Siteward is now available free on WordPress.org. It is a lean, self-hosted dashboard for managing many WordPress sites from one place: monitor uptime, run fleet-wide updates, watch backups and catch critical errors across unlimited sites, with no per-site fees. You can install it today straight from your WordPress admin.
Get Siteward on WordPress.org, or search “Siteward” in Plugins → Add New inside any WordPress site.
What Siteward does
If you look after more than a handful of WordPress sites, you know the pain: logging into each one to check updates, wondering whether a backup actually ran, and finding out a site is down only when a client calls. Siteward puts your whole fleet on one screen.
- Uptime monitoring with retry-then-alert, so you hear about downtime by email or Zapier the moment it happens, not hours later.
- Fleet-wide updates for core, plugins and themes, applied one-click or in bulk with a live progress view.
- Critical-error detection that catches HTTP 5xx errors, the WordPress “critical error” white screen, recovery mode and auto-paused plugins, and names the culprit.
- Backup and cron health flags for UpdraftPlus backups and WP-Cron, so a missing or stale backup never surprises you.
- One-click login to any managed site’s wp-admin, with no stored passwords.
Free, unlimited sites, self-hosted
Siteward is a deliberately lean alternative to tools like MainWP and ManageWP. The free dashboard manages unlimited sites at no cost, and it is fully self-hosted: it runs on your own WordPress site, and your data never routes through a third-party cloud. Every connection between the dashboard and a managed site is signed with an OpenSSL keypair and protected against replay.
There are no per-site fees. An optional Pro add-on adds SSL and domain-expiry alerts, fleet plugin management and Zapier webhooks for one flat price, but everything you need to monitor a fleet is free.
How to get started
- On your central WordPress site, go to Plugins → Add New, search “Siteward”, then Install and Activate. (Or get it from wordpress.org/plugins/siteward.)
- Install the free Siteward Child companion plugin on each site you want to manage. It is awaiting its own WordPress.org approval, so for now you can download it here.
- Paste each site’s connection key into Add Site, and your fleet appears on the dashboard.
Full setup steps are in the documentation, and you can see everything Siteward does on the features page.
This is just the start
This is our first public release on WordPress.org, and we ship improvements every week. If you manage WordPress sites for a living, give Siteward a try and tell us what you would like to see next.