Quartermaster
Website maintenance for WordPress
WordPress maintenance that fixes problems before you notice them.
Most maintenance waits for a ticket. We update, test, and trim your site on a schedule, so it gets faster and safer each quarter instead of building up problems. Fire Watch monitoring is included.
For the communications director who owns the website but was never hired to maintain it.
Trusted by editorial teams at
Most problems on publisher sites come from the same few causes.
Too many plugins. Late updates. Lapsed licenses that stop updates silently. Settings that broke without anyone noticing.
The security numbers point the same way. Patchstack counted 11,334 new WordPress vulnerabilities in 2025. Ninety-one percent were in plugins. Among the heavily targeted vulnerabilities in its study, the activity-weighted median time to a first exploit was five hours. A short plugin list that is patched quickly reduces that exposure.
Someone updates the plugins when there’s time. The host applies updates overnight without testing them. The agency that built the site checks in when asked. Nobody owns the whole site, so problems wait until a reader or a board member finds them.
We see the results when a site arrives: a core update that broke a three-year-old events calendar, a security plugin whose log table had grown to over half the database, a site nobody had updated since it launched.
One tool for each job. Patched on a schedule. Tested before it goes live.
Quartermaster works from a written spec of what a publisher’s WordPress site should look like. Each requirement names the standard first and our usual tool second. A site that meets it has one tool for each job, gets patched on a schedule, and is watched by a monitor that catches breakage before readers or Google do.
Updates on a schedule
Routine patches within 30 days. Critical patches within 48 hours, when an update or workable mitigation exists. That covers WordPress core, plugins, themes, and PHP. Every premium license stays active, because a lapsed license stops updates without telling anyone.
Every change tested first
Changes go to staging before production. After every release we run the same checklist: search engines allowed, no stray noindex, no staging addresses in canonicals or feeds, the production robots.txt, the production tag container, caches cleared. An update should never cost you Google.
Backups you’ve seen restored
Daily backups stored off the server. Once a quarter we restore one to staging and confirm it works, because a backup nobody has restored is a hope.
A quarterly review
Plugins: anything new, unused, or duplicated. Users: accounts for people who have left. Licenses due next quarter. Log retention and database size. We bring the findings to a quarterly meeting and record what we changed.
Repairs and rollback
We fix faults in existing forms and redirects, resolve plugin conflicts, and correct configuration problems. When an update causes a problem, we roll back to the last working version first and investigate second. New features, pages, redesigns, and work that needs design or review require a separate sprint.
Account oversight
We keep watch over the registrar, hosting, DNS and CDN, and the integrations named in your agreement, so a domain or certificate never lapses unnoticed. Accounts stay in your name, with named access for our team.
Plugins chosen for publishers.
We standardize WordPress around a selected set of plugins for think tanks and publishers. We choose tools that receive regular updates and security fixes, meet your publishing needs, and work well together.
We avoid adding a plugin for every small problem, especially when it receives irregular updates or doesn’t fit work in policy and politics.
Fire Watch watches. Quartermaster fixes.
Fire Watch is our website monitoring service. It checks the pages, feeds, sitemaps, tags, and records that keep a publisher’s site visible, and tells you when a rule breaks. It comes with every Quartermaster site, so the alert goes to the people who repair it. You can also buy it on its own if you have your own developer.
Scope, and what needs its own agreement
Quartermaster covers one agreed WordPress site. Hosting, software licenses, mail and storage usage, and other vendor fees are yours unless the agreement lists them.
New features, new pages, redesigns, migrations, and initial builds are Site Survey sprints, scoped separately. We identify the problems a site arrives with during onboarding and quote them before service starts. Repairs to third-party systems need their own scope.
The support window is Monday through Friday, 8 AM to 8 PM Eastern. We respond to routine requests within eight support-window hours. A P1, meaning the site is down, an active security issue, or a major public feature broken for many readers, gets triage started within the committed window. That commitment covers when we start, not how long the repair takes.
Our work is guaranteed. If you find a bug in code we wrote, we fix it free.
Pricing
We confirm the site’s scope before service starts and price it in the proposal. We quote onboarding work separately.
Questions
Do you host the site?
No. We work with your host, usually WP Engine, and we’ll recommend a move if the current host can’t give us staging or backups.
Do you build or redesign sites?
Yes, through Site Survey sprints. Quartermaster is the upkeep after the build.
Our site is a mess right now.
Onboarding starts with a plugin audit, licenses, PHP, two-factor, scheduled tasks, revisions, mail, and the monitor’s baselines. We identify the work your site needs and quote it before maintenance begins.
We run Drupal, or another platform.
Quartermaster is WordPress maintenance. Other platforms by agreement.
What repairs do you handle?
We fix bugs in your site, including broken forms and redirects, plugin conflicts, and configuration problems.
Is monitoring included?
Yes. Fire Watch, our monitoring service, watches every Quartermaster site, and we also sell it on its own. Maintenance includes the go-live checks and account oversight above as well.