WordPress Plugin Management for Agencies

Mastering WordPress Plugin Management for Agency Clients

Agencies have a mixed relationship with plugins. While they offer greater functionality for clients’ WordPress sites, concerns about plugin “bloat” or security vulnerabilities are never far off.

For agencies, part of the challenge with plugins is scale; managing five plugins on one site is easy, while managing 500 across 20 sites can be a liability without a centralized system to manage them. Agency WordPress plugin management requires a shift from reactively fixing problems to a more proactive approach.

This article outlines an agency framework for managing plugins at scale, focusing on standardized stacks, rigorous testing, and high-performance hosting environments.

Building a Standardized Agency Plugin Stack

Getting organized is critical to WordPress plugin management. A good first step is developing a standardized agency plugin stack.

• The Core Stack: No matter the client, there are certain essential plugins that you’re likely to use with every client. Identify these 5-7 non-negotiable plugins that every client site will use. In building this stack, focus on common functionality that all client sites require, including SEO, forms, security, and image optimization.
• Vet for Quality: There are tens of thousands of plugins to choose from. Focus on quality when choosing the right ones for your core stack. Some criteria that can help guide you include developer reputation, update frequency, and performance impact.
• The “One Job” Rule: Try to avoid overlapping plugins that do the same thing, such as two different SEO or caching tools. Each plugin should deliver a single, core functionality. Plugins that overlap can lead to site performance degradation and conflicts that can distort or break functionality.
• Put Performance First: Your managed WordPress hosting provider can help you slim down your core stack. Hosting that handles caching and backups at the server level can reduce the number of plugins needed for your plugin stack. Pressable offers automated backups and edge caching that can replace bloated plugins as well as DupliKit site templates for deploying preferred themes, plugins, and settings preconfigured.

The Plugin Update Workflow

One of the great things about WordPress sites is they are not static. Clients often need to update their site’s plugins to drive improvements to the visitor experience or access new features that help meet business goals. Agencies should have an update workflow ready to go.

• Never Update on a Live Site: Agencies need to use a staging environment for plugin updates. This avoids breaking the client’s site and either damaging the user experience or inadvertently sharing client data with the public.
• Automated vs. Manual: Have a clear understanding of which plugins are safe to auto-update, such as minor security patches (Sucuri or Wordfence). Other more complicated plugins, such as WooCommerce or Elementor, require more direct manual testing.
• Testing for Conflicts: Staging environments provide a safe location for plugin conflict discovery. This is especially valuable following bulk updates on a client’s site. Pressable offers one-click staging environments for safe plugin testing and debugging.
• Rollback Strategy: Not every bug gets caught before taking a site into production. Agencies need a contingency plan in place to revert plugins to a stable, previous version if an update appears to be causing errors or crashes.

Security, Auditing, and Lifecycle

Plugins are a known pathway for attacking websites. Because of this, safeguarding client sites is an important part of WordPress plugin management for agencies. This can be achieved through a few key WordPress security practices.

• Regular Plugin Audits: Plugins can quickly proliferate and begin to overlap in the functionality they are providing. Agencies should conduct quarterly reviews to delete deactivated or redundant plugins. This helps reduce the overall security risk from plugins.
• Vulnerability Scanning: Over time, security flaws are discovered in plugins or they can be abandoned by their developers. Both scenarios introduce risk to your clients’ sites. Agencies can address these potential vulnerabilities by consistently monitoring for plugins with known security flaws or “abandonware.”
• Managed Security: Not all security threats emerge from external sources. Some attacks target the underlying infrastructure, hoping to gain access to the site from an unexpected angle. Agencies can better protect their clients by partnering with a hosting provider that offers proactive malware scanning and firewall protection at the infrastructure layer. Pressable takes a proactive approach to its security by keeping its WordPress core updated and providing a web application firewall (WAF) to protect each client’s site being hosted.

Centralized Management Tools

Agencies are able to do a much better job of WordPress plugin management by using some of the centralized management tools that are available. They improve overall efficiency and reduce operational overhead across multiple clients.

• Dashboard Efficiency: Agencies need a single dashboard view of the plugins in use across all their clients. Tools like MainWP and ManageWP can help manage the plugins of all your clients from one dashboard. Pressable also offers a unified dashboard for managing multiple client sites.
• Bulk Actions: When a security flaw is revealed in a critical plugin used by multiple clients (maybe something in their standardized plugin stack), agencies need to be able to push out security updates to all of them simultaneously. Dashboards make this kind of bulk updating possible.
• Reporting Value: Dashboards can help agencies with reporting. Plugin maintenance logs can be included in monthly client “Success Reports” to help explain ongoing support.

Effective Plugin Management: Your Agency’s Calling Card

WordPress plugin management is an essential agency service. Being able to effectively deliver this service to clients can make all the difference between an overstretched agency and a profitable one. Having the right tools and practices in place will help ensure your agency is the latter.

Effective plugin management shows in the final product — your client’s site. A lean, updated, and well-managed site is the best business card an agency can have.

Start improving your WordPress plugin management today by auditing your core plugin stack and (if you’re not doing it already) moving your update workflow to a staging environment.

Pressable: Your Plugin Management Partner

Pressable understands the importance of effective WordPress plugin management. We offer a unified dashboard view that allows you to manage the plugins in use across all of your clients. Pressable also provides built–in multi-level caching and automated backups, so you don’t need to install third-party plugins for essential WordPress management.

Pressable—part of the Automattic family that also includes WordPress.com, WordPress VIP, and WooCommerce—is staffed by WordPress experts with the skills and knowledge to effectively manage your WordPress sites. If you’re thinking about switching to managed WordPress hosting, schedule a demo to see how Pressable can support your continued optimization and growth.

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