If you are a web designer or agency trying to manage multiple WordPress sites without a central management tool, you will sooner or later reach your limits. If you want to increase the number of your projects, you need efficiency in the development and management of your sites. Today, I'll show you how the ManageWP administration tool and the Raidboxes dashboard can help you manage your WP projects better.

Even managing a single WordPress site is pretty time-consuming. After all, you don't just have to maintain the content and design of your site. The WordPress version, theme and plugins also require regular updates. In addition, backups have to be managed, security checks carried out and the performance of the site constantly checked.

The time required increases with each new page

Although these seem to be small tasks, they cost an enormous amount of time in total. If you are a web designer or WordPress agency with several websites to manage, there is a lot of potential for savings here.

From a certain number of websites onwards, you won't be able to avoid a central administration tool if you want to manage your customers' WP projects professionally and as efficiently as possible.

That's why I'm showing you today:

• the most important application areas of a central management solution
• the free and paid features of ManageWP
• how to manage your projects more effectively with Raidboxes

For which tasks is a central management tool particularly useful?

First of all, you should think about which administrative tasks take up the most of your time and to what extent a central tool can speed up the management of your WordPress sites.

Well-known management tools such as ManageWP, InfiniteWP and WP Remote appear very similar at first glance. However, the differences lie in the details.

The following areas are covered by most providers as standard:

• Login: Management of WP logins or WP Single Sign-On
• Update management: Centralized updating of the WP version, plugins and themes
• Plugin and theme management: Install, (de)activate and remove WP extensions
• User administration: Assignment of various access and user rights

Most tools offer a free administration dashboard that can be customized with various paid add-ons. Before you decide on a provider, you should therefore consider which features you need and how much time and effort individual functions will really save you.

WordPress site management with ManageWP

ManageWP is probably the best-known WordPress site management tool, especially after the Serbian company was acquired by GoDaddy at the end of 2016. purchased by GoDaddy was acquired. Despite the acquisition, you can still use ManageWP with any other host.

Basic features

The free version of ManageWP offers all the necessary basic functions for the most important administrative tasks such as WordPress, plugin and theme updates. There is also Google Analytics integration and a simple performance check (PageSpeed and YSlow-Grade).

Customer reports

Client reports are a practical additional feature of ManageWP. These are also integrated in a slimmed-down version of the free offering. With this function, you can send your customers a report on updates, backups and page views with just a few clicks and even integrate your own logo.

However, you can only get a detailed customer report and complete white labeling with the corresponding add-ons.

Backups

Even in the free version of ManageWP, you have the option to automate your backups. However, you can only select monthly backups, which according to ManageWP is only suitable for "small websites that don't generate any revenue".

For weekly or daily backups (which are of course highly recommended for regular changes to the site!) you have to pay extra every month. If you are an agency or web designer and manage several websites, your expenses will quickly add up.

Paid add-ons

The additional paid features also include staging, cloning, uptime monitor, backup download and SEO tools. Each add-on is always charged per page.

ManageWP offers monthly bundle plans for add-ons. However, you should be careful here whether this is really worthwhile for you. The backup bundle (26-100 pages), for example, costs $75 and is therefore only cheaper than booking the add-on per page from 38 pages.

In general, ManageWP is certainly one of the more expensive management tools. For the all-in-one complete package, you pay $150 per month and between $6 and $1.50 per site. This then depends on whether you manage 25 or 100 pages in this bundle.

You can find an overview of the various features and price models in our administration tool comparison.

Our interim conclusion on ManageWP

All in all, ManageWP saves you a lot of time when managing multiple sites, even with the free features. Thanks to the selection of additional features, you can customize the dashboard to suit your needs and offer your customers an all-round carefree package. However, you should carefully calculate which offer is really worthwhile for you.

What's more, the ManageWP dashboard constantly reminds you which additional features you can't use in the freeware. The prominent placement of these upselling offers can become quite annoying in the long run.

Page management with the Raidboxes dashboard

Raidboxes offers Managed WordPress Hosting and is therefore not a classic management solution like ManageWP and Co. Nevertheless, the Raidboxes dashboard provides many similar features that save you as a web designer a lot of time and nerves when developing and managing your sites.

If you manage several WordPress sites, there are basically two ways to use Raidboxes: free development or reselling.

The web designer variant

As a web designer, you don't usually develop four projects at the same time per month and therefore generate a lower total volume of pages. In addition, the projects are often smaller and an additional monthly service from 30 euros and upwards is harder to sell to the customer.

Therefore, as a web designer with the Raidboxes FREE-DEV program your WordPress projects free of charge. After completion, you hand over the project and hosting contract to your customer and receive an attractive commission. You can continue to manage all your projects that you have already handed over to your customers as an admin via the administration dashboard.

The agency variant

As an agency, dozens of projects quickly come together that need to be managed for clients. In addition, the projects are usually larger and customers are more willing to pay for additional services. Here it is advisable to offer hosting in a reseller tariff and then resell it with a corresponding management service that is ideally automated as far as possible.

Many features are already integrated

Many standard functions such as WP single sign-on, update management as well as plugin and theme management are already integrated in the Raidboxes dashboard. With most management tools, these features are only available as paid add-ons.

Automatic backups and restore points

The automated backup system ensures that you always have an up-to-date version of your website to fall back on in an emergency. Of course, you can also save manual backups of your projects.

Automated plugin and theme updates

With the Fully Managed Option option, your plugins and themes are automatically updated after the nightly backups and the site is then checked for accessibility. If required, you can exclude plugins from the update and also configure the notification for completed updates accordingly.

Staging and templates

With the staging function you can test small and large changes on a copy of your site in the background without your live website suffering in the event of unexpected problems. If you are satisfied with the result in the staging environment, you can make the changes live with just one click.

If you regularly develop new WordPress sites, the template function saves you a lot of time during setup. This feature allows you to download a backup - separate from the original site - as a template. You can then clone any number of other pages from your saved templates in a flash - and with all your settings preconfigured.

For example, you can create your own WP templates for different industries and topics. This saves you valuable time right from the start of new projects, which you can normally charge to the customer as setup costs.

DEV functionalities for further automation

If the integrated functionalities of the dashboard don't go far enough for you or your developers, you can also manage your sites via our SSH environment, including WP-CLI and Git.

Advantages and disadvantages of a separate management tool

Advantages

More functionalities: The use of ManageWP is particularly useful if you want to offer your customers even more information, such as SEO rankings, page speed or uptime monitoring. For this functionality, the individual add-ons can also only be booked for one customer. However, you can assume that Raidboxes will gradually expand its range of functions over time.

Comprehensive site management: It is not always possible to accommodate all customers with one host. ManageWP offers the advantage that you can manage your sites across all hosters. However, this leads directly to an important disadvantage:

Disadvantages

An additional plugin is always required: In order to manage sites across the board, you need the ManageWP plugin, which contains a wide range of functionalities. This can sometimes lead to the plugin eating up the performance of your pages and thus becoming a management problem itself.

No automated performance optimization: Specialized WordPress hosters optimize all components that can be optimized in order to optimize the performance and loading time of a site. Depending on the host, this starts with the hardware with special high-performance processors and ends with the compression algorithms. With a specialized host that optimizes for performance, you no longer have to worry about whether your pages load fast enough.

No integrated security optimization: ManageWP is primarily limited to evaluating and displaying the security of a site. Updating plugins and the WordPress core is certainly one of the best security measures. However, you still have to take care of protecting the login area or shielding it with firewalls yourself. With specialized hosting, the provider takes care of closing such security gaps.

No completely automated administration: Even with ManageWP, you are forced to log in every now and then and check the status of your pages. Some web designers check here daily to see if there are any plugin updates, for example. As shown above, Raidboxes gives you the option of configuring your updates so that the system runs automatically and you are only notified in the event of problems.

Conclusion: Extended service vs. more time savings

The main advantage of ManageWP lies in its extended functionalities, which are particularly useful for customer reporting. If you would rather have an integrated tool that also takes care of performance and security optimization as well as server management, Raidboxes is the better choice. Both offers can be tested free of charge.

What is your experience with managing multiple WordPress sites? Do you use a tool like ManageWP or the features of your host? We'd love to hear your suggestions and feedback.