Newspack support is tailored to the unique needs of digital news organizations and covers four key areas, designed to foster a supportive partnership between our teams:

  • Instruction
  • Technical assistance
  • Feature requests
  • Critical issues

After more than four years of operation, we’ve found creative ways to balance cost and service.

By providing team training and instruction, technical troubleshooting, occasional operational assistance, and even some business guidance, we aim to empower publishers and give their teams the confidence to navigate Newspack with ease. As a practical matter, most publishers can use Newspack without additional in-house engineering or technical support.

At the same time, our system of prioritizing requests allows us to provide timely, expert support to over 250 publishers, while keeping costs low. Requests are triaged and addressed in order of urgency and the time required to resolve them. But we balance the needs of the client base as a whole and do not offer individually guaranteed response times that are typical of much more expensive services.

We provide initial support exclusively through a dedicated help channel in Slack. We’ve found Slack to be an efficient way to solve most problems in part because it’s a tool that’s already used by most publishers and because it blends elements of email and live chat. And it provides quick visibility to other members of the Newspack team and allows our product and engineering staff to help when needed. For publishers, it provides full visibility into the types of issues that other organizations are encountering and serves as a shared resource, in keeping with Newspack’s community-based, open-source philosophy.

We tackle issues asynchronously, though depending on the publisher’s workload and ours, real-time conversations might take place, particularly around critical issues. For others, a reasonable lag time is more common.

Best Practices

Here is a list of best practices that you can follow to limit the need for support and to help increase support turnaround time.

  • If you need to upload or update plugins, it’s best to do so Monday through Friday during your morning hours. Be sure to familiarize yourself with our plugin review process.
  • When editing pages, WordPress automatically saves revisions each time you save. If a page is not working as expected, you can use revisions to restore a previous version.
  • When contacting support, please provide as much supporting detail as possible, like URLs, screenshots, links, and examples.
  • Make sure that your display name in Slack includes your publication name. Our suggested format is “Full Name / Publication Name.”
  • Search #newspack-help. You may find the answer where someone else had previously asked the same question.

Coverage Hours

Business hours

Newspack Technical Account Managers (TAMs) provide dedicated support for new requests between 8 AM and 6 PM. U.S. Eastern Time. Our TAM team is small but growing so there are occasional, unexpected gaps in our availability during these hours. Those are rare and do not affect our response to critical events.

  • Critical issues like site outages get an immediate response with real-time resolution.
  • Workflow-blocking issues are generally addressed and resolved in hours.
  • Lower-priority and non-critical requests can take anywhere from 24 hours to several days depending on the nature of the request.

All inquiries posted Monday through Friday should get some kind of response in 24 hours or less — even if it’s only to acknowledge that we’ve seen it and are working on it and, where possible, to explain what it will take to resolve it. While we officially cover the help channel during the aforementioned hours, TAMs often work outside of those times so you may see replies to previous requests outside of those times.

While our average initial response time for non-critical requests varies based on the type of request, you can get help faster for most platform-related issues by searching our documentation. If you have questions about using any of Newspack’s tools, our help site is the best place to start. We strongly encourage you to use this extensive resource to not only seek help but also to become more familiar with our features.

Critical requests

Our team is international, offering coverage across 11 time zones from Qatar to the Americas West Coast, but there are limitations in coverage.

The Newspack team is available to assist publishers with critical issues Monday through Friday between 5 AM and 10 PM U.S. Eastern Time, and on Saturday and Sunday generally from 9 AM to 5 PM U.S. Eastern Time.

Outside of the Monday-Friday coverage times, we ask sites to refrain from loading or updating plugins or making configuration changes that could result in performance issues, outages, or interruptions in publishing. This schedule has proven to be a highly effective way to balance cost and reliability.

For site down or infrastructure issues outside of the hours when the Newspack team is online, WordPress.com Happiness Engineers are available to provide support via email at newspack-support@automattic.com. They have limited knowledge of Newspack’s functionality and thus are only available to assist with outages and interruptions that are platform-specific.

What’s Supported

In general, Newspack support centers on the core Newspack product, functions, and features – the plugins that come bundled with Newspack and its systems. That includes:

  • Assistance in understanding all aspects of Newspack, its features, and their use
  • Guidance on implementation and how to best use Newspack to achieve specific functions and goals.
  • Minor style changes to the theme and core blocks to fine-tune their appearance, including tweaking fonts and colors, changing the styles of elements like buttons, or other simple site-wide updates.
  • Assistance with performance issues caused by Newspack features; alerts when the site’s performance drops below a defined threshold (coming soon)
  • Troubleshooting and configuration assistance
  • Automatic plugin and core WordPress updates, including major and minor releases
  • Gather feature and enhancement requests
  • Support and troubleshooting for the suite of plugins nested under the Newspack parent plugin
  • Limited troubleshooting support for allowed third-party plugins

Currently, we provide support only in English. If you contact us in a different language, we’ll do our best to translate your message and will reply in English.

Ancillary features

We can also help with:

  • Connecting Google Ad Manager and troubleshooting delivery issues
  • Connecting Google Analytics via Site Kit
  • WooCommerce setup as part of Newspack’s Reader Revenue feature and Reader Activation System

Unsupported

Our support offering is robust and comprehensive but it is not unlimited. The following are outside the scope of our support:

  • Custom plugin development
  • Issues with custom code or plugins built by an external developer
    • We can often help you identify a PHP file generating a fatal error and disable the problematic plugin or theme to get your site back online, but fixing the code to resolve the error is the responsibility of the developer of that specific plugin or theme.
  • Single or targeted style changes to specific content, or that only affect a small number of posts are not provided.
  • Custom design, including extensive CSS or changes that require structural/functional modifications to a theme or plugin via HTML, PHP, JavaScript, or other languages beyond CSS.
  • Hands-on, service-oriented consulting service and operational support, such as business or marketing strategy development or SEO consulting
  • Full site audits

Ancillary features

We are not able to directly support the following (but may be able to point you to resources):

  • Google Analytics
    • Generating custom reports
      • But we do have a step-by-step guide for how you can generate reports in GA yourself
      • The Newspack Data Dashboard will be a good first stop for viewing high-level, actionable calculated metrics and will help you avoid the weeds of GA custom reporting
    • Troubleshooting data issues unrelated to your Newspack site
    • Setting up custom event tracking or dimensions outside of the defaults listed at help.newspack.com/analytics
  • Google Tag Manager
    • Setting up tags and triggers
  • Google Ad Manager
    • Setting up orders and line items
    • Creating new inventory
  • Google AdSense
    • Overriding rejection notices or issues

We encourage you to open a support request with our team, even if you feel your issue might be out of scope. We are always willing to help get you on the right path, no matter the issue. It never hurts to ask!