MainWP Review: Can It Reliably Manage All Your WP Sites?

Two out of five websites in the world use WordPress. Further, WP is used by more than 65% of all websites using a CMS. WP has been the fastest-growing CMS for the past 12 years. These are just some facts that drive home the point of how prevalent WordPress is as content management and website platform.

It comes as no surprise that many individuals and businesses own and operate several blogs or sites within WP. But managing several WP websites and handling all maintenance tasks like updates and security, among others, is a big challenge to site owners and administrators. Fortunately, there is a free WP plugin that can help you in this area. Welcome to MainWP.

Check if you can get any special discount with our MainWP coupon code article.

What is Main WP?

MainWP is a free WordPress management tool that allows you to easily manage multiple WP sites from one central location. It is targeted at freelancers, developers, agencies, and site owners who manage several websites on WordPress. Over 10,000 such users rely on MainWP to manage more than 600,000 sites on WordPress.

The core function of site management can’t be underestimated. If left unmanaged and unsecured, WP sites are prone to password attacks and other vulnerabilities despite safeguards built into the WP system. But imagine the huge task of managing and updating each site if, say, you have a dozen websites on WordPress.

MainWP provides one dashboard as a central hub where you can update everything across all your WP sites as well as control virtually all your day-to-day WP maintenance tasks without wasting your time or costing you a dime. Time will be well spent managing your business than running your websites because the plugin will do all the heavy lifting.

Aside from the aforementioned, you can extend the dashboard functionality of MainWP through affordable plans that allow you access to powerful extensions. These give you features and tools for SEO, backups, marketing, security, analytics, site monitoring, and many more.

Key Features

• 1-Click Plugins & Themes Management
• Built-in Themes
• Client Management
• Content Management
• Premium Extensions
• Sites Management
• Updates Management
• Users Management

Pricing

• Monthly – $29 (billed monthly)
• Yearly – $17/month (billed yearly at $199/year)
• Lifetime – $499 one time (can be paid in 2 installments)

Highlights

* All images in this article are from mainwp.com

Connect unlimited sites

With MainWP you connect an unlimited number of sites for free. You read that right; it doesn’t matter if you have 2 or 200 WordPress sites because the plugin can manage them all easily. The main dashboard can show you an overview of your every site, and you can add as many sites as you want. From there you can do all your maintenance work for all your sites including scan security, sync updates, manage posts, etc.

Several premium features

MainWP comes with numerous premium features. Some of these are for user management, content management, updating, plugin management, activity log, backups, and security. You can do anything and control everything from the MainWP dashboard. The core plugin functionality is free; what you pay for are the extensions – all 40 of them including any new extensions that will be introduced later on, giving you a future-proof platform.

Uptime monitoring

The plugin comes with advanced uptime monitoring to guarantee that your site won’t suffer any downtime. It checks that your websites are live every five minutes. If a website is found to be down, it will be checked again in three minutes. An event log will show when your site was down and provide you with a record of the event. This is especially useful for agencies that need to furnish clients with reports.

Free, open-source, and self-hosted

MainWP is completely free and fully open source, meaning it allows for full customization, has more stability and security, far fewer bugs and fixes, and no upgrade push. Best of all, you don’t need capital outlay to immediately enjoy the program. Another thing, MainWP is private and self-hosted. In other words, aside from installing it in a WP site or subdomain, you can install the dashboard locally on your computer through your favorite stacks such as WAMP or LAMP.

Low Points

Complex set up

Setting up the MainWP and configuring it can’t be put on auto-pilot which makes it time-consuming. Also, you have to manually add all your websites and download each extension you need from the MainWP store. Then you have to install them to your dashboard and configure each for your every site. Prepare to be patient.

Page builder compatibility

While it’s impressive that you can edit your content and manage your posts within your MainWP dashboard, you can only do this through the standard WordPress text editor. There aren’t any other post editor extensions or MainWP features compatible with your page builder and theme.

Top Alternatives

If you think MainWP does not address your needs or seems lacking in certain capabilities, there are other WP management plugins and tools that you can try. Among these are the following:

• ManageWP – WP website management dashboard; offers a free version and premium add-ons.
• WP Remote – Manage multiple WP sites; comes with 3 paid plans starting at $29/month.
• WP Umbrella – Easy multiple WP sites manager for $1.99/site per month.
• wpCentral – Free, open-source program that provides a single panel for managing multiple WP sites.
• iControlWP – WP site management tool; offers a free trial and 4 plans starting at $15/month.

Back to MainWP – can it help you reliably manage all your WordPress websites?

The Verdict

We do think it can be a great advantage to have MainWP as your WP site manager. It is a sturdy tool that counts thousands of users who depend on it. MainWP has consistently been in the top favorites of WP management tools for good reasons – it won’t cost you and, after some initial setup effort, can flawlessly go about performing maintenance and monitoring of all your WP websites, remotely and securely. No need to wait – install MainWP for free.