FAQs
Find answers to the most frequently asked questions regarding our WordPress website management and care plans. If you can’t find an answer to your question, contact us!
Onboarding
Everything you need to know about what happens after you sign up for one of our website care plans.
Immediately after subscribing to your new website care plan, you’ll be redirected to a web page to provide us information on how to access your website.
Additionally, you will receive a detailed welcome email with information on getting started and what you can expect next.
For a complete list of onboarding tasks, click here.
After signing up, you’ll be redirected to a page where you can submit your login credentials securely. Additionally, you can respond to the welcome email you receive after subscribing with that information.
For owners of multiple websites, please perform separate transactions for each website. This allows you to select different plans for each website (if applicable).
Yes! Contact us for discounted non-profit pricing plans.
Of course! After signing up, you’ll receive a welcome email detailing everything you need to know to get started with your website care plan.
If you have questions regarding which plan to select, you can contact us and a team member will reach out to you within one business day.
Account Management
Managing your Tipsy Support website care plan is simple and convenient.
Yes, anytime!
Downgrading website care plans means losing access to premium speed and security optimization services. If you move forward with the downgrade, just make sure these are things you’re prepared to handle yourself!
You can upgrade, downgrade or cancel your website care plan(s) anytime by:
- emailing our sales team the request.
- submitting a request on our contact page.
Please note that we do reserve the right to cancel a subscription plan should a customer frequently upgrade and downgrade.
Of course!
Once you’ve worked with us for a bit and know how awesome we are, you can take advantage of our discounted pricing and move over to a yearly plan anytime.
No for monthly plans, yes for yearly plans
You can see our exact refund policy in our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
We understand that business needs change. That’s why our monthly care plans are flexible and can be cancelled anytime.
But because we start providing services from day 1, our monthly care plans are non-refundable.
If you opt for a yearly subscription and need to cancel part way through your year, we’re happy to talk to you about a partial refund. Simply contact us.
If a yearly plan is cancelled part way through the subscription we’ll charge you only for the months you’ve used (at our full monthly care plan rate) and we’ll refund the remainder of your paid amount.
You do have the option to move a yearly website management subscription to another website, so that might be a good alternative to cancelling entirely.
We work best when we’re your primary technical partner when it comes to WordPress. That way we can ensure all changes made to the site are done following our rigorous procedures. So we prefer to be the only team making technical changes to your website(s).
24/7 Unlimited Edits
24/7 Unlimited website edits are fully covered by our Call plan or higher.
After our team has successfully completed the onboarding process for your website (24 – 48 hours), we can start making changes to your website!
As is detailed in your onboarding welcome email, there are multiple ways to submit website edit requests:
- Email our support team directly (you can find our support team’s email address in the welcome email)
- Submit a request through our support page.
Unlimited edits include edits to content on any page, changing banners, headers or footers, changing plugin settings, CSS adjustments, blog content or context edits, adding a new landing page, formatting landing pages, changing images or text, adding coupon codes or updating shopping carts. Unlimited truly does mean unlimited too!
Unlimited edits do not include custom development (PHP, plugins, themes, etc), updating custom code, graphic design, PSD to WordPress, creation of content, or building out a new website or subdomain.
Example: adding a blog post
Included: You want us to upload blog content that you created with attached images that have been sent and formatted for WordPress with detailed instructions.
Not included: You want us to create a blog post, find images and upload to WordPress with no instruction for formatting.
Example: WooCommerce edits
Included: You want us to add a new product to your WooCommerce store (for which you’ve provided all needed content).
Not included: You want us to create a custom checkout process for your WooCommerce store.
Example: adding a new plugin
Included: You want us to install and set up a plugin to use it’s built-in functionality.
Not included: You want us to create new functionality that doesn’t exist in a plugin (this would require custom development which is available at an hourly development rate).
Example: editing website copy
Included: You want us to take the text that you emailed to us and use it to replace the current content on your About page.
Not included: You want us to write content or design your About page.
Example: troubleshooting issues
Included: You want us to troubleshoot plugin and theme conflicts after updates, activating new plugins, or website edits.
Not included: You want us to make hosting adjustments that are the responsibility of your hosting provider or plugin customizations that are the responsibility of the plugin developer.
We’d be happy to help you with custom development as well. That kind of project is fully covered by our hourly work.
Example: on-site SEO changes
Included: You want us to change some page titles, meta descriptions, or fix specific SEO errors found in your latest report.
Not included: You want us to help with keyword analysis, rank tracking, backlink outreach, or SEO consulting.
Example: Google Search Console issues
Included: You want us to help fix some specific minor WordPress errors found in your GSC account.
Not included: You want us to fix every issue in your GSC account without context or priority.
Yes, although support may be slower based on number of requests submitted or task complexity.
We get a lot of questions about our unlimited edits. But it’s true! Unlimited really means unlimited when it comes to the edits we provide.
We don’t like to nickel and dime people, so we just ask them to pay for their monthly subscription and we provide the technical support.
It depends on the ticket, but in general, 2-6 hour reply time & 24-48 hour resolution time.
How website edits work
When you email a support ticket (or submit it through our support page), you will receive an automated response right away if it is submitted correctly into our system.
Within 2-6 hours you will receive a manual response email from our team that we have opened the ticket, have assessed the request complexity, and are actively working on it.
Within 24-48 hours you will receive a resolution email with the changes made as a result of that ticket or request.
Factors that can affect this timeline
Our team only performs one edit request at a time. This is to make sure conflicts are never created on your site because multiple changes are being made at one. If you submit 5 edit requests at one time, we’ll handle them one-by-one. This just means you’ll need to be a bit patient as we work our way through multiple simultaneous requests.
If you send in a request that’s highly complex, it also may take our team longer to address it. We pride ourselves on doing work quickly, but even more on doing safe, diligent work. More complicated requests also require some patience on your end as we effectively tackle it for you. If a ticket is complex and our team needs more time, we’ll let you know if it is outside of that 48 hour window.
Ways you can help our team be more efficient
Sometimes we need additional information or direct feedback from you to move a request forward. If you receive an email that requires additional information, please reply to it as soon as possible so our team can continue working on your request!
Because we don’t offer phone or live chat support, please take the time to provide a complete and thorough request including screenshots and specific deliverables. The more back-and-forth required to understand your request and obtain required information, the longer the request will take to complete.
If you need us to provide edits to your website, you’ll need to upgrade to our Call plan or higher. We’re not big fans of one-time edits since we want to work with people who understand their website is a work in progress and want a technical partner who can help them continue to move forward. Plus, when it comes to security and website speed, one-time changes are simply not effective. We want to provide ongoing support to get your WordPress site fast and secure, then keep it that way.
Yes! We fully manage WordPress websites, including everything in your WordPress ecosystem. If updates are causing conflict issues, we’ll reach out to plugin and theme companies directly to help fix the core issue so you don’t have to. If your hosting company’s server goes down for any reason, we’ll hop on live chat to help them assess and fix the issue so you don’t have to wait in a queue for 30 minutes.
At the end of the day, Tipsy Support fully manages WordPress websites so you won’t every have to worry about a technical website issue again!
No! We only offer support via email and our support page.
If phone support, live chat support, or real-time screen sharing are must-haves for you, Tipsy Support isn’t a great fit. No hard feelings!
While we don’t offer phone support, we’ve made email and help desk support a huge priority here at Tipsy Support and you’ll find our email support fast, effective, and friendly!
Tipsy Support focuses mainly on maintaining, supporting, and optimizing already built WordPress websites.
However, our sister company, Tipsy Social, is an award-winning marketing and design agency that can fully handle website projects of any size. Checkout their website design work.
Within moments of successfully submitting a website support request, you’ll receive an automated email confirming that we have received it.
Within 2-6 hours, a support engineer will manually confirm that we have your ticket, understand the request, and are working to resolve it.
If there are any additional needs, our support engineers will email you directly to communicate.
After the ticket is resolved, you’ll receive an email outlining the status of the ticket and confirming it has been completed.
Right away, but there are some things our team needs to do before we can proceed with your edits.
Right after you sign up for your website care plan, you’ll be redirected to supply us with your login credentials. Additionally, you will receive a welcome email. Read more about our step-by-step onboarding here.
That welcome email will also tell you how to submit website edits.
You can submit your first website edits right away after you receive your welcome email since your website care plan is technically active the moment you sign up!
But there are a few things we have to do before performing any website edits…
- Make sure all the login credentials you’ve sent us work correctly.
- Perform a full backup of your core files and database.
- Do a few initial onboarding steps to make sure your website is stable.
These initial steps can take a few hours. But once they’re completed, our support team’s next step will be to dive into your initial website edits whenever they were sent in.
No, but depending on the size of your project, Tipsy Social may be able to help.
Yes at $150/hr & as an add-on to our website care plans.
We do offer custom development for larger projects that are outside the scope of our website management subscriptions.
Custom development is $150/hr.
Our team will always try to make changes to your website(s) as simply as possible. That means we’ll avoid custom development whenever possible to keep your website itself simple. And if something does truly require custom development, we’ll follow the procedure below.
The process for custom development
- You’ll submit an edit request that our team decides requires custom development.
- Our engineers will email you with an accurate estimate for how much time we think it will take with regards to hours.
- Once you accept the estimate and submit payment, our team will complete the project with any additional questions during development directed to you via email.
Yes.
We know many websites have multiple users, contractors, freelancers or consultants doing many different things in the backend. We enjoy working with many websites to make things even easier for everybody with dashboard access. As long as Tipsy Support is aware of any technical changes to the website made by another party, this shouldn’t create any conflicts.
Emergency Support & Monitoring
24/7 monitoring and emergency support are included in all our website care plans.
We use automated tools that check the status of your website(s). They ping your sites managed under our monthly care every minute of every day.
These pings check to make sure your site isn’t giving a 400 or 500 error.
If our automated software finds that your website is down or showing abnormal activity, it will ping our help desk and someone on our support team will address the issue immediately.
Our team is distributed, meaning we work from around the globe! Our core team is local to the US while some of our support engineers are international and work remotely. This gives us the ability to provide 24/7 service.
If your website crashes at 3am on a Sunday morning, someone on our team will be notified within 1 minute, the issue will be addressed and your site will be back up immediately.
WordPress Security
Security optimization is fully covered by our Call plan or higher. Malware cleanup is fully covered by our Premium plan or higher.
Tipsy Support uses iThemes Security Pro and BlogVault to bring premium WordPress security to your website(s) for free under select website care plans.
During the onboarding process, we’ll implement the premium plugins and optimize them for your unique site to give you the best possible protection.
Premium security plugins are never simply installed and activated. Our team optimizes every setting and option to maximize security for your unique websites’ design and functionality.
We’ll also implement additional security measures across your WordPress dashboard and server as needed. While your hosting company is responsible for security on your server, our team will ensure everything is up to your standards, and recommend upgraded hosting when necessary.
Yes, if you’re interested in long-term security as well!
After you sign up for a website care plan for your compromised site, our team of security engineers will:
- scan the site
- clear out all malware, and
- check the site for any vulnerable areas such as outdated themes and/or plugins with known vulnerabilities.
- create a security setup to harden your website to protect against future attacks.
Tipsy Support does not perform one-time malware clean up. If you decide to work with us, it’s because you want to clean up your site and keep it secure in the future.
We’re in the business of security, which means we’re incredibly diligent about the transfer of personal data, website passwords, credit card information, etc.
- We use tools like 1ty.me to securely hand off personal information.
- Our entire team uses VPNs to anonymize and encrypt internet activity whenever we log in to do any work related to Tipsy Support, our customers or our partners.
- Every single member of our team activates 2-factor authentication for every piece of software we use that offers it, including all software that contains customer data of any kind (including Stripe, WooCommerce, Teamwork Projects, Teamwork Desk, etc).
Speed & Performance Optimization
Speed and Performance optimization is fully covered by our Premium plan and higher.
Speed and Performance optimization is fully covered by our Premium plan or higher. Through hours of manual optimization and our premium plugins, we achieve sites fast enough to have a significant positive impact on the websites we manage.
During onboarding, our team does a full audit of your website and hosting environment. This allows us to create and execute a unique plan for your website to significantly lower loading time.
We also keep your website fast on an ongoing basis. Getting your website to load quickly is one thing, but keeping it loading fast over the long-term is a real game-changer.
During your onboarding process, we’ll work through our proprietary procedures and implement our premium plugins to give you the best possible optimization.
- Optimize Images
- Remove Query Strings
- Minify Javascript and CSS
- Optimize Mobile Experience
- Render-Blocking Resources
- Combine Requests
- Leverage Browser Caching
- Lazy Loading Images
- Enable Compression
- Inline Critical CSS
- Reduce Server Response Time
- CDN Support
No. While our goal is always to achieve loading times of under 1 second, we never make any blanket promises when it comes to loading times of the websites we manage. Anybody who makes promises like this is simply trying to sell you on their services and get you to swipe your credit card.
This being said, the majority of the websites we manage load in under 2 seconds, which is the recommended loading time to hit according to Google.
Every website is different, and depending on certain aspects of the website, it may be impossible to achieve loading time under 2 seconds. For example, if your website is on shared hosting (alongside 20,000 other websites) and has 20 Google Ads serving external content, chances are your website will be slow.
But if you take our speed engineers’ advice, ensure your website is on appropriate hosting and do a great job balancing marketing & growth needs with minimalist speed optimization techniques, achieving loading times under 2 seconds should be no problem.
Yes, although this would not be covered under a website care plan.
No. Tipsy Support only provides speed optimization services for people who want to make their website faster and keep it that way over the long-term.
One-time speed optimization may help your website load faster now, but as your site continues to change over the following weeks and months, the site will slow down again unless someone is continually optimizing the site for speed.
We partner with folks to manage their website speed not just for today and tomorrow, but for the foreseeable future.
Our support team does not run SEO campaigns!
SEO tasks we can’t help with:
- help with keyword research
- consult on SEO strategy
- do keyword tracking
- help you earn backlinks
- anything else related to driving traffic to your website through search engines
That being said, our sister company, Tipsy Social, can help implement technical tasks relating to your SEO.
SEO tasks we can help with:
- Adding metadata
- Updating title tags and page titles
- Adding blog post content
- Helping with any other on-page SEO tasks you or your marketing team need completed.
Performance
While we don’t run SEO campaigns for clients, we do help optimize speed and Core Web Vitals under our Premium plan. As loading time becomes more of a ranking factor for Google, having a team speeding up your site becomes more of a necessity!
SEO is a long-term challenge. We always recommend working with an SEO team who can fully review your site and help you achieve your website goals. If you’re looking for an SEO agency to work with, we recommend Tipsy Social.
WordPress Updates
WordPress update management is fully covered by all of our website care plans.
Tipsy Support updates plugins, themes and core files on every website we manage.
This includes:
- a full battery of testing before updates are made (when necessary)
- executing updates using our safe procedure
- troubleshooting after updates have been made to ensure all designs and functionality are intact
Full backups done before updates
Before we start the process of executing a set of updates, our engineers will perform an extra full backup of your core files and database. Safety first!
Our engineers perform WordPress updates on a weekly basis.
This is actually safer from a security standpoint than daily updates because it avoids the situation of updating a plugin or theme after a developer has accidentally released a new version with a security bug.
They are safely handled by Tipsy Support during low-traffic hours
This ensures that any possible issues around updates wouldn’t adversely affect your site when the majority of people are active.
Updates can be done on staging first
We’re also happy to perform the updates on your staging server before pushing them live for another layer of security if you’d like us to.
This is especially helpful for websites with advanced functionality like WooCommerce, membership, etc.
What about premium plugins from 3rd party developers?
We will gladly perform the necessary plugin updates to any previously purchased or future purchased plugins, for example, WooCommerce Subscriptions. You can either give us the logins to the account of the plugin you purchased or you can send us the updated file and license via WeTransfer or similar. We just need the plugin and licenses to update it.
We will not purchase or pay for any premium plugins or licenses on your behalf, you will need to do this directly with the plugin developer.
There are a few reasons for this:
- Sometimes plugin updates are released with bugs. Updating less frequently allows the plugin developer to get rid of these bugs before we add them to your WordPress site.
- Batching more updates together means an easier manual review. That in turn means a lower probability that something bad will happen or break your website.
- We’ll be doing all these updates on the weekend when most websites receive less traffic. That means a safer environment and minimal issues for your visitors.
We always make an exception for more major plugin updates, such as WooCommerce. When major updates come out for this, we’ll make the updates far more slowly to ensure that your website remains running smoothly without any hiccups.
If your hosting provider has a one-click PHP version setting that we can use to select the desired PHP version, then yes, we can use that if a PHP update is requested.
If this option is not available, then no, it will be up to your host to update the PHP version of your site or server.
If you are on a Call, Premium, Top Shelf, or Reserve plan, we can put in a ticket with the host on your behalf and ensure that any issues caused by the update are resolved.
If you are on a Well plan and a PHP update not done by us causes issues, you will need to resolve that with your host or upgrade your care plan to add edits by Tipsy Support so that our team can make the necessary changes to your website to make it compatible with the newer PHP version.
Premium Plugins
WordPress premium plugins are only available on specified website care plans.
When you sign up for a Tipsy Support website care plan, you get full access to all our premium plugin partners for free.
During your onboarding process, we’ll implement the premium plugins and optimize them for your unique site to give you the best possible protection.
- iThemes Security Pro (Call Plan or higher)
- Imagify (Premium Plan or higher)
- WP Rocket (Premium Plan or higher)
- Video User Manual (all plans)
Premium security plugins are never simply installed and activated. Our team optimizes every setting and option to maximize security for your unique websites’ design and functionality.
You’ll lose access but can purchase the premium plugins yourself to continue using them.
Unfortunately, we can’t continue servicing websites that are no longer covered under our website care plans.
If you decide to cancel your Tipsy Support subscription (or downgrade to a subscription that doesn’t include a premium plugin), you’ll lose access to our license to be able to run the plugin.
You’re more than welcome to continue using any of these premium plugins by purchasing your own copy of the plugin.
No! We can utilize and optimize any current or added plugins.
Advanced & Custom Functionality
Managing your Tipsy Support website care plan is simple and convenient.
Just because something specific is not listed here does not mean it doesn’t belong under our Premium Plan, especially with new technology arriving in the WordPress ecosystems regularly.
- eCommerce (WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, WP Simple Pay, etc)
- Membership (MemberPress, Restrict Content Pro, s2 Member, etc)
- Learning Management (LearnDash, LifterLMS, Sensei, etc)
- Multilingual (WPML, Polylang, qTranslate-X, etc)
- Outside API/software integrations (auto-populating real estate listings, etc)
Yes!
All WooCommerce websites or sites that contain on-site payment or donation functionality (Easy Digital Downloads, BigCommerce, WP Simple Pay, Give, etc) require our Premium Plan.
All websites that are also custom-built or have highly customized themes or plugins require our Reserve Plan.
If your website accepts payments or donations that are managed by a 3rd-party (someone submits their payment on a separate website, etc), this requirement does not apply.
Under specific website management subscriptions, our team manages WooCommerce stores to help you drive more sales and revenue.
Adding new products
Our unlimited small website edits fully cover adding or removing any products to your online store. Just send us images, descriptions and any other details we need about your new products and we’ll get new product pages up for you.
Performance
If you run a high-traffic WooCommerce store, whether it’s regularly driving traffic through SEO or seeing large traffic spikes over short time periods, our team will help you set up the infrastructure and ensure your checkout process is fast and effective. Whether 1 person is checking out or 1,000 are concurrently, we’ll make sure your site is set up to give each of those people a great checkout experience.
Safe updates
Here at Tipsy Support, we practice a safe update procedure, which is even more important for finicky WooCommerce updates. We’ll perform all WooCommerce updates in a staging environment and do a full battery of tests before pushing those updates to the live site to completely avoid any update issues.
Staging integrated into workflow
You need folks to be able to check out on your store 24/7. That’s why we’re happy to provide a workflow that sees all changes happen in staging before they get pushed to the live site. This means it will take a bit longer for you to see website edits go live on your site, but also that the risk of downtime or checkout issues is significantly reduce.
Yes!
5 sites or less
If your Multisite installation has 5 sites or less we can fully manage the full multisite install on Reserve Plan.
6+ sites
For Multisites running more than 5 sites we can fully manage your installation under an Enterprise plan. Contact us for more details.
Yes!
If your website has advanced functionality, we’ll do all plugin, theme, and core file updates on your staging server. Once everything has been updated successfully, we’ll push those changes to your live site to avoid any downtime.
If you have access to a staging site through your hosting provider, we’re happy to manage that staging area.
If not, Tipsy Support will provide you complete access to a staging site our team will create for you.
Do you have a process for pushing data from staging to production without overwriting production member data (e.g Membership, eCommerce, and Learning Management Systems)?
In these cases, we don’t do a full website push from a staging environment.
We selectively choose what needs to be pushed based on what was changed. Some things may be manually copied over if it’s database-related, such as content.
If the changes made were only to files, such as testing, we can choose to only push the files to the live version of your website.
Staging websites should only be used for testing or short-term edits. We don’t recommend using a staging site for more than 24 hours. This is to mitigate overwriting production site data.
Not necessarily!
If your site handles all payments or donations on-site (WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, BigCommerce, WP Simple Pay, etc), our Premium Plan or higher is required.
However, if your website accepts payments or donations that are 100% managed by a 3rd-party (someone submits their payment on a separate website, etc), we can also manage your website under our Call or Well Plans.
Yes.
We manage tons of membership sites. Our monitoring and updates is specifically designed to make sure login areas are always functional.
Our team is also very familiar with the most popular membership plugins, so no matter how your site is built, we’re a great option to get up to speed on your website fast.
We also know that accepting credit cards and being responsible for so much membership data is heavy on your shoulders. That’s why you can rely on our security experts to make sure your site remains safe from malware, blacklist status, website errors, and out-of-date software.
Custom-built (or highly customized) websites required our advanced plans because of their level of complexity! That’s where our Top Shelf plan and Reserve plan come in.
Websites built using out-of-the-box themes, plugins or page builders can be updated through regular updates provided by the developers of those products.
Custom websites require our engineering team at Tipsy Support to manually updated custom areas of your website, a time- and resource-intensive process.
That’s why these websites require a higher level plan! It’s our job to make sure we take the best possible care of every website we manage and that means giving it the investment needed to keep it performing, secure, and stable.
Your WordPress site requires our Top Shelf plan if…
- the theme is custom-built
- the theme files have been highly customized
- the site is using any custom-built plugins
- the site is using any highly customized plugins
Your WordPress site requires our Reserve plan if…
- Any of the above points are true AND the website has advanced functionality.