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We are handling around \~40 websites, and we give monthly reports to our clients (Performance score, SEO, Security, etc) stuff like that.
Currently, we are using WPMU Dev, and god it is horrible (in our experience), it is so hard to optimize large websites. The changes do not reflect when optimizing. Server config when for lazy load, backup issues.
Now I proposed moving to ManageWP. We used this 2 years back but somehow, we moved to WPMU Dev. The owner said he is okay with it but there were malware issues caused by ManageWP more than a year ago (I was not informed about this).
Question is: Should we stay with WPMU, or transfer to ManageWP? Thanks
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Not sure about ManageWP, but can tell you a client of mine used InfinateWP to manage their sites, and they were all compromised about 2 years ago. The exploit was found on like a Tuesday, they released an update on Wednesday, however the client did updates at the end of the day Fridays, and sometime on Thursday all their sites (across different hosting) all got hosed. IWP claimed they sent e-mail to users, client never noticed it, probably lost in the tons of mail they get every day.
So if you do use something, make sure you are signed up for notifications and set them up in your e-mail to be filtered to high importance.
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I don’t have an answer for you, but I will add in my experience trying a few of these. I used WPMU Dev as well for a while and had tons of issues. Their Hummingbird Optimization sucks and many times I was unable to get things updated or backed up. Everything seemed janky and like it had tons of bugs. That was 4 years ago… and it sounds like it hasn’t gotten any better.
I now use MainWP and while its also not perfect, it doesn’t only rely on their own developed tools. It links into 3rd party plugins like Updraft Plus, uptimeRobot, Google PageSpeed, and provides reports on what all your different systems are doing. So it allows you to at least pick and choose what plugins you use to help make management easier. Its not perfect.. but I think I paid $400 once for lifetime access and I host it locally on the same server as the sites. It’s better than WPMU Dev was but development seems slow and its not very fancy.
I use ManageWP for about 80 sites. Highly recommended. Being able to update 80 sites in 1 minute is amazing. I don’t use any of their paid features, it’s all free. The mainwp website is deceptive/untrue with their pricing comparison with ManageWP, I don’t pay anything for MWP.
To address to comments about security issues – ManageWP can use a connection key, rather than a username/password is much more secure.
Whoever owns WPMU is a marketing genius and/or has very deep pockets. Their themes were crap, but they continued to grow. Now that they’ve moved to plugins, most of them are crap too (except the ones they bought), and they still seem to be doing okay.
My agency manages over 100 active WordPress sites. We have tried all the tools but at the end of the day we do it manually.
The reasons
1.) We make sure all the updates are done correctly.
2.) Premium plugins require a manual update like RankMath Pro.
3.) Gives us an opportunity to upsell our service for each client.
4.) Gives us an opportunity to contact the client and reach out to them.
5.) Our retention rate is about 99% and our upsell rate is over 60% because our system of manually reviewing each site and contacting our clients.
6.) Customer service is a major factor in our referral of getting new clients.
I would consider using a mass update tool once we hit over 500 clients.
I’ve been using Manage WP for a few years and it does a lot of great things for free. You can also buy upgrades on a per site basis and create white labeled reports.
Premium plugins won’t update through the console.
Since they are owned by Godaddy, any sites you manage with GoDaddy hosting tend to get a lot of the upgraded features at no cost.
You could have a look at [WPCS.io]), that could be just the platform if your sites fit the multi-tenant way.
I use ManageWP for a few clients who insist on hosting on GoDaddy “economy Linux” plans because those plans are so badly throttled it’s the only reliable and free way to get downloadable daily backups.
I’m not fond of their pricing plan but the full package is free for GoDaddy clients. This is also true for GoDaddy “whitebox” resellers. You can sign up with a (free) GoDaddy Pro account and then connect those sites.
I have several colleagues in the WP support/maintenance field and every month or so they ask “is anyone else seeing…” various issues, usually relating to reports going out, but occasionally related to downtime/inaccessibility. That said, they seem pretty happy with it.
I’ve used InfiniteWP for almost 10 years now and it generally Just Works fine. I use it (and GoDaddy Pro for those GoDaddy Clients) to make scheduled daily (for 14 days) and weekly (for 3 years) offsite backups. I also use it for daily updates.
InfiniteWP, like MainWP, are self-hosted solutions so unlike ManageWP and other cloud-based managers you’re responsible for keeping up with software and security updates. This isn’t a problem for me since I my IWP console daily. But I can see how 0-day patches would be a problem if you only visit weekly or monthly.
I should add that I pay for IWP’s plugin package rather than using the somewhat limited free version. But I prefer that one-price model vs. ManageWP and others’ per-site pricing because it lets me manage quite a few non-profit and friends-and-family sites at no additional cost to me (beyond backup storage of course.)
Final point, in my opinion you really want to be able to store backups in bulk off-site for more than ManageWP’s standard 30 days. Not all site damage shows up immediately, and it’s always good to be able to go back in the (admittedly very rare) cases where one has to.
1000% yes! I’ve been using it for years and maintain 20+ websites for a local medical group in one account, and 20+ of my own & clients in my personal account. It’s great for management, cloning, backups, migrations, etc. I don’t know about reporting because I’ve always used semrush and ahrefs for that, never had to report on uptime and security.
You probably got moved to WPMU Dev because of the white-label hosting. A company I work for sometimes has this, and I still add the site to ManageWP.
MainWP. I just switched from ManageWP to MainWP a few days ago. Self-Hosted, Better control, and MainWP has better mass administration tools. Bulk add & remove plugins, posts as well as just updates. From what I can tell, most of the other mass admin tools are just for updates or backups, mostly. They don’t actually help with any mass administration of the site in any other way.
Uptime monitoring, Cache Control (an extension that is new for MainWP and free for the next month, I like this a lot because ManageWP always managed to break my site layouts after a bulk plugin update and would be broken until I purged the caches), and some other goodies. It seems like a better offering than ManageWP IMO.
I would combine this with a service like VisualPing to do visual uptime monitoring if desired for some extra cost.
I can’t speak to the built-in reporting capabilities because I don’t use them. Give it a try though, I quite like it. Just secure the heck out of your main dashboard installation.
Configure your server to dump backups to a separate bucket like BackBlaze or AWS. I don’t rely on the admin software to do that for me.
I use ManageWP.
Never had any issues and manage about 50 sites. I have daily backups for 3 months I think and then do safe updates.
I have a couple sites that give me issues (but its not a ManageWP issue) so I still manually review those, but otherwise I spend probably a half hour doing updates a day from start to finish regardless of the number of sites.
I’m actually using WPMU DEV and I quite like them… am I the only one? What issues to you guys have?
I use it for around the same number of sites. It’s pretty solid, but their reports are pretty maddening. They’ve never improved them in the 2+ years I’ve been using it.
Check out gowp.com
What about MainWP?