All Industries // industries / publishers

Managed WordPress for digital publishers — without the plugin chaos.

Publisher sites accumulate plugins, vulnerabilities, and load-bearing tribal knowledge faster than any other vertical. We host them, monitor them, patch them on a schedule, and stay on the phone when the traffic spikes.

// the_problem

What publisher sites actually break on.

▸ Plugin sprawl

Forty plugins accumulated over six years, half of which nobody can confidently say what they do. Every update is a roulette wheel.

▸ Recurring malware injections

Outdated plugins get exploited, JavaScript redirects appear in the footer, SEO spam lands in the database, and rogue admin users keep coming back after every manual cleanup. Without root-cause hardening, infections repeat on a schedule.

▸ Reactive patching

CVEs land in the news, then sit for two weeks before someone has time to triage. The window is exactly when you don't want a window.

▸ Uptime on news days

A traffic spike on a real story shouldn't take down checkout, comments, or the homepage. Most stacks weren't set up to absorb it.

▸ Ad-tech complexity

Headers, tags, GAM, prebid, consent — a whole second stack riding on top of yours. Performance and reliability live or die in this layer.

▸ Editorial workflow drift

Custom post types, role permissions, and editorial tooling that's grown organically. Cleaning it up shouldn't require a quarter-long replatform.

▸ Key-person risk

One engineer holds the entire mental model. They get sick, take vacation, or leave — the runbook doesn't exist.

// the_package

Managed WordPress for Publishers.

A productized version of our managed services tier, scoped specifically for digital publishers. Sits between Essentials and Pro on price, gets you Pro-tier SLA, and is set up around the publisher rhythm — busy news days, ad-tech tagging, plugin sprawl, and a same-day patch cadence on serious advisories.

Default coverage is US business hours (9 a.m. – 6 p.m. ET) with a 4-hour response SLA on the Publisher Tier. Move to Enterprise for a 2-hour SLA. Most non-critical issues land in the inbox by US noon ET.

Publisher Tier

vertical pkg

Pro-tier SLA. Publisher-shaped scope.

$999/mo
  • ▸Hosting + uptime monitoring
  • ▸Daily vulnerability scans against your plugin / theme inventory
  • ▸Plugin updates with regression testing on staging
  • ▸Monthly written audit report
  • ▸5 hours / month of small fixes and tweaks
  • ▸4-hour response SLA in business hours
  • ▸Faster 2-hour SLA available on the Enterprise tier
  • ▸Run-book + handover docs maintained as part of the service
Talk to us about Publisher Tier

Need different scope? See our general managed tiers.

// publisher_case_study

What this looks like in practice.

Anonymized for client confidentiality. Metrics are real. More case studies on the Use Cases page.

// managed_wordpressDigital media / publisher · 50–200 employees · US-based

Managed WordPress for a digital publisher

// problem

Legacy WordPress installation with 40+ plugins accumulated over years. Frequent uptime issues during traffic spikes, no proactive security monitoring, and a recurring pattern of malware injections through outdated plugins — JavaScript redirects, SEO spam in the database, and admin-user backdoors that kept reappearing after manual cleanups. Vulnerability patches were handled reactively (sometimes 2+ weeks after a CVE landed). One engineer was the load-bearing knowledge.

// what_we_did

Inventory of stack and plugins. Cleaned the existing infections, rotated all credentials, and audited admin users. Migrated to managed hosting with daily automated vulnerability scans (WPScan + OSV + NVD feeds matched against the live inventory). Hardened the stack — file-integrity monitoring, WAF rules, principle-of-least-privilege on the WP admin. Set up monitoring, alerting, and a written run-book. Plugin update pipeline with regression checks before pushing to production. Monthly written audit report.

// outcome

  • 14d → <48h
    Mean-time-to-patch reduction
  • ~12 → 0
    Malware reinfections per year (was monthly)
  • 0
    Security incidents in 12 months of operation
  • ~30%
    Infrastructure cost reduction (hosting + tooling consolidation)

Let's build
something real.

No pitch decks. No committees. A focused conversation about what you need built, who uses it, and what it has to do.

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