What makes a WordPress specialist?

No doubt you’ve seen us talk a lot about our WordPress specialists; as such you might have rightly asked, what does that actually mean? Is it just a fancy sales phrase we bolt onto our website to sell WordPress hosting? Does it actually mean anything of import? Do our support team really know WordPress?

If you’ve worked with our specialist team you’ll know the answer of course; we pour a significant amount of time and energy into ensuring our WordPress specialist team are the best in the business. Let’s look at what that means in practice.

First and foremost, our WordPress specialists actually have to complete an in-house formal training program before joining the team. The training process is a built around a combination of elements including certain parts of the Red Hat systems administration certification alongside specialist subject knowledge of WordPress itself.

All our specialists are expected to have a working knowledge of PHP/JS to the extent they’re capable of easily debugging plugins, and at some point capable of even developing their own plugins. In addition to that we train our specialists to have a deep understanding of the systems we use to build our own custom WordPress Hosting stack : CentOS, Nginx, PHP, MariaDB and Redis.

Training typically takes 6 months for an experienced existing member of our support team to complete. The exhaustive training concludes with a series of 4 practical exams; complex WordPress support cases modelled on real-world tickets from our nearly twenty years in business. The tests cover items such as setting up complex multisite migrations, fixing hacked sites with multiple backdoors, slow site performance issues and many more.

Once completed and certified our specialists are the spearhead of our WordPress website support, delivering internal training to other staff and engaging with the larger UK WordPress community too.

Indeed, specialists above all else need to be passionate and engaged with WordPress and the WordPress community. That means you’ll find them at the events we attend up and down the country, from local user groups through to WordCamp events and other tech-related conferences.

Once a WordPress specialist’s basic training is completed, that is just the start. Our team are encouraged to undergo continual professional development and training; further specialising and where possible taking professional certifications like the Red Hat Systems Administration and Engineer courses.