number uppercase lowercase and that goes a long way towards protecting from users putting password one two three or you know my password or using their username and their password is the same exact thing goes a long way towards protecting not only their site but themselves from that another big thing is proper training taking the time to sit down with your client and explain how WordPress works even better if they have a specialized part of the website sitting down and explaining this is the aspect of your website this specific thing this is how it works if you're using it to do these things these this is how you do it because we've had clients who came in who had refused the training that we provided and they were asking they had somehow managed to break the content of the website because instead of going through the basics of how to use it they just assumed that they would know how to use it and WordPress can offer a lot of really simplistic ways of handling things but it's a very complex system and what seems simple can take you down a rabbit hole real quick thank you no problem thanks well that wraps up my talk if you guys have any other questions afterwards feel free to pick me up but thanks for listening and putting up with my chatter for a while