Alex
Posted
Currently causing a massive headache for us.
Really not happy with their service. I'm sure they have experts working there, but it feels like all of the plugin updating is done without professional care - with HUGE consequences for sites when it doesn't work. They recently updated plugins on our site (the day before they send out the monthly report) which clearly hadn't been tested on a staging environment. There were several issues with the site afterwards. Customers started complaining. We notified WP Buffs - the only way to contact is via email as they removed the livechat feature quite a while ago. So then you basically have to wait a few hours (2 hours in this case) for them to email back. They said "Hey, we're looking into it for you now", I come back a few hours after to find a mountain of customer complaints about a database error, I check the site and see it's down with a "There has been a critical error on this website." message. I emailed back to ask what's going on and they said "we were trying out a previous backup to see if the issue will be fixed" - trying it out on the live website instead of a staging environment. To fix a range of mild issues they do something that causes critical errors. They didn't even put the site in a maintenance mode while doing this. So some people could access and place orders, others couldn't. It's a mess. Now orders and customer progress seem to have been lost with all the backups happening. It's still ongoing now. We'll need to see what gets done. I'm hoping to them to fix everything and restore all the lost progress ASAP, but we'll have to wait and see. At the moment i'm absolutely fuming. It just really isn't the kind of professional care that you want for your site before they make updates. I'll update this review with the outcome later. ----------------- Update: They've managed to fix it, just a couple of orders lost and need manually re-adding, and around 50 customer complaints that we'll need to try to resolve. Still really angry that updates had been made to the live site without testing on a staging site, that a test solution was done on the live site without testing (causing further problems), and that maintenance mode wasn't used during all of this. We literally pay for this service to avoid these situations, to have professionals to carefully and expertly test plugin updates before implementing them.
Response from WP Buffs· Jun 2, 2021
Hi Alex! Thanks for taking the time to write up your feedback on your recent experience with us. We're a super transparent team, and I hope that came across while we worked through this together in our support desk (Ticket #6503595). Website updates and changes don't always go as planned, especially when it comes to working with multiple pieces of software. We never like to see things go wrong, however, I hope that the way these challenges were handled and fixed helped to regain some trust in WP Buffs. Our whole team really enjoy working with you and your success really is our goal. We look forward to a continued relationship and we're always around if you'd like to discuss this particular issue any further, Alex.