If you are struggling with the remote management of the WordPress websites, then you are indeed missing out on something. If you have to manage multiple WordPress sites spending hours at updating themes and plugins, scheduling backups, running security scans, etc. then, ManageWP is an excellent solution for all that and more.
ManageWP offers you one single dashboard to manage any number of WordPress sites. Instead of logging into each site separately, you can manage all of your websites from a single screen. Yes, it’s a godsend, that’s true!
Since 2012, people have relied on ManageWP to keep an eye on multiple WordPress websites. Keeping your website up to date is crucial to modern day security.
WordPress powers more than a quarter of the world wide web, and whoever is associated with it, the laser focus has been to ensure that their growth model aligns with the open source nature. To help the next WP generation become aware of the website management, and to ease the process ManageWP has released a major new upgrade which is called ManageWP Orion.
In the next few minutes, you’ll learn about the features of Orion that are better than old ManageWP dashboard and how they have innovated this whole idea of easy website management. You can get started with it right away once you’re done reading. Why? Because Orion is free to use and easy to setup but it does have premium add-ons which are incredible. Let’s take a look.
ManageWP Orion
Orion, the new dashboard, is like ManageWP being completely reimagined. ManageWP team has worked quite a lot in gathering feedback and improving their product as well as their services. ManageWP was the pioneer solution for managing websites; I remember the time when the disrupt the market with this new idea and all of us — who manage multiple WP sites — joined the party. With time, things changed, we saw a good deal of new competitors across the community, from hosted to self-hosted solutions; some of which are still here while others weren’t able to cope up with the competition. Even more so, WordPress.com now offers a free site management solution via Jetpack.
With this kind of competition and changing technology, ManageWP team has managed to innovate the complete solution at hand. Everything from the dashboard, their product, the add-ons, the pricing model, and even their business model has changed.
ManageWP is free for an unlimited number of websites. All of them can finally be in one place. Not only this, but there are a ton of free features which I will discuss in this article. This is a game changer! The new dashboard is built with AngularJS, Symfony, NodeJS, and hosted at AWS. All of this helps Orion offer turbo speed and a responsive working environment for personal as well as clients’ use. Everything in the dashboard is revamped and fun to use.
For anyone managing multiple WordPress websites, Orion brings great relief irrespective of whether you’re a first time ManageWP user or an existing Classic dashboard user. The initial impact of the product is so compelling that it’s difficult to resist this new dashboard. Here is a screenshot from my demo Orion account. Let’s dive right in.
How Is Orion Better Than the Classic Dashboard?
Users of the Classic dashboard can choose to stick with the old version or shift to the new Orion dashboard. Migration to the new dashboard is pretty smooth. Let’s take a look at what’s new at ManageWP Orion as compared to the old dashboard.
The Infrastructure
Orion is an in-house custom built solution hosted at AWS (Amazon Web Services) Cloud. AWS Cloud based architecture ensures better security and complete scalability. This not only helps ManageWP offer a robust and redundant solution, but it also impacts the pricing structure. Since you only use the resources when you are using them, you only pay for the resources used. Confused? Let me put it this way; you can add and remove premium add-ons on a daily and per site basis. Which means the price you pay is calculated daily instead of monthly.
Performance
The performance parameters have been amped one step further with all the existing features of the Classic dashboard. Options like logging and client reports have been deeply incorporated with all the ManageWP tools. Not only this, but the reports are inherently beautiful, easily customizable, and professional. All these improvements mean better tracking and monitoring of data with happy clients. The entire product has become smarter; let’s say you have a server with 100 websites on it, which ultimately went down. You will receive one single SMS notification about this instead of 100.
Backup
Keeping regular backups has been one of the most noticeable features at ManageWP it also extends to ManageWP Orion only much better and improved. Earlier, a PHP based script was used which used your website server to backup the site and hence put a load on your sites. On the other hand, new cloud backups are incremental in nature and are performed off-site. That means, once your new site is all backed up with Orion, only new changes will be backed up instead of the complete site being backed up again and again. This has made Orion even more reliable as a cloud backup resource which offers unlimited storage capacity.
Dashboard Management
The main dashboard is the backbone of new ManageWP Orion. It is very well-structured, less cluttered and has a smooth workflow to it.. Instead of the widget based layout, you find more options that make your job visually quite easy. The click rates have decreased by 30% which means focused interface. The options for tags and clients help you automate the management and reporting process. Likewise, managing themes and plugins updates have become a lot easier with Orion. Less clutter means better user experience. Vulnerability Updates are completely free in Orion; this is a total game changer for your maintenance workflow as knowing that a website has a known vulnerability is hard to ignore.
Website Cloning
The cloud technology has raised the mark of Orion many folds. The cloning feature is one of the beneficiaries of this advancement. Previously, whenever a user cloned a particular site, that was done through a PHP script. With the cloud, however, the same process is done by the ManageWP Cloud; it goes like Website A ManageWP Cloud Website B. This approximately doubles the clone success rate which means controlled web management and much better success rate.
Pricing
The new strategy for Orion’s pricing plan is entirely different. The best thing I like about new pricing model is the concept of use first and pay later model. This is incredibly useful for B2B services where you pay for the services used by your clients only after your clients have paid you. The charging methodology is also changed, and now the users pay by per website and per resource usage. That means you pay for what you use, instead of old min-usage blocks model. Want a new feature for one day? Put it on and off whenever you want, while you pay the fraction of month’s price.
There is a lot more to the new ManageWP Orion, which I was not able to cover in one single article, but you’re more than welcomed to checkout their features page.
My thoughts about Orion
The sole contributors that can make ManageWP Orion a big hit are its loyal customers. Being an active member of the WordPress community here’s what I think about new ManageWP Orion.
Orion, in my opinion, is an incredible rewrite, and I only have good things to say about it. I have personally started shifting all my personal and my retention-based client’s websites to Orion. Clients are quite happy with the new changes, and so am I. The user experience is one of the key highlights of Orion, I love how easy, robust and quick it is to manage everything in there. I think this is where the ManageWP team has spent most of their time because building anything simple is hard!
This effortless multi-website management and so many premium features being given away by ManageWP Orion makes it stand out of the crowd. Huge props for this to Vladimir and his team at ManageWP. ManageWP Orion is incredibly powerful and it seems to have empowered the WordPress Administrators, which is a step in the right direction. All in all, I score it a 10/10 effort but a room for improvement always exist which we are waiting to witness with time. But here’s a suggestion; I love CLIs and with custom built dashboard, I am sure you folks have worked out on custom API endpoints, however raw, I’d love to have a ManageWP CLI which would be like having a WP-CLI on steroids.
Conclusion
ManageWP Orion is clearly on of the best website management solutions in the WP community. You can always make it better with your feedback which the team at ManageWP has also sought from its users. I’ve scrolled through a couple of user feedback and so far, the response is fantastic. Those who left ManageWP Classic due to some reason have also turned back and have highly recommended Orion. Try ManageWP Orion for free. I’m sure you’ll love it.
You can post your reviews here as well and share what you feel about ManageWP Orion. Finally, you can catch all of my articles on my profile page, and you can follow me or reach out at Twitter @mrahmadawais; to discuss this article. As usual, don’t hesitate to leave any questions or comments below, and I’ll aim to respond to each of them.
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Things You Need to Know About ManageWP Orion
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