WP Buffs

If you’re hoping to run your websites on a custom engine that isn’t WordPress, close this tab right now. You don’t need WPBuffs. More power to you. Not using WordPress is potentially powerful, if you write your own code. But, if you’re sensible, busy and above all, not a web developer, you should be running your site through WordPress. It’s free, it’s secure and it’s built and maintained by millions of dollars and uncountable man-hours. At this point, it’s the best web engine for large scale content management and delivery. Whether you’re peddling pornographic videos, pictures of tits or you’re just running a porn forum, WordPress will make sure you never have a single issue with any facet of your site. They cover all of your bases. Plus, there’s a plugin under their marketplace for damn near any feature you might need, from auto-mailing to analytics. If you can dream it, they have it.

Well, WPBuffs are here to take that ease of access to the next level, by taking whatever work falls on you, off your hands. Maintenance, optimization and even customer outreach can all be offloaded on WPBuffs. You can think of them as that one final subscription after you’ve set up your WordPress, but before you completely give up on managing your own website. WPBuffs aren’t going to make you redundant.

You’re still perfectly in charge. But, they are a holistic solution for all of your WordPress related problems and aspirations. If you can think it, WordPress can handle it and WPBuffs can set it up for you. Now, they have tiers that sort of define what they can and cannot do for you under a certain price range. They’re there for you 24/7, but they’re not going to bend over backwards for every request you have. You’ll have to actually figure out which tier you need and check what it covers. They vary a lot in what they offer.

The Maintenance Tier

This is their entry-level coverage and they call it Maintain. It comes with weekly reports and plugin, theme and core file updates. This is quite literally the definition of maintenance. It’s the security of having a dedicated team regularly checking up on all of the core files that make your site do what it does best – rake in the views.

You also get emergency support at all times, but they only jump to action when someone goes haywire. They have 24/7 uptime monitoring, so if something does knock your site offline, they’ll do their best to bring it back. They perform daily cloud backups, which is great in case you manage to royally fuck up your WordPress setup irreversibly. Finally, you get Google Analytics integration, which is basically worthless, but it does save a good 10 minutes of your time. Fuck it, free features.

This tier costs $67 a month, down to $56 if you pay yearly.

The Protection Tier

Moving up the ranks, we’ve got the protect tier, which comes with all the shit from the previous tier. On top of that, you get 24/7 website edits. Now, website edits don’t mean you get any kind of alterations to your site, any time you need them. It means you get content edits and design changes. If you need a custom feature built that isn’t already part of your WordPress theme, that’s PHP web backend. It’s basically programming. That’s absolutely not on offer here. That kind of shit costs a ridiculous amount of money and getting it on a cheap retainer is out of the question. That is, unless you hire a third-world freelancer with no guarantee of quality. WPBuffs know better than to promise you a service they know they can’t actually provide.

You get not one, but two daily backups, which is kind of pointless, but I guess they have to pad the package somehow. There’s also access to something called iThemes Security Pro. I don’t think you really need this, but extra features are always welcome. The protection tier’s appeal is literally just the 24/7 website edits. Having someone on your Skype chat who’s always waiting for instructions for content changes is better than having to do shit yourself, especially if you’ve got a successful website that you don’t feel up to editing. You’re more likely to fuck it up. Leave it to the professionals.

This one’s $147 a month with a $123 offer if you pay yearly. So far, so good.

Perform Tier

They claim this is their most popular tier and I can see why. It comes with all the previous features plus priority support, which means you’re on the top of their stack whenever shit goes downhill. They also offer speed optimization, which I guess touches upon SEO optimizations as well. They don’t curate your content, but they do sniff out the bottlenecks and remove them appropriately. They streamline your process, basically. If you’re serving large amounts of content to tons of users, this is key. You need to know that you’re making the most of your bandwidth, especially if you’re on a variable data plan with your host.

They throw in some plugin goodies like WP Rocket and WP Smush Pro. I’ve covered these in their own personal reviews. They’re great plugins that do a lot of work. In particular, WP Smush Pro is a great tool that compresses all the images on your site, from thumbnails to full-scale porn content, variably. Meaning, it makes tons of versions for your users so that they only see what they need at any given time. Don’t worry, though; if they try to download something, they get the source file. If they don’t, they get served a seemingly identical compressed version. It saves a ton of bandwidth in the long run.

You also get four cloud backups a day. I have no idea why you’d possibly need that many backups, but you’re not storing them on your servers, so who cares. You’re backed up in case of emergency and that’s always a positive. There’s also the promise of mobile and tablet optimization. This is pivotal if you have a serious mobile demographic. Mobile porn game sites could benefit greatly from this feature. Finally, there’s the promise of malware detection and removal. This is the kind of feature that is completely and utterly useless, until the day you need it and then it becomes a lifesaver.

This tier is expensive as shit, at $197 a month, down to $164 billed yearly.

Going Custom

If you’ve reached entrepreneur levels of profits with your site or sites, you’ll be looking at the custom offers. On top of all of the aforementioned features, you’re also looking at custom functionality scripting for plugins, themes and core files. This is the tier that adds actual PHP coding to your subscription. You’re basically renting out a programming team at this point. If you can dream it, they can code it, as long as it’s within reason. I don’t think they’ll code AI functionality into your site from scratch. But, it never hurts to ask. I’m sure they’ll figure something out for you. At least they’ll have a solution for your problems. It might not be what you had in mind, but these kinds of teams are great at finding free plugins that do the work you need effectively and quickly.

Your custom code gets monitored 24/7 and fixed if something fucks up along the way. They also want you to know that this tier is the minimum necessary if you’re on Pantheon. Pantheon is a super-advanced hosting solution that comes with a lot of custom bullshit when it comes to integrations, so it’s only natural they’d charge you through the nose for compatibility.

This tier will ring you $347 a month, with a discount down to $290 if you pay yearly.

There’s also a pro version of the custom plan that comes with a ton of goodies that I can’t imagine you ever making use of, like git management, WordPress Multisite and an increased level of custom coding. It’s also the required tier for AWS hosted websites.

White Label Options

I won’t go into too much detail about the white label functionality, because it’s pretty straightforward. WPBuffs are more than willing to represent you as your team in any form of customer interaction. You can have them use an e-mail that you allocate to them under your domain if they’re expected to communicate with clients for you. Basically, if you want to make it seem like they’re a part of your team, you’re welcome to. They embrace this approach.

They can send out reports in your name and even offer you a dashboard through which you can access all the key information about your clients. So, even though they’re doing all the work for you, you still get full transparency into what gets done. It’s a dream come true.