WordPress management for agencies, without the per-site tax.

Siteward is self-hosted WordPress fleet management built for agencies: it runs uptime monitoring, fleet-wide updates, backup health and critical-error detection across your whole client portfolio from a single dashboard, for one flat price, with no per-site fees. It is a deliberately lean alternative to MainWP and ManageWP, designed to stay fast and profitable at scale.

The agency math that quietly kills your margin

Maintenance retainers are some of the best recurring revenue an agency has, until the tooling eats them. Most cloud managers bill per site, per feature, per month: a dollar or two here for monitoring, a few more for backups, more again for reporting. On a 200-site portfolio that’s $5,000–$21,000 a year in tool cost alone, paid before you’ve covered a single hour of actual work. The client list grows, the bill grows with it, and the margin you priced your retainers around quietly erodes.

Siteward breaks that link. Monitoring and fleet-wide updates are free for unlimited sites, and Pro is a single flat price, $129/yr or $399 lifetime, not a per-site meter. Add your 201st client and your tooling cost stays exactly where it was. Whatever you charge per site for maintenance flows to your bottom line instead of someone else’s billing engine.

Four problems every portfolio agency knows

1. Per-site costs eating retainer margin

You priced a maintenance plan at a healthy margin two years ago. Then you added monitoring, then backups, then a reporting add-on, each a per-site line item that compounds. Siteward replaces that stack with one flat licence. Run the numbers on our pricing page: the bigger your portfolio, the more dramatic the gap.

2. Dashboards that crawl at scale

A manager that feels snappy at 30 sites can become unusable at 200, with checks timing out and the overview taking a minute to paint. Siteward uses a parallel engine to check and update your entire fleet in seconds, with concurrency you control, fast by default, no special caching tweaks required to stay usable. See how the engine works.

3. Updates that break client sites silently

A plugin update ships a fatal error, the site white-screens, and nobody knows until the client phones, angry, on a Friday. Siteward’s critical-error detection catches HTTP 5xx errors, the WordPress “critical error” screen, recovery mode and auto-paused plugins, and names the plugin or theme that caused it. You hear about breakage from your dashboard, not from your client.

4. Proving the maintenance value you already deliver

Months of clean uptime are invisible to a client, until they question the invoice. Siteward gives you a single source of truth: uptime history, update activity, backup status and health flags per site, on your own server. When a client asks what they’re paying for, you have the record. (Scheduled white-label client reports are on the roadmap.)

Protect the margin you’ve already earned

Think of Siteward as margin insurance. Most agencies charge somewhere between $25 and $100 per site, per month, for a maintenance plan. The cost of managing those sites with Siteward is the same whether you have 50 clients or 500, a flat licence, divided across an unlimited fleet, that rounds to pennies per site. Every per-site dollar you would have handed to a cloud vendor stays in the business instead.

And because Siteward is self-hosted, there’s no third party in the chain at all. The dashboard runs on your own WordPress install, each client site is paired to it with an OpenSSL keypair, and every request is signed with timestamp and nonce replay protection. Client data never routes through anyone else’s cloud, which matters when your contracts or your clients’ compliance teams ask where the data lives. The answer is simple: on your server.

Standardise maintenance across your team

The hidden risk in a growing agency isn’t any single site, it’s inconsistency. One developer remembers to check backups, another doesn’t. Updates happen on an ad-hoc basis when someone has a spare hour. A site slips through the cracks for a month and nobody notices until it’s a problem. Siteward turns maintenance from tribal knowledge into a repeatable, visible process the whole team shares.

• One overview, one truth. Every site, its uptime, pending updates, backup status and health flags on a single screen, colour-coded by severity. Anyone on the team opens the dashboard and instantly sees what needs attention, without asking who looked at what.
• Updates as a routine, not a scramble. One screen lists every pending core, plugin and theme update across the fleet. Select by plugin or by site, bulk-update with a live progress modal, and let critical-error detection flag anything that broke, so update day is a checklist, not a gamble.
• Backups nobody forgets. Siteward reads UpdraftPlus status across the fleet and raises automatic flags for missing, stale and failing backups. A junior doesn’t need to remember to check, the dashboard surfaces it.
• Alerts to one inbox. Down, recovered, backup failing, cron failing, pushed by email or to any Zapier webhook, so your team’s existing channels (Slack, a ticketing queue, on-call) light up the moment something changes.

The result is that maintenance quality stops depending on which person happened to be looking. Onboard a new developer and the process is the dashboard, no runbook drift, no “we usually do it this way.”

How agencies run Siteward day to day

You install the free Siteward dashboard on one central WordPress site, your control panel, and a lightweight Siteward Child plugin on each client site you manage. The dashboard always initiates traffic: it measures uptime by hitting each site’s public URL directly (so an outage is caught even when WordPress is fully down) and pulls updates, backups and health from the child’s signed endpoint. From there it’s daily monitoring, weekly update runs, and alerts only when something actually changes. The full setup takes minutes per site, walk through it in the documentation, and browse practical guides in the resources.

Why agencies switch from MainWP and ManageWP

MainWP is a capable self-hosted manager, but several of its most-wanted features live behind paid extensions and it can slow once you pass ~100 child sites without tuning. ManageWP is polished but cloud-based and per-site priced, and your client data routes through a third party. Siteward keeps the best of the self-hosted model, your server, your data, unlimited sites, deliberately lean and fast, with one flat price and no extension shopping. See the full breakdown on our MainWP and ManageWP alternative page.

If your portfolio is between 20 and 500-plus client sites and your tooling bill grows every time you win work, Siteward is built for exactly your shape of agency. Start free with unlimited sites, the free dashboard already watches backups and cron for you; add Pro when you want SSL and domain-expiry alerts plus Zapier webhooks, or head back to the overview to see how it all fits together.