“Trying out” may be the wrong term to use this week, because we’ve been using ManageWP daily for years, so it’s probably not fair to call it a try-out.
ManageWP is a paid WordPress tool that allows you to manage one or many WordPress websites from a single dashboard.
For us,the top benefit is the ability to work with lots of websites without having to log in and out of each one. We can log into ManageWP and perform a number of tasks for all the websites that we manage:
- post at blogs
- edit and schedule blogs
- update selected plugins and themes
- clean spam comments and previous blog post versions
- check stats of various kinds
- manage users — change passwords, delete, or change roles
- clone sites or implement code snippets
- import or export sites
- back up sites
If you have just one website, you can do all this from your website. However, we think that some people might find the ManageWP dashboard easier to use. For example, if you want to find and update blog posts to reflect a change in your products or to check and approve posts your blogger has written, you can use this screen:
Filling in this form might be simpler than conducting a similar search at your WordPress website, which would require multiple clicks and passes through the search tools.
ManageWP also offers some additional tools and services. You’ll have automatic backup of your site or sites, you’ll be alerted when your site is down, and you’ll also receive alerts when your site has an unusual amount of traffic. There are several plan levels, and the highest level includes SEO tools. You can get a quick look at PageRank, Alexa ranking, a backlinks estimate, number of indexed pages, and more. The middle level lets you look at high points from your Google Analytics from the dashboard — but of course you can arrange that at an individual WordPress site as well.
Pricing for a single site is quite low, and price per site goes down as the number of sites you manage goes up.
If you own more than one website and manage your own websites, you should give ManageWP a try. If you own even one website and have no webmaster, it would be worth $4.50 a month to be sure of automatic backups (your hosting company ought to do this for you, but many don’t). If you find the WordPress dashboard more difficult than you had expected, it could be worth $1.50 a month to try out this interface instead.
We currently have several clients who own two or three websites. They don’t do their own blogging or manage their own websites, but ManageWP would allow them to go to a single dashboard and check their editorial calendars or read their comments. For $15 or so per month, this might be a worthwhile convenience.
If this tool sounds intriguing to you, we’d say it’s worth trying out. If you have limited responsibility for a single website, the price is low enough to make a month’s tryout super economical. If you have responsibility for multiple websites, the time saving is significant — we definitely see a good return on investment.
Leave a Reply