Behind the Scenes at SharonHH.com – ManageWP Review

Sometimes you need more than one website for your business. Maybe you’ve got more than one major product or service that needs its own web presence. That’s great, but after a while it can be hard to keep track of all the site management tasks.

I manage several sites too. As well as this one, there’s my writer mentoring blog, a site I run for an organization I volunteer for, a travel blog plus a few sites for family members. They all run on WordPress, which is always releasing updates, and requires maintenance to keep things running smoothly. That takes time, and I don’t always have as much spare time as I’d like. I’m sure many small business owners feel the same.

Introducing ManageWP

That’s why I was thrilled to find ManageWP, a dashboard for managing multiple WordPress sites. It’s not the only tool of its kind out there, but it works well. I snagged a free account through the hosting provider for one f m other blogs, though even the paid option, at $0.80 per website per month for individual bloggers, isn’t too expensive. My account allows me to manage 5 WordPress sites.

When you set up your account, the first thing to do is to add your website. It will ask whether you have installed the Manage WP Worker plugin. Don’t worry if you haven’t; it will do this for you. Continue and add other sites as needed. Once you’re set up, you get a dashboard which allows you to:

• Login instantly to any of your WordPress admin dashboards
• Update and install themes and plugins from ManageWP
• Backup your site manually

Premium versions include scheduled cloud backups, the ability to clone your website, client reporting, integration with Google Analytics while enterprises can benefit from SEO and SERPs tracking, uptime monitoring and more.

Every time you login to ManageWP it refreshes the dashboard, giving you a snapshot of the theme and updates you need to make. I particularly like the fact that it shows you the table overhead that might slow down your MySQL database. You also get an overview of post revisions, comments and spam. You can see these either by type of update or by individual site.

Does ManageWP Work?

Does it work as a one-stop shop? Mostly. From my experience, I’d avoid updating WordPress itself from this dashboard (I had to roll it back when I tried). The failure was most likely a problem with my WordPress installation, but why take the chance? Most other updates worked seamlessly, making getting rid of spam, post revisions and the like a breeze.

Another good feature is the ability to perform a one click Sucuri security check on all the websites in the dashboard. This is a good way to find out if there are any issues you need to solve or whether your website has been blacklisted. You can also access performance tests, other tools ( you can check for malware, page load times, broken links and back links) and server information.

I also like the weekly update email reminding you of issues on any of the sites in your dashboard. And if you happen to log into a site manually and make changes there you can always press the sync dashboard button to bring ManageWP up to date.

Overall, ManageWP is an effective one-stop shop for anything to do with managing your WordPress site and can be a time saver for anyone working with multiple sites.

For more behind the scenes info, check out my HostAwesome review.

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