Elder Pages Online is on a mission to promote elder care professionals and support family caregivers as they journey with their loved ones through the last chapters of life.
They do this by providing syndicated content for elder care professionals around the country, counting hospices, home care companies, and care managers among their client base. The content consists of curated newsletters, blogs, and social media posts about topics that interest family caregivers.
“Each of our clients receives an exclusive for their area,” explains Tasha Beauchamp, Founder of Elder Pages Online. “This means none of their local competitors can license our materials. Our client becomes THE local expert in family caregiving.”
The worst-case scenario strikes
Since 2007, the dispersed team of solo entrepreneurs has been working entirely remotely. But it wasn’t until 2014 that the unthinkable happened—Elder Pages Online got hacked.
Their hosting company closed down all their clients’ websites, amounting to around 25 in total. Tasha and the team had to prove each website was clean before they would be allowed to display again.
Acting quickly, they made the decision to migrate to WordPress multisite. Tasha was well aware of the gravity of the situation. “It would have burned our reputation terribly,” she says. “Clients would have been very mad and would have, understandably, quit our service.”
To help them with this transition, they needed someone who was adept at WordPress security and could optimize performance, especially as they were in the process of migrating all their websites.
However, it was much more than a salvation operation. Undeterred by the setback, the team still had their sights set on growth. They needed someone who was both responsive and willing to understand their product in depth, someone who, “brought as much heart and pride to their work as we do.”
Meeting Justin From Watchdog Studio
Around this time, the CTO of Elder Pages Online met Justin from Watchdog Studio. They felt that Justin could be relied upon to stay abreast of the server side issues, freeing the team up to focus on design and content.
During the initial meeting with Justin, Tasha outlined the security concerns they were currently experiencing. She made special reference to needing a hosting partner she could rely on to keep their new setup secure.
From this conversation, Justin began with providing Tasha and the team at Elder Pages Online a unique and personalized WordPress hosting solution that included ongoing WordPress management, DNS support, and a custom WordPress consulting add-on.
The Road to Recovery
The first challenge to overcome was the logistics involved in migrating the client domains from the old setup to the new WordPress multisite one. It required a great deal of care and planning to successfully move each domain without experiencing any downtime at all and yet, with the help of Watchdog Studio, that’s what they managed to do. With the migration complete and a safer hosting environment, Elder Pages Online was in a better position to scale as a company. They did this and more, outgrowing their initial hosting plan with over 100 subsites on their hosting network.
To keep up with demand they required a dedicated instance on Google’s Cloud Platform. During the two months it took to migrate to this new dedicated platform, Justin personally assisted each of Tasha’s clients. He helped them move DNS from various providers and consolidate to use Cloudflare for easier DNS management, while also ensuring added security and optimization.
“Justin’s offer to guide all our clients through that migration was phenomenal,” Tasha recalls. “He was so patient and helpful. It turned an intimidating, Herculean task into something I could just entrust to him so I could go do the things that only I can do. That’s a huge relief!”
From Strength to Strength
In the time that Justin has been working with Tasha, he has witnessed her more than quadruple the number of clients she had. “The less I have to worry about tech,” she says, “the more time I can spend developing creative new products to help our clients.”
She notes that Justin helped save them money by sparing them downtime from attacks or plugin incompatibility. But the tasks that Justin is responsible for covers a much broader base.
He has helped develop a key integration that allows her business to push content from the master site on the WordPress multisite network down to all of her child sites. Tasha particularly appreciates the “work Justin does with advanced custom fields and broadcasting issues, keeping us safe from intrusions. His work is so good we don’t know he’s doing it!”
“Justin is not only our System Administrator,” she says, “he also serves as a consultant for our CTO so we can really think big! Justin has always been gracious with me—a non-tech CEO—and responded patiently and thoroughly to my questions. Even though I’ve never met him in person, it feels like we are a team.”
Tasha also points out that Justin helps with “troubleshooting things like error messages, or too many email notifications not getting through to clients.” Justin’s “seamless services play no small part in our very high renewal rate.”
An Eye on the Future
With such a strong collaboration, Tasha and the team at Elder Pages Online have been free to “think big” and develop plenty of ideas for the future. They are currently exploring new ways that they can leverage their clients’ Google Business Profiles and are also working on email drip campaigns that provide advice on key caregiving topics. This advice may deal with dementia, caring for a loved one long distance, or letting them know about the services that are available to help an aging loved one remain at home.
Tasha is excited about the impact these plans will have on her client base. “Watching their businesses grow as a result of our efforts is truly gratifying. It’s also a thrill to respond to their requests and build products that meet their emerging needs.”
“I love helping my clients succeed,” she concludes. “And Justin’s seamless services play no small part in our very high renewal rate.”