MANAGED WORDPRESS
Putting an End to Tedious Plugin Maintenance
RocketLevel uses Smart Plugin Manager for automatic plugin updates, allowing
developers to focus on more valuable work.
Site:
Industry:
Marketing Automation, Digital Marketing
“When you’re dealing with sizable installs and 20-30 different multisites, updating a single plugin, not to mention multiple plugins, can become a real chore. What I like about Smart Plugin Manager is that it’s not overly complex. It gets to the core of what it needs to do and it does it well.”
— Montana Pham, RocketLevel Senior IT Manager and IT Support Lead.
The Client
RocketLevel helps companies grow by leveraging the power of digital marketing to engage new prospects, nurture leads, and continue the connection with them. Its cutting-edge marketing automation platform, coupled with insightful data and analytics, maximizes clients’ success in converting leads.
The Challenge
Reduce the amount of hours spent on tedious (but necessary) plugin maintenance, enabling developers to refocus on core business projects.
The Solution
Using WP Engine’s Smart Plugin Manager, RocketLevel reduced the amount of time developers spend on plugin updates to near zero. The solution automatically performs plugin updates on a scheduled, customizable interval, and uses machine learning to identify if updates pass or fail. If updates are unsuccessful, they’re rolled back to their previous state and a detailed report is sent to the user.
The Results
While plugins are one of WordPress' core strengths, they require regular updates to protect against security threats.
In fact, more than half of all WordPress-specific security vulnerabilities are tied to out-of-date plugins, making regular maintenance a critical aspect of website security.
At the same time, however, plugin maintenance can be extremely time-consuming, especially when managing multiple plugins
This was the case for RocketLevel, a customer acquisition platform that manages numerous WordPress installs and multisites.
As RocketLevel’s WordPress environments grew, the burden of maintaining various plugins used across each install began to weigh on the company's developers.
“We got to a point where we had full-time developers spending the majority of their time on plugin maintenance, which was obviously not ideal,” said Montana Pham, RocketLevel’s Senior IT Manager and IT Support Lead.
While Pham knew the arrangement wasn’t sustainable long-term, he also knew he had little choice.
“Not keeping our plugins up-to-date wasn’t an option,” he said, “so we had to keep doing our plugin maintenance the hard way: manually.”
However, all of that started to change when Pham and his team found Smart Plugin Manager, which was designed to help WordPress site owners and developers better manage plugin and theme maintenance.
Smart Plugin Manager is the only comprehensive WordPress plugin and theme manager on the market. It's also the only solution that updates plugins and themes from wordpress.org and premium plugin providers.
When Pham and his team heard about the solution, they decided to give it a try right away.
“We immediately jumped on it and activated it for our most heavily trafficked multisite installs. Honestly, it’s become one of our most-relied-upon tools. It’s helped us put plugin maintenance on autopilot.”
Pham added that the setup process was clear and straightforward, and within a day of enabling it, Smart Plugin Manager was auto-updating dozens of RocketLevel’s most critical plugins.
“What I really like about Smart Plugin Manager is that it’s seamless,” Pham said.
“I like how it’s just simple. It’s not over-complex; it gets to the core of what it needs to do and it does it well.”
Since setting up Smart Plugin Manager, Pham said the most impressive result has been the developer time he’s been able to save and redirect from constant plugin maintenance to more important, business-oriented tasks.
“We’ve been able to take two full-time developers and move them over to mission-critical R&D roles that help move our business forward,” he said.
“That’s hard to put a price on, but beyond saving us time and money, I think Smart Plugin Manager has helped us add new energy to our engineering and product efforts, and in that regard, it’s helped us strengthen the core of our business.”
Moving forward, Pham said he’s excited to see new Smart Plugin Manager features roll out.
“I can’t wait to see this tool get even more powerful,” he said. “In the meantime, we’ll be using it for more and more of our installs and sites.”
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