When a WordPress site goes down at 9am on a Monday, the useful question is not "who do I call?" but "does the person I call already know my site?" Every maintenance plan on wp-maintenance.pro includes emergency response, handled by me: the engineer who set up your monitoring, ran your last update cycle and knows which of your plugins has form.

What emergency response covers

If you are on a plan and any of these happen, it is my problem before it is yours:

Site down — white screen of death, 500/502/503 errors, "there has been a critical error", a site that times out or is stuck in maintenance mode after an update.

Security incidents — malware in files or the database, spam redirects, defaced pages, unknown admin accounts, Google marking the site unsafe.

WooCommerce revenue problems — checkout not processing, payment gateway errors, orders not saving, subscription renewals silently failing, stock locking under load.

Failed updates — a core, plugin, theme or PHP version update that broke the site. Roll back first, fix forward second.

Database errors — "error establishing a database connection", corrupt tables, MySQL gone away, tables that have grown until wp-admin times out.

Performance emergencies — a sudden slowdown, a server out of memory, a traffic spike or bot flood crashing PHP-FPM.

How it works when you are on a plan

1. The monitoring tells me first

Uptime checks run every 60 seconds on every managed site. For most outages I am already looking at logs before the client has noticed, and I have usually replied before the "is the site down?" email arrives.

2. Stabilise, then fix properly

There is always a current off-server backup, so the first move is to get the site back online: roll back the update, restore the file, disable the plugin, clear the queue. Then I find the root cause and fix it so it stays fixed. On tiers with a staging workflow, the proper fix is tested there before it touches production.

3. Root cause and write-up

You get a short, plain-English account of what broke, why, and what I changed to stop it recurring. If the cause was a plugin with a track record, it goes on the watch list or gets replaced.

4. No hourly surprises

Incident response is part of the plan, not a separate invoice. Response time and what is included beyond the initial response, such as malware removal, staging-first recovery and priority scheduling, scale with the tier. The plans list what each one covers.

Why it is included rather than billed by the hour

Billing emergencies hourly rewards the wrong thing. I would rather spend the month preventing the outage than get paid for fixing it, and that only works if the person maintaining the site is the same person who answers when it breaks. Context is what makes the response fast: I know the hosting, the plugin stack, the last three changes and where the backups are. None of that has to be discovered at 9am on the Monday.

Not on a plan?

One-off emergency work for sites not under management is handled by Rootscope at rootscope.dev/wordpress-emergency-support. Same engineer, hourly rate, backup before any change, no fix no fee.

If you would rather not be in that position again, the cheaper option is to pick a plan once the site is back. Most emergency clients do.

Real incidents, written up

The blog is where the emergency work ends up documented:

Every one of those was an emergency for the site owner. Every one of them is now something I watch for on every site I manage.

Emergency Response Included With Every Maintenance Plan