Managing a website is no easy feat, especially when you manage multiple WordPress sites or deal with complex setups. It can involve things like managing a network of websites, securing your site, optimizing performance, or managing large amounts of content. In all these cases, having the right tools can make all the difference.
There are plenty of WordPress management tools out there. And we’ve set out to collect a variety of different ones in various categories. These are suitable for everything from small businesses to large organizations. So you should be able to find something useful.
Table of contents
The benefits of WordPress management tools
When you’re managing a large WordPress site or a network of multiple sites, the right WordPress management tools are essential.
WordPress is a solid platform. But its management tools can be a little lacking. Without the right plugin, that is. Keeping your site secure, efficient, and running smoothly may require third-party tools and plugins. These will ease your workload and offer numerous other advantages.
- Automation and efficiency – Managing a WordPress site involves juggling various tasks. Things like updates, backups, and security scans come to mind. With the right tools, you can automate these repetitive tasks. This frees up your time to focus on growing your business.
- Enhanced security – Protect your site from bad actors with WordPress management tools that monitor activity. They should also enforce strong authentication methods and alert you to suspicious changes. Dedicated security plugins can also identify and purge malware.
- Centralized management – Manage multiple WordPress sites from a single dashboard. Update and change settings across all your sites with just a few clicks.
- Improved performance, less downtime – Optimize your site’s speed and performance. And prevent extended downtime with tools that keep an eye on your website.
- Better user experience – A better-managed site leads directly to improved user experience. Managing content and performance ensures your visitors have a seamless experience. And improving SEO is good for UX while also drawing in organic traffic.
With that said, you can see how the right management tool can make your life a lot easier. Now, let’s get into the various types of WordPress management tools.
Multi-site management tools
Running a single WordPress site can be challenging enough. But throw an entire network into the mix and it becomes far more complex.
This is where WordPress multi-site management tools can be super helpful. They offer a centralized way to update and maintain all your WordPress sites. Instead of having to log into each one individually, just do it all from a single dashboard.
You can also monitor all your sites from this interface. Keep an eye on things like site speed, downtime, logged-in users, and so on. If you need a more efficient way to manage a WordPress network, keep reading. Here are some of the best tools to manage multiple WordPress sites.
1: MainWP
MainWP is a self-hosted dashboard designed. It’s designed to help you manage multiple WordPress sites. It’s popular with agencies that have a lot of websites to handle. And it comes with the ability to update all your sites from one dashboard. You can also track them with analytics, manage their plugins and themes, and monitor uptime.
It’s also very developer-focused, with its own actions, filters, and API for you to work with. MainWP also has its own extensions you can use to add functionality.
Price: Free, with premium extensions starting at $199/year.
2: ManageWP
ManageWP is all about automation. Automate updates, backups, and analytics for an unlimited number of websites. All this while collaborating with your team or your clients. It comes with a bunch of extra features, too. Things like security, code snippets, a template builder, and more in this all-in-one plugin. This makes it a strong choice for managing multiple WordPress sites from one dashboard.
Price: Free, with premium upgrades (pricing varies per addon).
3: InfiniteWP
InfiniteWP is made for agencies, developers, and freelancers managing multiple WordPress websites. It helps you monitor all your sites and use bulk operations to save time. Backup your site, do updates, scan for malware, and monitor uptime without ever leaving the dashboard.
Price: Free, with premium plans starting at $147/year.
4: WP Umbrella
If you’re looking for a simple multi-site management and maintenance tool that’s just as effective as less lightweight options, WP Umbrella is a good choice. It includes things like monitoring, update management, and backup/restore. All from a single dashboard. Pricing is also very affordable for this WordPress management tool. It just depends on how many sites you have to manage.
Price: Free, with premium plans starting at $24/year.
User management tools
If you’re running a large website, you potentially have tens of thousands of users. Think eCommerce shops, forums, and other sites that let everyone create a user account. It’s important that each user is given the appropriate level of permissions for their role. But staying on top of that can be overwhelming.
User management tools give you a way to monitor your users’ activity and change their permissions. Plus, you can change what parts of the dashboard they have access to. That way, you reduce the risk of accidental changes or security breaches. And with user logging, you can track any unwanted activity back to the source.
5: WP Activity Log
Successful user management requires extensive logging. What if someone makes an unwanted change like editing a setting, changing an article, or deleting something? It’s important to trace this back to the user who did it, whether it was intentional, accidental, or due to their account being breached.
It tracks plugin activities, too, which means you’ll always have a clear idea of the changes plugins are making to your site as well. And it can help you comply with important legislation regarding data storage.
WP Activity Log keeps a comprehensive log of everything that happens on your site and who’s responsible for it. Set up alerts for destructive or notable actions, manage user sessions in real time, and generate reports in a specified period to catch anything you missed.
The plugin is extremely customizable, and everything can be tailored to your unique setup.
Price: Free, with premium plans starting at $139/year.
6: User Role Editor
WordPress comes with several roles (like Administrator, Editor, etc.) built into the platform and the ability to create your own, but have you ever wanted to modify exactly what each role has access to? This plugin lets you do just that so you can fine-tune what your users can do on your site.
Price: Free, with premium plans starting at $29/year or $87 lifetime.
7: WP 2FA
You don’t need to only worry about your own account getting hacked. As long as you have other users on your site with advanced permissions, like administrators and editors, their accounts are a risk to your website too.
2FA locks down all user accounts by requiring them to add an extra authentication method to their accounts. Even if their passwords are compromised, bad actors won’t be able to slip past the second layer of security. Plus, WP 2FA works with most 2FA apps, so you don’t need to switch to a new one.
Price: Free, with premium plans starting at $79/year.
8: Adminimize
Adminimize is a simple plugin, but it can be very useful. It can hide unnecessary menu items from certain user roles – for example, if you want to simplify things for a client or only give your editors access to posts rather than pages.
Price: Free.
9: MemberPress
Restrict and paywall content, sell online courses, and build a community. MemberPress is the most popular membership plugin for WordPress and is a good choice if you want to monetize your content. If you just want to restrict content and edit user roles, try MemberPress’ free plugin, Members.
Price: Premium plans starting at $179.50/year.
Security management tools
A hacked website can be devastating for your business. The larger your business, the more you stand to lose, and the more downtime costs you as you work to repair your site. It’s better to be proactive and prevent bad actors from breaching your site in the first place.
WordPress management tools can help lock down your website, detect and purge malware, monitor suspicious activity, and set up firewalls to filter traffic. This is a must-have for any WordPress website, especially if you don’t want to deal with data breaches – and who does?
10: Melapress Login Security
By default, WordPress’ login security features are pretty lackluster. There’s no way to set a password policy, so users can create super simple passwords that are easily cracked. It also has no way to limit login attempts or hide the login URL, resulting in sites getting hit with a barrage of brute-force attempts.
Melapress Login Security changes this. Lock down your login page, set strong password policies, restrict user login times, and keep unwanted visitors out.
Price: Free, with premium plans starting at $29/year.
11: Wordfence Security
If you need an all-around security plugin with firewall and malware scanning, Wordfence has everything you need. Wordfence is a major contributor to WordPress security, with their Vulnerability Database and consistent threat research, so you can trust them to deliver a secure plugin.
Price: Free, with premium plans starting at $119/year.
12: Sucuri Security
Sucuri is a security platform for all websites, not just WordPress, but they do have a free WordPress plugin available. The plugin will help you clean a malware-infected site, monitor for unusual activity, and harden your website.
The only thing the plugin is missing is a firewall; you’ll need to purchase a subscription to Sucuri’s Website Firewall for that. Everything else in the plugin is free.
Price: Free, with basic firewall starting at $120/year.
Performance management tools
Who doesn’t want a well-performing website? How quickly your website loads and how fluidly it performs directly correlates with how many people choose to stick around and explore. If your site takes forever to load, people will click back before it’s even finished.
Speed and reliability are everything, and WordPress management tools can speed up your site by caching it, optimizing images, identifying bottlenecks slowing down your site, and keeping track of downtime and server resources.
13: W3 Total Cache
A performance optimization plugin offers a convenient way to speed up your site, and W3 Total Cache is a popular choice due to being free. It can improve your performance by 10x and save up to 80% of your bandwidth, so your page loads faster and that means a better user experience for visitors. And that also means you won’t need to spend as much time on on-site maintenance tasks.
Price: Free, with premium plans starting at $99/year.
14: WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a premium, all-in-one WordPress performance plugin designed to boost your page speed. Setup is simple and most performance boosts work out of the box, and you can dive deeper into the settings to tailor the features to your environment.
Price: Premium plans starting at $59/year.
15: Perfmatters
Perfmatters is a lightweight plugin with an uncluttered interface that makes it easy to reduce HTTP requests and perform script management tasks without having to manually dive into code. Most options are just a toggle you can turn on or off, including database optimization.
Price: Premium plans starting at $59/year.
16: Autoptimize
Autoptimize is a popular optimization plugin due to being free and really simple to use. Minify and cache scripts, inline and defer CSS, and lazy load images with one simple plugin. The free version does not include page caching, but you can either upgrade to premium or use this alongside a caching plugin.
Price: Free, with premium plans starting at $66/year.
17: Pingdom
Pingdom is a popular tool for monitoring website performance and uptime, designed to help you monitor UX and give users a better experience on your site. Real-time monitoring and reports can help you find what’s negatively affecting UX and fix it.
Pingdom is used all over the web, not just on WordPress, but they have a plugin that makes it easy to add real-time monitoring to your site.
Price: Premium plans starting at $120/year.
18: Cloudflare
Cloudflare is the go-to platform for those who want to speed up their website with a CDN or install a web application firewall to protect against DDoS and malware attacks. It even offers free SSL certificates.
Like Pingdom, Cloudflare is used all across the web, but they have a specialized WordPress plugin. Just one click and your site loads faster and is better protected from threats.
Price: Free, with premium plans starting at $300/year.
Content management and SEO tools
A steady stream of high-quality, SEO-optimized content is necessary to attract organic traffic and retain that hard-won audience. Content management tools can help you optimize your pages and posts and streamline content creation.
Besides helping you more efficiently create better content, these WordPress management tools also help increase the visibility of that content and bring it to a wider, even worldwide audience.
19: All in One SEO
Managing SEO on a large site isn’t easy, but plugins like AIOSEO can help. You can optimize on-page SEO for all your pages and posts, create an XML sitemap, connect to Google Search Console, and even automate internal linking.
AIOSEO also leverages AI to help you generate meta titles and descriptions, along with finding appropriate internal links for each article. Some features, like automatic internal linking and WooCommerce SEO, are only available in the premium version of the plugin.
Price: Free, with premium plans starting at $50/year.
20: Rank Math
Rank Math is a popular SEO plugin with user-friendly features and a suite of tools designed for optimizing your site’s SEO directly from within the WordPress dashboard. It includes features like advanced content analysis, automated image SEO, and a built-in schema generator. The plugin also supports XML sitemaps, internal link suggestions, and local SEO optimization.
Price: Free, with premium plans starting at $59/year.
21: Edit Flow
WordPress has some basic collaboration features, but most editorial teams must turn to outside platforms like Google Workspace to get things done.
Edit Flow aims to bring these collaboration features into WordPress, including a calendar, threaded editorial comments, user groups, and notifications. This plugin can completely upgrade your content creation process, and it’s totally free.
Price: Free.
22: SchedulePress
SchedulePress is the all-in-one content marketing tool for WordPress. Its primary feature is the ability to schedule your posts for various social media websites. It also has an editorial calendar, social share templates, and drag-and-drop organization.
In the Pro version of the plugin, you can create rules for automatically posting and scheduling content. You can also schedule updates to already-published posts. If you feel overwhelmed dealing with social media, a plugin like this can help.
Price: Free, with premium plans starting at $39/year or $319 lifetime.
23: WP Project Manager
Bring project management tools to your WordPress dashboard with this plugin. Add to-do lists and tasks assigned to certain users, set milestones, send messages, share files, and get notifications.
The premium version adds more features, like pinboards, Gantt charts, time tracking, and invoicing.
Price: Free, with premium plans starting at $79/year.
24: Advanced Custom Fields
ACF is a deceptively simple plugin. It allows you to add custom fields anywhere on your website – posts, pages, users, taxonomy, and so on. These custom fields basically let you add tiny bits of information to WordPress content, like price, start time, URL, files, etc.
Think of how WordPress posts contain data like the author, post date, and so on. ACF lets you make your own. It’s much more powerful than it sounds like and adds an extra layer to your content management.
Price: Free, with premium plans starting at $49/year.
Analytics and reporting tools
A key part of successfully managing a WordPress site or network is having the analytics and monitoring tools in place to know how it’s performing.
These WordPress management tools provide insights into your audience’s interests, content performance, and user behavior, identifying areas that need improvement and letting you know where you’re excelling. You can also track the success of your marketing campaigns and make adjustments as necessary.
Your business decisions should be driven by data, and these tools will give you the information you need to push your business toward success.
25: MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights aims to make connecting WordPress to Google Analytics seamless. Besides hooking your site into GA, MonsterInsights also adds a custom dashboard that lets you see your most important insights. There are over a dozen reports on various analytics so you never have to leave WordPress.
Price: Free, with premium plans starting at $49/year.
26: WP Statistics
If you’re not fond of Google Analytics and need an alternative, WP Statistics is a good choice. These analytics are GDPR-compliant, don’t use cookies, and no personally identifiable information is collected. That means you don’t need to worry about GDPR notices the way you may with other analytics plugins.
Besides that, the plugin has everything you’d expect: a centralized dashboard, performance tracking, and reporting.
Price: Free, with premium add-ons.
27: GA Google Analytics
If other Google Analytics plugins are too bloated and you just need something simple, GA Google Analytics does the job. There’s no dashboard, but what it does do is easily connect your site to Google Analytics and also give you access to advanced settings so you can tailor how it works.
With the Pro version, you can customize tracking further, such as disabling tracking for logged-in users or on certain pages.
Price: Free, with premium plans starting at $20/year, or $40 lifetime.
28: Hotjar
Hotjar is an analytics tracking service known specifically for its heatmaps, which light up the parts of the page people click on so you can see what’s getting attention. Its recordings feature also shows you exactly what users do, and you can set up surveys and feedback requests so you can further improve your site.
Hotjar works with any website, but they’ve created a WordPress integration so you can easily see the heatmaps and use the other features right from your dashboard.
Price: Free, with premium plans starting at $468/year.
Other management tools
Beyond the core areas of security, performance, and content, there are some small niches that a few extra management plugins can fill. These don’t quite fit into the categories above, but they still make a solid addition to any site in need of stronger management tools.
These tools improve your workflow, automate some management tasks or make them easier, and offer a little more flexibility than WordPress gives you out of the box. Many of these are also specifically tailored towards developers or advanced users.
29: Easy Updates Manager
If you have a lot of plugins, or a lot of websites, managing the updates for them can take a lot of time. Easy Updates Manager works with both single and multisite installs to help you keep everything up to date.
You can customize exactly what plugins and themes get updated, and the premium version lets you schedule updates, get alerts and logs, and integrate with third-party services.
Price: Free, with premium plans starting at $36.25/year.
30: WP-CLI
WP-CLI is not a plugin but a command line interface for WordPress. Things like accessing the database, installing plugins, updating WordPress, and performing operations on the network can all be done from your server’s command line. You can also automate many of these processes.
For developers, this is a very useful tool for managing a website remotely since you don’t need to log in to WordPress and can just type in a quick command.
Price: Free.
31: WP Reset
WP Reset is a very useful developer tool for debugging broken websites and developing custom plugins/themes. It can reset your site to its initial state with just one click, and it also has a very handy snapshot feature to let you restore your settings when you’re finished debugging. There are also partial reset tools like deleting all plugins or custom database tables.
Price: Free, with premium plans starting at $199/year.
32: WP Rollback
Sometimes updates go wrong, especially on large sites and networks dealing with several dozen plugins. WP Rollback makes it easy to just go back to the previous version of a plugin or theme. It’s a small management tool but one that can come in handy if you run into a problem.
Price: Free.
33: WP Crontrol
Behind the scenes, WordPress uses cron events to schedule tasks on your website. But sometimes, you need to take control of these events, deleting them, pausing them, or adding new ones. WP Control is a simple plugin that lets you do just that. It also alerts you to orphaned cron events and ones that have missed their schedule.
Price: Free.
34: Query Monitor
For WordPress developers, Query Monitor is the best tool panel for debugging WordPress. It’s a great technical management tool for tracking down issues that are slowing down your site or causing errors. It will also specifically point out code or scripts that may need to be changed, and warn you about PHP errors.
Price: Free.
Wrapping up
Effectively managing a WordPress site or network requires more than just the basic tools that come with the platform. There are many excellent third-party platforms and plugins that can make WordPress management much easier.
There are plenty of tools to pick from, covering everything from security to analytics to user management. So hopefully the selection offered here will help you settle on a set of tools that meets your needs. With the right combo, you can expect better site functionality, easier site management, and a better experience for your site’s visitors. It’s a win all around.
