What Field is
Before you set anything up, it helps to understand what Field actually is and how it's structured. This takes two minutes and makes everything else click.
A platform, not a tool
Field is a practice management platform. It's the operating system for professionals who manage things for other people — monitoring, work tracking, billing, reporting, and client communication in one place.
Field isn't a WordPress plugin or a site scanner. It's the infrastructure that holds your entire practice together. WordPress stewardship is the first type of practice Field supports, but the platform underneath works for any vertical where the pattern holds: recurring care of something someone else owns.
Templates
A template defines what kind of practice you're running. It tells Field what to scan for, what findings look like, what a health score means, and what tools are available. You're on the WordPress Stewardship template — which means Field knows about sites, plugins, themes, security, performance, and SEO.
The template shapes the details. The platform — the pipeline, the billing, the client communication — is the same regardless of template.
The pipeline
Every piece of work that moves through your practice follows the same path:
Inbound
Signal arrives
Triage
You assess it
Work
You do the work
Record
You capture it
Settlement
You bill for it
Archive
It becomes history
This pipeline is the same for every operator on every template.
An email from a client, an uptime alert, a scan finding, a time proposal — they all enter at Inbound and flow through the same six phases. The pipeline is what makes Field a practice management system rather than a collection of separate tools.
Three relationships
There are three parties in every Field practice:
You (the operator)
You run the practice. You see everything — the pipeline, the billing, the client data. You make the decisions. Field is your infrastructure.
Your clients
They see a portal with their site health, reports, requests, and invoices. They don't see your pipeline, your billing, or your other clients. Their experience is scoped to their own data.
Field
Field sits between you and your clients. It processes data on your behalf, runs monitoring, generates reports, and handles billing. Field is infrastructure — your clients see your brand, not Field's.
Your WordPress practice
The WordPress Stewardship template equips Field with everything specific to managing WordPress sites:
- • Site scanning — 60+ finding types across security, performance, SEO, accessibility, and content
- • Health scores — composite score from scan results, updated with each scan
- • Plugin monitoring — version tracking, update detection, vulnerability matching
- • Field Agent — a WordPress plugin that provides deeper site access and real-time data
- • Uptime monitoring — tier-based checks with downtime alerts
- • Security advisories — automatic matching of known vulnerabilities to installed plugins
This section describes the WordPress template specifically. The platform features — pipeline, billing, reporting, client communication — are covered in the rest of the Guide and work the same on every template.
Now that you understand the model: Set up your practice →