Mission Control

Learn a little about who we are, where we come from and why we’re here…

Back Story

Jonny graduated from UCD in 2002 with a bachelor of commerce honours degree. He travelled extensively before settling in Cape Town, South Africa to take up an apprenticeship with digital agency Clickthinking, since acquired by Aegis Media, now part of the global iProspect group. Head-hunted back to Ireland, Jonny took up a seat in Ireland’s first dedicated search marketing division at leading Irish digital agency Cybercom, now In The Company of Huskies. Late 2008, Jonny travelled on, starting his journey as founder of SURF MERCHANT.
SURF MERCHANT took up residence in a number of incubator spaces across the city, including the Digital Hub, Liffey Trust and Fumbally Exchange. Subsequent to many successful collaborations on WordPress website optimisation projects, SURF MERCHANT relocated to Guinness Enterprise Centre in Dublin 8 to bring the WordPress optimisation services offering to the next level.

The Story of Now

In Ireland, stand-alone WordPress optimisation and management services are thin on the ground. Many website design and development companies offer “website support”. Reactive in nature, these monthly payment plans provide website hosting, domain renewals, perhaps a automated google analytics report and pay-per-hour support requests. In the UK & US, bespoke WordPress maintenance companies are more common place, a consequence of 27% of the internet being produced atop WordPress open-source publishing software.

A numbers game, low-cost WordPress maintenance packages (sub €100 p/m) scale by automation. According to the 80:20 rule, WordPress maintenance services are 80% automated software, 20% human managed. These WordPress plans generally feature the following:

  • WordPress hosting
  • WordPress back-ups
  • WordPress plugin installation
  • WordPress plugin updates
  • WordPress malware & spam guards
  • WordPress security checks
  • WordPress caching plugin installation
Our fully mananged WordPress optimisation service includes the following:

  • Dedicated AWS cloud hosting on Irish server IP
  • WordPress server varnish technology
  • SSL cert server installation for https by default
  • WordPress server PHP 7 http/2
  • WordPress caching & speed optimisation
  • WordPress security hardening
  • WordPress secure cloud back-up
  • WordPress SEO management
  • WordPress image optimisation
  • WordPress page/post/product/portfolio optimisation
  • WordPress URL optimisation & 404 redirect management
  • WordPress Google webmaster tools validation
  • WordPress sitemap.xml submission & indexation
  • Google Analytics data clean-up and reporting dashboard
  • WordPress uptime monitoring & error alerts
  • WordPress client portal w/real-time SEO performance reporting
  • Hand-written email reports documenting work-in-progress
  • Face-to-face meetings and frequent phone calls

More details on cost/benefit and service features may be found here:

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