I started my wordpress development career on upwork and the first couple of clients that I got had their websites crashed and needed someone to fix. I have to say, I really enjoyed going through error logs and finding fixes along with many other things that expanded my knowledge.
I want to start specifically selling my fixing crashed wordpress websites service and am looking to know if this is even viable. So here is the million doller question, how long have you guys had your wordpress websites and in that time, how many times did you face a crashed website. Additionally, how long were your websites down until you could fix it or could find someone to fix it?
Thanks 🙂
WordPress websites, like any web app, can crash for various reasons. In my experience, issues are often unique to each client’s website. Troubleshooting and fixing these problems can take anywhere from 1 to 10 hours or more, depending on the complexity.
However, fixing crashes is just the beginning. Performance issues are another common concern, often coming from poor development practices or bloated databases that may contain several gigabytes of data requiring manual cleanup. Simply restoring the site’s functionality isn’t always enough.
Clients may follow up with additional requests like:
1. “The website is much slower now. Can you please fix it?”
2. “Our checkout process is broken, it wasn’t like that. Please fix it.”
These requests can continue indefinitely, each potentially requiring significant time and effort to address.
This ongoing nature of website maintenance and troubleshooting is why a simple “fix-it” service isn’t necessarily a “good idea” It’s a complex, time-consuming process that often involves more than just resolving the initial problem and just “bringing a crashed site back up”.
Im 15+ years now and never a crash.
Only had some plugin conflicts over the years and one client site hacked. Host fixed it in minutes since its backed up.
It happens all the time. I started a service called https://wpmedic.com specifically for this because I enjoy dealing with unique challenges. The biggest problem I’ve encountered is that a lot of people have no idea how to provide sftp access nor do they even know where their website is hosted.
One site I was asked to look at recently completely crashed. It contained a theme and a builder with plugins which were way too old (discontinued/not updated for over 3-4 years). Site was updated to WP 6.5.# recently, and ended up breaking. Couldn’t restore it, because backups were 2 months old, and there’s no download links to restore the theme or its add-ons. The crash must have happened at least three months ago, and no one was paying attention to it.
If you’re not maintaining the site or have a maintenance program in place (something like that) where you’re constantly updating the site on a staging (depending on the apps and change logs) once a week, then you’re going have crashes often.