WordPress Maintenance Technician (On-Call / Standby Monitoring)

WordPress Maintenance Technician (On-Call / Standby Monitoring) Job Overview We are seeking reliable, detail-oriented WordPress Maintenance Technicians to provide on-call emergency monitoring and maintenance for our client websites during our core team's off-hours. We operate on a 15-hour overnight window on weekdays (5:00 PM EST – 8:00 AM EST) and 24-hour coverage on weekends. We can have multiple technicians so you are not obligating yourself to all shift hours. Because our sites are generally stable, this is a standby/on-call position. You do not need to sit at your desk staring at a screen for the entire shift, but you must keep your phone alerts active and respond immediately if an automated system pages you. We are open to hiring multiple technicians to split these shifts, and you can work from any global time zone as long as you are fully available during your agreed-upon coverage windows. Compensation Structure (Upwork) • Standby Retainer: A flat weekly or per-shift base rate to guarantee your availability and 15-minute response time during your designated hours. • Active Hourly Rate: Your standard technical hourly rate, billed (with a minimum time guarantee) whenever you are actively paged to troubleshoot or fix a site issue. Key Responsibilities • Emergency Response: Maintain active phone alerts and respond within 15 minutes to automated uptime monitors and critical security alarms. • Issue Resolution: Log in immediately to resolve site downtime, server errors, malware injections, or firewall triggers. • Scheduled Updates: Utilize our centralized website maintenance dashboards to run off-peak core, theme, and plugin updates during designated calm periods. • Regression Testing: Manually check site functionality post-update to fix any visual distortions, broken links, or plugin conflicts. • Handoff Logging: Document all alerts, actions taken, and pending issues in a clean report for our daytime team. Required Qualifications • WordPress Expertise: Proven experience managing, updating, and troubleshooting complex WordPress ecosystems unsupervised. • Monitoring Tools: Familiarity with automated website uptime monitors, alerting software, and centralized website maintenance dashboards. • Hosting & Security: Deep technical familiarity with hosting environments (cPanel, SFTP, SSH, phpMyAdmin) and security plugins (Wordfence, Sucuri). • Core Code Knowledge: Strong working knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP, and browser console debugging. • Reliable Infrastructure: A highly dependable internet connection, backup power solution, and a reliable smartphone to receive immediate emergency pages.