ManageWP.com: The Ultimate WordPress Dashboard

ManageWP is more than just a backup service. It’s more than just a place to manage all your comments. It’s even more than just a place to update all your WordPress installations.

It’s all of those, and more.

ManageWP.com will let you manage multiple sites in a grouped and orderly fashion. The system will let you easily let you…manage all comments, all newly published posts, and create scheduled backups (system backups and external remote backups (screenshot): Amazon, Dropbox, E-mai, or FTP).

The ManageWP platform even allows for WordPress core and plugin updates, with just a few simple clicks.

Unless you’re running WordPress Multisite, which allows for a majority of this functionality from the Super Admin homepage, running ManageWP with your site(s) is a great idea.

Getting Started

When first getting started (screenshot), it was a little tricky as I had to add my site, install the plugin, then go back to the same screen to click “add site” again. I hope they continue to improve the user flow so it’s easier on users when adding a new site. But after a few clicks, I was able to get my site added.

After the first site was added, it was a breeze navigating around and being able to manage different aspects of my site.

The Features

WordPress backups are becoming more and more necessary, given how many sites are getting hacked these days. Not just WordPress specifically, but sites across the entire Internet — for example, Yahoo!, Universal Music, DOJ, you name it. Backups are always a good idea, so you have something to fallback to if you need it.

ManageWP makes it easy to setup a scheduled backup service, allowing for flexibility in how many backup files, how often to actually run the backup, and which files to include or exclude from the backup.

Updating WordPress is another huge feature of ManageWP. The ability to manage specific plugin updates or update an entire installation of WordPress to the latest version of WordPress, it’s a snap to do.

Easy commenting management is also available. With a steady flow of the most recent comments available in the dashboard, you can see what kind of discussions are taking place across your sites.

SEO management is another built-in feature. While this feature is only available in the Business package (which runs for $24/mo), it can certainly be a helpful feature for webmasters that run multiple sites and want to easily see a global view.

Improvements

Having been in an Apple world for so long, my standards have become fairly high in terms of a polished user interface. After using the interface, it feels like it could still use some further clean up and polishing to make it an even better experience. I think this largely has to do with WordPress limitations and styles, but there are still many ways to improve this.

Additionally, the fact that while browsing around the dashboard, the permalink never changes, that can be frustrating if you’re trying to send someone the link for the page that you’re on. The use of the History API could be very useful here to replace the entire AJAX interface.

Final Thoughts

Overall, ManageWP.com looks like a great service that I can easily recommend to people. It provides a ton of functionality at a very low cost, and it makes it easy to maintain and run multiple WordPress websites.

One of the ManageWP competitors is InfiniteWP. The largest difference between the two being self-hosted vs remotely hosted (ManageWP being the latter of the two.)