Managing one WordPress site is easy. Managing ten WordPress sites? Well, that’s a lot of logging into different WordPress dashboards!
Whether you’re managing WordPress sites for clients or running your own collection of WordPress sites, staying on top of maintenance, updates, backups, security, and more can be a pain as the number of sites you’re responsible for grows.
To address this pain point, people have built great tools to help you manage multiple WordPress sites from a single unified dashboard, and I’ve collected the best options in this post.
Keep reading to learn about five tools that you can use to manage multiple WordPress sites from a single dashboard…
Acquired by GoDaddy in 2016, ManageWP is one of the most popular tools to manage multiple WordPress sites (and still run independently from GoDaddy, for the GoDaddy haters).
Once you hook your site up with the ManageWP Worker plugin at WordPress.org, you’ll be able to manage all of your sites from the ManageWP cloud dashboard.
From there, ManageWP helps you with maintenance, security, monitoring, and more.
It includes both free and premium features, and offers a modular pricing approach that lets you create a plan that meets your needs.
Features
- Automatic incremental backups as frequently as every hour, complete with off-site storage
- Cloning/migration
- Uptime monitoring
- Safe updates (automatically create a restore point before updating sites)
- Malware scans powered by Sucuri
- White-labeled client reports
- Unified Google Analytics reports
- SEO keyword ranking monitoring
- Manage themes and plugins
- Manage comments
- Backlink monitoring
Pricing
The core ManageWP service is free for unlimited sites. So without paying a cent, you’ll be able to manage updates, plugins, and themes, run performance and security checks, and perform some other helpful actions.
Then, you can choose exactly which premium add-ons you want to use. For each add-on, you’ll pay per website you want to use it on. Currently, there are 8 premium add-ons. The prices below are per month per site:
- Backup – $2
- White label – $1
- SEO ranking – $1
- Uptime monitor – $1
- Advanced client reports – $1
- Automatic security check – $1 (manual is free)
- Automatic performance check – $1 (manual is free)
- Link monitor – $1
Get ManageWP
There are two notable things about MainWP:
- It’s self-hosted, whereas most of the other tools require you to use the service’s cloud dashboard. If you’re privacy-conscious, you might prefer this approach.
- It has a very generous free version.
To create your own MainWP dashboard to control other sites, you can create a blank WordPress install and install the MainWP Dashboard plugin. Then, you’ll need to install the MainWP Child plugin at all the sites you want to sync to your dashboard.
Features
Here are the features that you get across the core plugin, free extensions, and premium extensions:
- Easy updates
- Plugin and theme management
- Backups via a huge range of backup solutions including UpdraftPlus, WP Time Capsule, BackWPup, and more
- User management
- Security scans via Sucuri SiteCheck
- White-labeling
- Uptime monitoring
- Broken link checker
- Bulk settings manager
- Comments
- Google Analytics
- Basic maintenance
- Article uploading and post dripping
- Content spinning
- Staging
- SEO
- …plenty more – there are a lot of extensions
Pricing
The core MainWP plugins are free. Then, you have two options for getting access to the premium extensions:
- You can purchase individual extensions, which range from $39 to $69 per year each. There are also tons of free extensions.
- You can purchase a bundle of all current and future extensions for $19.99 per month or $399 for lifetime access.
Either way, you’ll be able to use whatever you purchase on unlimited sites.
Get MainWP
InfiniteWP is another popular multiple WordPress site management solution. Like MainWP, it’s a self-hosted solution, which is good for the privacy-minded.
To install the self-hosted InfiniteWP admin, you can either use a dedicated installer plugin or manually install it by uploading the files via FTP.
From there, you can install the InfiniteWP Client plugin at all the WordPress sites that you want to manage via your dashboard.
Features
With the free version, InfiniteWP offers:
- 1-click admin access
- 1-click updates
- Manual backups and restores
Then, the paid plans give you access to:
- Automatic/scheduled backups
- Migration and staging
- Malware scans
- Uptime monitoring
- Client reporting
- Comment and user management
- Content publishing
- Broken link checker
- Bulk file uploads
- Integrations with WordPress security plugins
Pricing
InfiniteWP offers a limited free version for unlimited sites
After that, you’ll pay based on the number of sites you want to use the premium features on, starting at $147 per year for up to 10 sites ($1.20 per site per month).
Get InfiniteWP
iThemes Sync is, unsurprisingly, a tool to manage multiple WordPress sites from iThemes. Where I think iThemes Sync is especially valuable is if you’re using other tools from iThemes, like BackupBuddy or iThemes Security.
However, you can still certainly use iThemes Sync even if you’re not heavily into the iThemes product ecosystem.
Features
- One-click WordPress updates
- Uptime monitoring and email notifications if any of your sites go down
- SEO Checker tool
- Integrations with Google Analytics and Search Console
- Manage themes and plugins
- Integration with BackupBuddy for remote backups
- Integration with iThemes Security for security management
- Client dashboard tool to hide certain WordPress menu items (great for client sites)
- User management
- Comment management
- Monthly maintenance reports that you can share with clients
Pricing
iThemes Sync has a free tier with limited functionality that you can use with up to 10 sites. Most other tools let you use unlimited sites even on the free tier, so this is a bit of a disappointment.
If you want to go Pro, plans start at $6.99 per month for up to 5 sites. You can also test out Sync Pro with a 30-day free trial.
If you host at Liquid Web, you can also get access to Sync Pro for free as part of your hosting subscription.
Get iThemes Sync
CMS Commander takes a unique approach to managing multiple WordPress sites that’s a little more focused on marketing and creating a network of automatically-updated sites.
You don’t have to use it for that, but it comes from the same developer as the popular WP Robot autoblogging plugin.
For example, it can help you bulk post across multiple sites, including tools to import content or rewrite/spin articles across multiple sites.
It can also display backlink data and show you an integrated Google Analytics report that shows you the aggregate traffic across your entire network.
If you find those features attractive, CMS Commander might be the best option for you. You can learn more in our detailed CMS Commander review.
Features
- One-click updates for all or some of your sites
- Manage user accounts and comments across all sites
- Copy WordPress settings from one site to another
- Automatic backups, including option to store backups on cloud providers like S3
- Deploy new WordPress sites with pre-configured settings
- Auto-post content across multiple sites
- Import content from external sources or RSS feeds
- Use popular article spinning services to create unique content
- Monitor backlinks for all your sites
- Uptime and Pagespeed monitoring
- Aggregate Google Analytics data to see traffic across your entire network
Pricing
You can try CMS Commander for free for 30 days – no credit card required. After that, you’ll pay based on the number of sites you want to manage.
They have a number of pre-set plans, and they can also create a custom plan for you if you need to manage hundreds of sites.
Paid plans start at just $8 per month for up to 5 sites.
Get CMS Commander
What’s the Best Tool to Manage Multiple WordPress Sites?
Now for the important question – which is the best tool to manage multiple WordPress sites for your unique situation?
First, I think it depends on whether you want to go with an entirely self-hosted solution or are happy to use a hosted option.
If you want something self-hosted, your two top options are MainWP or InfiniteWP. Of those two, I think MainWP has a more generous free plan, so that might be the best option if you’re on a budget.
On the other hand, if you’re happy to use a hosted solution, my recommendation is ManageWP. ManageWP has been around for a while now and has built a great reputation. It also has a generous free plan and the modular approach to premium features lets you build a plan that suits your needs.
Do you have any questions about the best tool to manage multiple WordPress sites from one dashboard for your situation? Or have any personal experience with these tools? Let us know in the comments!
Keep reading the article at Learn WordPress with WPLift. The article was originally written by Colin Newcomer on 2020-02-17 02:37:29.
The article was hand-picked and curated for you by the Editorial Team of WP Archives.