At Backline, we handle over 200 WordPress websites on behalf of the agencies we partner with — sites their clients depend on and that the agencies call on us to support. Much of that is routine maintenance and new projects, but sometimes a frantic email lands: a client site is down, or something critical isn’t working. Our team is set up to handle those moments, and everyone is trained to watch our support inbox, Slack, and Google Chat for the “HELP!” messages from the agencies we work with.
Since your client only ever sees your brand, how we respond in that moment is really how you respond. Here is exactly what happens.
Step 1: Triage
When an emergency comes in, we first confirm whether the site is actually down or something else is going on. Sometimes “urgent” turns out to mean a new feature is needed quickly — the site itself is fine. We filter those into the normal queue to keep things fair across all of our partner agencies, so true emergencies always get the drop-everything response. Once a real outage is verified, we stop what we’re doing and work the problem until the site is back online.
Step 2: Rule Out the Fast Fixes
We collect information and run basic checks to rule out the “easy” causes first, because three of them account for a surprising share of outages:
DNS issues — We confirm the A record points where it should and the DNS provider isn’t having an outage. We’ve seen providers like Sucuri go down and take every site behind them along for the ride.
SSL certificates — We check whether the certificate has expired. If it has, we typically apply a Let’s Encrypt certificate, then make sure auto-renewal is configured so the same outage never repeats.
Expired domains — Domains lapse over billing hiccups and disabled auto-renew more often than anyone expects. We check the registration before digging deeper.
Step 3: Dig Into the Real Problem
If none of the fast fixes apply, we go deeper: enable the WordPress debug log, read the errors being generated, isolate the failing plugin, theme, or server issue, and apply the fix. Then we tell the agency their client’s issue is resolved, and the agency verifies everything is back to normal on their side — under their own brand, as always.
Why This Matters for Your Agency
When a client’s site goes down, the client doesn’t care whose fault it is. They call their agency. Having a tested escalation path behind your brand is the difference between “we’re on it, give us an hour” and a scramble through freelancer contacts at 9 p.m.
That escalation path is part of every Backline Care plan, and it’s why agencies trust us with more than 200 sites behind the scenes. If your agency doesn’t have a plan for the next outage, let’s fix that before it happens.
