Twenty-one things, all of which you will actually use.
Free covers the whole monitoring core and safe updates on unlimited sites. Pro adds management, one-click rollback, client reminders, expiry alerts, reports, AI assistants and integrations.
Uptime monitoring
Every site checked on a schedule. Retry-then-alert avoids false alarms, you are notified the moment a site goes down or recovers, and each site shows its uptime over 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days. How to monitor WordPress uptime at scale.
Fleet-wide updates
One screen shows every pending core, plugin and theme update. Select by plugin or by site and bulk-update with live progress. Five ways to update plugins across many sites.
Safe updates & rollback
Every plugin and theme update is saved first and checked afterwards. If it broke the site, the previous version goes back automatically and you get an alert. Pro adds one-click rollback from the dashboard. How safe updates work.
Fleet plugin management
Update, activate, deactivate, uninstall or install plugins across exactly the sites you filter to: by tag, status or which plugins they already have. Every action shows the sites it will run on first, and failures come back with a one-click retry. Install by name from WordPress.org or from an uploaded ZIP, including premium plugins. How fleet plugin management works.
Visual update checks
After any plugin, theme or WordPress change, your dashboard loads each site’s homepage and up to three pages you choose and compares them with before: errors, PHP errors, missing content and stylesheets that stopped loading. A page that changed is flagged and alerted within minutes. How visual checks work.
Before & after screenshots
Screenshots of the homepage before and after each update, taken by Google PageSpeed Insights with your own free API key, and flagged when the page looks very different. Videos, sliders, popups and cookie banners are recognised, so they do not raise false alarms.
PageSpeed scores
Weekly Google PageSpeed scores for every site, mobile and desktop, in a column on the Sites page you can sort by, with the details behind each score on hover and history on each site’s page. The scores also appear in client reports.
Vulnerability monitoring
Every installed plugin, theme and core version across the fleet, checked against a feed of nearly 39,000 known vulnerabilities. Severity, CVE and the exact version that fixes it, shown on your dashboard and on each site’s own Plugins screen. No API key, no account, no per-site fee, and nothing about your sites ever leaves your server. Pro can close them for you: set a severity threshold and Siteward applies the update itself when one exists that actually fixes the vulnerability.
White-label client reports
A branded monthly report of every update applied, uptime, security and optional Google Analytics traffic, sent as HTML email under your name, not ours. Included with Pro at no extra cost, where most tools price reporting per site. See what the report looks like.
AI assistants (Siteward MCP)
Connect Claude, Cursor or any MCP client to your dashboard once and ask about the whole fleet in plain language: what needs attention, what is waiting to update, what is vulnerable. It can also use the WordPress abilities your sites allow, such as Bricks or Gravity Forms. Changes stay off until you allow them for tagged sites and named people, and every call is logged. Included with Pro. How to connect an AI assistant.
Critical-error detection
Catches 5xx errors, the critical-error white screen, recovery mode and auto-paused plugins, and names the plugin or theme that caused it. What to do when an update breaks a client site.
Backup & cron health
UpdraftPlus and WP-Cron status across the fleet, with automatic flags for no backups, stale backups, failing backups and failing cron. How backup and cron health works.
SSL & domain monitoring
Reads every certificate and domain registration and alerts you days before either lapses, so a forgotten renewal never takes a site offline. How SSL and domain monitoring works.
Health flags
At-a-glance badges surface what needs attention: down, slow load, failing cron, stale backup, updates available, unsupported PHP, outdated WordPress and more, colour-coded by severity. See the health flags reference.
Tags & segmentation
Label sites by client or server, then filter the fleet and scope bulk actions, so you can update everything except the sites you tag “do not touch”. How to organise sites with tags.
Notes, client details & reminders
Free notes on every site for client contacts and hosting details, searchable from the Sites page. Pro adds each client’s email, phone and price, plus reminders for renewals and contracts, emailed up to 90 days before. What’s new in Siteward 0.15.
One-click login
Open any connected site’s wp-admin, or its Site Health screen, straight from the dashboard, already signed in. No passwords stored, no hunting through a password manager. See the documentation.
Email & Zapier alerts
Notified on state changes, down, recovered, backup failing, cron failing, by email or to any Zapier webhook, so one inbox covers your whole fleet. Route uptime alerts into Slack.
Signed, self-hosted security
Each managed site is paired with an OpenSSL keypair; every request is signed with replay protection. Client data never routes through a third-party cloud. Self-hosted vs cloud WordPress management.
Built for 200+ sites
A parallel curl_multi engine checks and updates your whole fleet in seconds, with concurrency you control. No caching tweaks to stay usable at scale. Managing 100+ WordPress sites.
One lean dashboard
No add-on accounts, no separate billing, no IP-whitelist spreadsheets. A free dashboard plugin plus a lightweight child plugin, that’s it. Compare the leading alternatives.
What each feature actually does
The problem each one solves once you are running a fleet rather than a handful of sites, and how it compares with the way MainWP and ManageWP approach the same job. Where a competitor does it better, we say so.
Uptime monitoring
Your dashboard requests each managed site’s public URL on a schedule and records the status code and response time. Because the check hits the public URL directly rather than going through the child plugin, a site is still detected as down when WordPress itself has failed, which is the case that matters most.
A single failure does not raise an alarm: Siteward retries a configurable number of times before declaring a site down, which removes almost all false alerts from brief network blips. Response time feeds a slow-load flag, so gradual degradation surfaces before it becomes an outage. Each site’s page shows its uptime over the last 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days, and the Sites list shows the 30-day figure, so the sites that keep dropping out are obvious.
Fleet-wide updates
One screen lists every pending core, plugin and theme update across every connected site. You can work by plugin, updating one everywhere it is out of date, or by site, clearing a single client in one action.
Bulk runs show live progress: updates apply sequentially within a site, because a site cannot safely run two upgraders at once, but sites run in parallel, so a fleet-wide update takes about as long as your slowest site rather than the sum of all of them. Each site is re-checked afterwards, so a broken update surfaces immediately. With safe updates, each plugin and theme update is also saved first and rolled back automatically if it breaks the site, and Pro adds one-click rollback from the dashboard.
Critical-error detection
An update that breaks a site rarely announces itself. Siteward catches HTTP 5xx responses, the WordPress critical-error white screen, recovery mode, and plugins or themes that WordPress has automatically paused after a fatal error.
Crucially it reads WordPress’s own paused-extension state, so the alert names the plugin or theme that caused the failure instead of reporting that the site is unreachable. That turns a bisect-by-hand afternoon into a rollback of one component. It also catches the case that fools naive monitors: a critical-error page that still returns HTTP 200.
Backup and cron health
Siteward reads each site’s UpdraftPlus history and WP-Cron state on every sync and flags four failure modes: no backup configured, a stale backup, a backup that ran but errored, and overdue cron events.
The point is not to run backups, it is to notice when the backup you assumed was running has quietly stopped, which is the failure people discover at restore time. A dead scheduler matters for the same reason: no backups, no update checks, and it fails silently by design.
Health flags
Every site carries a set of computed flags, colour-coded by severity: down, slow load, connection error, updates available, no or stale or failing backup, failing cron, recovery mode, auto-paused extensions, Site Health criticals, a PHP version that no longer gets security fixes, and WordPress two or more major releases behind.
Flags are computed centrally from each sync and cached on the site’s status row, so the overview reflects the latest known state without re-querying every site when you load the page. The practical effect is that the dashboard is scannable: you are looking for colour, not reading rows.
Tags and segmentation
Tags let you label sites by client, server, plan tier or fragility, then filter the fleet with Is and Is-Not conditions. The important part is that bulk actions respect the filter, so “update everything except the three sites tagged do-not-touch” becomes a safety rail rather than a checklist you might get wrong at 11pm.
A site can carry several tags at once, so the same fleet can be sliced by client today and by server tomorrow. Pro adds dynamic tags that assign themselves by rule, for example every site resolving to one server IP, and re-evaluate on each sync.
And the rest, just as honestly
Including the two places we would point you at MainWP instead. See the changelog for what has already shipped.
Visual update checks
Included with ProAfter every update the dashboard compares each site’s key pages with how they looked before, from your own server, and flags a page that broke: an error, a PHP error, missing content or a stylesheet that stopped loading. Homepage screenshots from Google PageSpeed add a visual comparison, with videos, sliders and popups recognised so they do not cause false alarms.
PageSpeed scores
Roughly a washWeekly Google PageSpeed scores for every site, mobile and desktop, with a sortable column on the Sites page, the measures behind each score, history per site, and a site speed section in client reports. It runs on your own free Google API key.
Fleet plugin management
Roughly a washActivate, deactivate, uninstall or install plugins across a selected set of sites in one run. Install by name from WordPress.org, or upload a ZIP so premium plugins and your own private builds work like repository ones; each site downloads the plugin itself, so host firewalls do not get in the way. The site list is filterable, so you can scope an action to a client, a server or a tag.
SSL and domain-expiry monitoring
MainWP wins hereCertificates and domain registrations expire on their own schedule, usually while nobody is looking, and the failure is immediate and public. Siteward reads each site’s certificate and registration daily and raises a flag with enough lead time to renew calmly.
Email and Zapier alerts
Siteward winsAlerts fire on state transitions, not on every check cycle, so you get one message when a site goes down and one when it recovers. Every dispatch is logged, which is what makes the deduplication reliable. The Pro Zapier channel posts a normalised payload to any webhook.
Signed, self-hosted security
Roughly a washDuring setup the dashboard generates an RSA keypair and pairs with each site once, using a single-use connection secret invalidated on use. Every request after that is signed and verified against the stored public key, and rejected if the timestamp has drifted or the nonce has been seen before.
Built for 200+ sites
Siteward winsFleet operations run concurrently through a parallel curl_multi engine rather than looping site by site, with the concurrency level exposed as a setting. A full-fleet sync at a few hundred sites completes in seconds rather than minutes, with no separate optimisation mode to switch on as the fleet grows.
Notes, client details and reminders
Roughly a washEvery site has free notes for contacts, hosting details and anything else, searchable from the Sites list. Pro adds each client’s name, email, phone and price, and dated reminders for hosting renewals or contracts that email you before they fall due, once, monthly or yearly.
One-click login
Roughly a washOpen any connected site’s wp-admin, or straight to its Site Health screen, from the dashboard, already signed in. The login travels over the same signed connection as everything else, so no passwords are stored on the dashboard.
One lean dashboard
Roughly a washTwo plugins: a dashboard and a lightweight child. No add-on marketplace to assemble, no separate accounts, no IP allow-lists. That is a deliberate trade rather than a free win. A smaller tool does less: no staging integration, and backup monitoring covers UpdraftPlus or server-level backups rather than every backup plugin.
Still deciding? The ranked comparison puts five tools side by side.
Common questions
What can Siteward do from one dashboard?
Siteward monitors uptime, runs fleet-wide core/plugin/theme updates (one-click or bulk), detects WordPress critical errors, and watches UpdraftPlus backups and WP-Cron health, across unlimited sites from one screen.
Does Siteward slow down with hundreds of sites?
No. Siteward uses a parallel engine that checks and updates your whole fleet at once, so it stays fast at 200+ sites where older managers crawl.
Is Siteward secure?
Yes. It is self-hosted and the dashboard initiates all traffic; every request to a managed site is signed with an OpenSSL keypair and protected against replay with a timestamp and nonce.
See it on your own sites.
Monitor unlimited sites free, or add Pro when you want expiry alerts, dynamic tags and integrations.