How Safe Updates Gave Benjamin Gosset Confidence in WordPress Maintenance

For web agencies managing WordPress sites at scale, there comes a point where manual workflows stop holding up. When dozens of client sites require updates, backups, monitoring, and explanations, relying on scattered tools and personal memory becomes a risk. That’s where Benjamin Gosset found himself, and where he began rethinking how maintenance should work.

Company snapshot

Managing WordPress updates manually

Benjamin’s studio relied on a patchwork of tools for maintenance. They used MainWP (self-hosted) for updates and Updraft for backups. Both are solid tools, but they couldn’t provide a clear history of what had been updated and when, as well as which version of each plugin or theme was live on each site. When something went wrong, there was no audit trail. When a client asked about maintenance, there was nothing to show them.

The biggest challenge was to keep a history of updates, including version numbers for each extension or theme. The configuration of backups was a headache too.

Without visibility, clients didn’t understand what was being done to keep their sites secure and performant. And Benjamin believes that internally, if the person handling most of the maintenance wasn’t available, the process can easily fall apart.

Sometimes in agencies there are two or three people, and one person makes the most of the maintenance. If this person is not here for any reason, somebody else must take their place. And it could be complicated if there is no process.

Why Benjamin switched to a centralized WordPress maintenance tool

Benjamin discovered WP Umbrella through Aurelio Volle, CEO and co-founder of WP Umbrella, at WordCamp Europe. What caught his attention wasn’t just the feature set; it was the approach.

I met Aurelio at my very first WCEU and discovered WP Umbrella and tried it after that. The report feature is a really nice thing that helps my clients give reality to the work needed to keep websites secure and performant.

WP Umbrella brought everything into one place: updates, backups, monitoring, vulnerability alerts, and client reporting. 

It allows us to have all the features in one place, which is really nice to have.

Before WP Umbrella, updating multiple sites meant manually pushing changes. It was slow and error-prone. With WP Umbrella, updates became centralized and safer to run. Benjamin estimates saving around 30 minutes per site during regular maintenance, freeing up time for higher-value client work.

How Safe Updates and restoration reduce WordPress update risk

The Safe Update feature is one of Benjamin’s most-relied-upon. Unlike his previous manual process, Safe Updates gave him something he’d never had before: peace of mind.

The safe update is really interesting. We are confident about updates because if there is a problem, the rollback system is here to prevent our website from breaking. It prevents being called by a client saying ‘my website is broken’. It’s a big feature, which helps us to be more confident, and clients too.

Instead of worrying about what might break, updates became a routine part of maintenance, handled with far more confidence. That confidence was tested during an incident on a multilingual restaurant website.

Restoring a broken multilingual WordPress site

Even with the best WordPress plugins, things can go wrong. For Benjamin, it happened with a restaurant client using WPML for translations.

It was a restaurant website where WPML was used for translation, but it wasn’t configured the right way. The client asked me to change some translations. I made changes to how WPML worked, but it broke the site, including the menus, which is critical for a restaurant website.

Benjamin reached for WP Umbrella’s restoration feature.

I used the restoration feature and it worked like a charm for this case. Very good.

What could have become a stressful client situation was resolved quickly. The site was restored and the client relationship remained intact.

Using client reports to make WordPress maintenance visible

For WordPress agencies, it can be hard to explain to clients why they should pay for ongoing maintenance. Everything, including updates, backups and restoration, monitoring, and uptime and performance tracking happens in the background. But if clients can’t see it, it might as well not exist.

WP Umbrella’s reporting feature transformed that dynamic entirely.

The report feature is really nice. A lot of clients didn’t understand what maintenance is, what actions are done to keep a website updated, to have backups and monitoring.

Now, every month, clients receive a clear maintenance report showing exactly what was done: updates deployed, backups completed, vulnerabilities detected, and uptime tracked. It’s transparency in action.

WP Umbrella helps me have a better view over the websites I manage. And by providing insights to clients like reports or uptime info, this helps give real professional value to the actions I take for clients.

The reports have a direct impact on renewals and upselling.

Clients say in general that they didn’t have an idea of all the updates being done on the websites and the frequency of the updates. So it’s really great. And it’s also a way for us to sell the maintenance.

Turning WordPress maintenance into a professional service

For Benjamin’s studio, WP Umbrella did more than save time. It transformed maintenance from an invisible overhead cost into a visible, defensible, professional service. It is the infrastructure that allowed him to scale from siloed, manual processes to a professional, systematic operation managing dozens of websites. 

When asked if he would recommend WP Umbrella to clients:

Yes, absolutely! I would recommend it to everyone maintaining WordPress sites. It will save you time and provide peace of mind by giving you a global overview of all your sites, and it will help you showcase all the work done.

WP Umbrella gave Benjamin, and his clients, confidence. It made his invisible work visible. And it helped him clearly demonstrate the value of maintenance and support ongoing client renewals.