My team and I manage many WordPress sites on a day-to-day basis because of our maintenance service, and I have tested most of the tools out there to help speed up the process.

In this post I want to show you how to manage multiple WordPress sites and  what to look for in a site management tool.  I’ll also let you know which one I selected.

Tools I Have Tried

I’ve had a go at them all, we have given a test drive to:

• Managewp
• InfiniteWP
• WPRemote

What Functions I Look For

These were my criteria when selecting my tool:

Automatic Backups – I want daily database backups and weekly full backups that send the files offsite to a cloud backup location like Dropbox or Google drive.

One Click Plugin Updates – I want to be able to quickly update plugins across all sites from a central console.

One Click WordPress Updates – and the same with WordPress updates.

Security monitoring – I want to monitor the sites for security and potential hack attacks.

Uptime Monitoring – I want to know when the sites are down so I can pro actively fix them.

Database Optimisation – I want to keep my clients databases optimised and running quickly.

Reporting – I want a tool to keep my clients up to date with the updates I’ve done on their sites.

What We Use

We opted for Managewp over the other two, it’s more expensive than InfinteWP but at the time of testing the backups were far more reliable.  They are both great tools that do the same thing, but reliable backups are a must.

I remember as an eager young techie, my boss said to me “You are only as good as your last backup”. That stuck and the more robust backup of managewp won the day.

WPRemote didn’t get much of a look in to be honest, their pricing structure ruled them out almost immediately.

Wrap Up

I think if you have five or more websites to manage then Managewp is an excellent tool for you, or you could outsource the maintenance of your site to us 🙂

Photo Credit: Gabriel Rojas Hruska via Compfight cc