Successful WordPress agency and freelance work means spending time on the right things

A user recently emailed us to remark on just how much time WP Lookout started saving his team when it came to tracking needed plugin updates across their client sites. We love hearing any kind of feedback from our users, but that one really touched on the core of why WP Lookout exists.

If you make a living as a WordPress professional, either in a freelance context or as a part of an agency, you know that the success of that work can depend heavily on figuring out good time management.

How much time to spend on sales, how much on marketing, how much on a project and at what cost to your clients. How much time on professional development to improve your skills, how much on site maintenance, how much on updating the tools and software you depend on. How much time attending conferences and events. How much time thinking about and working on other things so that you don’t burn out.

Every decision about what you spend time on, and what tasks you let have priority in your day, contributes to the direction of your business and whether you move closer to your goals. And if you spend time on the wrong things, you can end up feeling very busy without actually making any progress.

When we’re taking a hard look at our WordPress agency or freelance offerings and trying to figure out how to make them better, we often focus on really big decisions. Whether to hire or subcontract something out. Whether to add or subtract a major service offering. What hosting environments and tools we want to work with to serve our clients. And so on.

But it can be just as important to focus on the smaller decisions we make every day, and the more subtle tasks that take up our time and attention over the course of a week. These rarely feel as glamorous or consequential as those bigger decisions, but they can add up over time and have a huge impact on our work. Our ability to scale up the number of client projects we take on or the revenue we generate can sometimes come all the way back down to what we do with a few minutes of our time here and there.

As a tool, WP Lookout is designed to save you those few minutes in the course of your day or week of WordPress work. And once in a while, we think it will save you a few hours or more. What kind of time can it save?

The time you spend logging in to all of your client WordPress sites just to see what needs updating.

The time you spend clicking around theme and plugin changelogs looking for details and mentions of security issues.

The time you spend reading about what features and bugfixes have gone into the central WordPress tools you use to build client projects.

The time you spend fixing a client site because it went down after a plugin upgrade introduced a conflict.

Again, these may feel like relatively small bits of time. If you’ve been doing WordPress site building and development for a long time, maybe your brain has just come to accept that these are things you will need to do now and then to be a WordPress expert for your clients.

But what if you could get some of that time back, and use it for more valuable tasks? What if you could turn it into professional development time to learn a new skill or try that new tool you’ve had your eye on? What if you could use that time to follow up with some past clients to see if they have any project needs coming up? Or what if you could use that time to step away from the computer and do something fun for yourself?

With WP Lookout, you can stop spending time or reserving mental energy for so many WordPress maintenance tasks. Our tracking system keeps watch on the plugins and themes you depend on and lets you know when there’s an update you might care about. You can direct those notifications in whatever way makes sense for your project workflow, so you have them right where you want them, right when you need them.

As WordPress professionals, we work with software tools because we’ve seen their power to simplify our lives and automate some of the things we’d rather not do manually. We’ve seen the looks of joy on our clients` faces when they realize a cumbersome or time-consuming tasks would now be handled by their WordPress site.

We deserve those same moments of relief and delight, too!

Give WP Lookout a try today to see what kind of time it can save you, and how it can help make your WordPress agency or freelancing work even more scalable and successful.