Siteward docs, set up your fleet in minutes.

How Siteward works

Siteward is two lightweight WordPress plugins:

• Siteward Dashboard, installed on one central WordPress site. This is your control panel: the site registry, scheduled checks, health flags, alerts and the admin UI.
• Siteward Child, installed on each site you want to manage. It exposes a single secured endpoint the dashboard talks to.

The dashboard always initiates traffic. Uptime is measured by the dashboard requesting each site’s public URL directly, so an outage is caught even if WordPress is fully down, while everything else (updates, backups, health) is pulled from the child’s signed endpoint.

Requirements

• WordPress 5.8+ and PHP 7.4+ on both the dashboard and the managed sites.
• The OpenSSL PHP extension (standard on virtually every host).
• HTTPS on the managed sites, recommended; Siteward warns if a site isn’t on HTTPS.
• A working cron. WP-Cron works out of the box; for accurate timing we recommend a real system cron (see Uptime & alerts).

1. Install the dashboard

1. On your central WordPress site, install the free Siteward plugin from WordPress.org, go to Plugins → Add New, search “Siteward”, then Install and Activate. (Or get it at wordpress.org/plugins/siteward.)
2. A new Siteward menu appears in wp-admin. Open it, the overview is empty until you connect your first site.
3. Optionally open Siteward → Settings to set check intervals, retry counts, alert recipients and thresholds. You can do this any time.

2. Connect a site

1. On the site you want to manage, go to Plugins → Add New, search “Siteward Child”, then Install and Activate. (Or get it at wordpress.org/plugins/siteward-child.)
2. Go to Settings → Siteward Connection and copy the site’s REST URL and its one-time connection key.
3. Back on the dashboard, open Siteward → Add Site, paste the URL and key, and click Connect.
4. The dashboard generates a keypair, completes the handshake, and runs a first sync. The site now appears in your overview with its status and flags.

Your fleet at a glance

The overview shows a live summary bar, Sites, Online, Down, Updates, Attention, and a row per site with its status pill, response time, pending updates and health flags. From here you can:

• Sync a site on demand, or let the scheduled sync keep it fresh.
• Open a site’s detail page for its full update list, latest backup, cron health and uptime history.
• Spot problems fast via colour-coded flags: down, slow load, updates available, no / stale / failing backup, failing cron, connection error and critical error.

Tags & segmentation

Tags let you group your fleet however you work, by client, by server, by care-plan tier, or a “do not touch” label for fragile sites. Create and colour your tags in Siteward → Settings → Tags, then assign them on any site’s detail page.

• Filter the overview. A Tags filter appears next to search as soon as you have a tag. Pick a tag and an Is / Is Not condition to narrow the fleet, and combine several conditions with the status filter and search.
• Scope bulk actions. Sync and update actions target the currently-shown rows, so a filter like Tags → Is Not → Do not update lets you update everything except those sites. The Updates page carries the same tag filter.
• Show tags on the list. Toggle Show tags on the list in the Tags filter to render each site’s tags on its overview row.

Tagging is free and unlimited. Siteward Pro adds dynamic tags that assign themselves by rule, for example every site on a given server IP, or every site below a target WordPress version, and re-evaluate automatically on each sync.

Running updates

Open Siteward → Updates to see every pending core, plugin and theme update across your whole fleet. You can:

• Review updates by plugin / theme (update one item everywhere) or by site.
• Select what to update and run it, a live progress modal shows each item completing in real time.
• Update a single site from its detail page.

Updates run sequentially per site and in parallel across sites, so large fleets finish quickly. After each run Siteward re-checks the site, so any critical error surfaces immediately.

Uptime & alerts

The dashboard checks each site’s public URL on a schedule. To avoid false alarms it retries before marking a site down, then alerts you on the transition, down, and again on recovery, not every cycle.

• Configure intervals, retry count and the slow-load threshold in Settings.
• Add email recipients and / or Zapier webhook URLs for alerts.
• For precise timing, add a real system cron and disable WP-Cron, Siteward shows a notice with the exact line to add, and warns if the dashboard’s own cron falls behind.

Critical-error detection

Siteward detects when a site is broken even if it still returns a page: HTTP 5xx errors, WordPress’s “critical error” white screen, recovery mode, and plugins WordPress has auto-paused. The site is flagged and, where possible, Siteward names the plugin or theme that caused it, so you know exactly what to roll back.

Backups

Siteward reads UpdraftPlus backup status from each site and surfaces the latest backup on the dashboard. The free dashboard also raises health flags for no backups, stale backups (older than your threshold) and failing backups, and can alert you, so a missing backup never surprises you at restore time. More providers are on the roadmap.

One-click WP Admin login

Every connected site has an Open WP Admin button, on its overview row and on its detail page. Click it and Siteward logs you straight into that site’s wp-admin in a new tab, with no stored passwords. Each login link is signed by your dashboard, single-use, and expires within a couple of minutes.

Licensing & Pro

The free Siteward Dashboard manages unlimited sites, uptime monitoring, fleet updates, critical-error detection, UpdraftPlus backup health and WP-Cron health alerts, and email alerts, with no per-site fees. Siteward Pro is an optional add-on that adds proactive SSL & domain-expiry alerts, dynamic (rule-based) tags and Zapier webhooks.

To add Pro:

1. Buy Agency or Lifetime from the pricing page. Lemon Squeezy emails you a download link for the Pro plugin and your licence key.
2. Download omnis-dashboard-pro.zip (from that email or your Lemon Squeezy account), then on your dashboard site go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, upload it and Activate.
3. Open Siteward → License, paste your licence key and click Activate. Pro features switch on immediately.

Keeping Siteward updated

The free Dashboard and Child plugins update through WordPress.org like any other plugin. The Pro add-on self-updates from the Siteward update server, validated against your licence key, so once it’s installed, Pro updates arrive automatically on your dashboard’s Plugins / Updates screen.

Troubleshooting

A site won’t connect

Check the child is on HTTPS, the REST URL is reachable, and the connection key hasn’t already been used, regenerate it on Settings → Siteward Connection and retry.

Uptime says “down” but the site loads for me

Something is blocking the dashboard’s requests, often a firewall, security plugin or rate-limit. Allow the dashboard’s IP, or raise the slow-load threshold if the site is simply slow.

Pro features aren’t showing

Make sure the Siteward Pro add-on is installed (upload the zip Lemon Squeezy sent you via Plugins → Add New → Upload) and that your licence key is activated on Siteward → License. SSL / domain-expiry alerts and Zapier appear only with Pro active; backup and cron health alerts are part of the free dashboard.

Still stuck?

Email jason@lifering.co.nz and we’ll help.

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