Once you move beyond one or two WordPress-powered web sites, the issue of keep­ing them up to date becomes — well, it becomes an issue. Sure, it only takes 5–10 min­utes per week to do a quick data­base backup and apply the lat­est core and plu­gin updates — but 5–10 min­utes each on 5 sites is 25–50 min­utes and that’s already start­ing to become a pain in the der­rière and time bet­ter spent elsewhere.

I am in the process of get­ting all of my sites re-hosted, updated and stand­ing tall in nice neat orderly lines. I need to find a smarter, less time-consuming way to man­age them all into the future. There’s two approaches I have been considering.

Option One: Word­Press Multi-Site

As of Word­Press ver­sion 3, the multi-site abil­ity is baked into the stan­dard core install (pre­vi­ously the multi-site ver­sion was a sep­a­rate down­load). It takes only a few set­ting changes to turn one install into a net­work of Word­Press sites. Each site shares the same core and plu­g­ins so updates can be done from one location.

At Clever Starfish, I’ve used this suc­cess­fully for a client with a net­work of sites (in this case it was four related tourism prop­er­ties) run­ning on the same server. The multi-site install made it easy for the client’s admin users to man­age the var­i­ous sites in one place, while allow­ing each site to have it’s own indi­vid­ual setup and the abil­ity to restrict con­tent edi­tors to one site only if required.

Option Two: Third Party Man­age­ment dash­board: ManageWP

Man­ageWP is a new ser­vice (still in beta at the present time) which, by means of a plu­gin on each site, allows you to man­age mul­ti­ple sites from one dash­board. I’m not sure if there are other sim­i­lar ser­vices but Man­ageWP is the only one I’ve come across.

Man­ageWP allows you to do core and plu­gin upgrades, view aggre­gated or indi­vid­ual stats, and even do things like bulk post­ing right from a sin­gle inter­face  — and

Which to choose?

At first, Word­Press in a multi-site con­fig­u­ra­tion seems like the free, easy and obvi­ous way to go. The more I think about it how­ever, the more attrac­tive the Man­ageWP option gets.

The weak­ness with the multi-site approach is that each site needs to be on the same server, and they will all run the same ver­sion of Word­Press and plu­g­ins. For now, all my sites will be on the same server — but I can’t guar­an­tee that will always be the case. Fur­ther­more, there have been times in the past where due to a par­tic­u­lar bug or fea­ture I’ve kept using an old ver­sion of a plu­gin on a par­tic­u­lar site. While that sce­nario won’t apply to any of my sites in the imme­di­ate future, there is the pos­si­bil­ity that this could crop up again in future.

Up until a few days ago — that is, when I was writ­ing the draft ver­sion of this arti­cle — no pric­ing infor­ma­tion was avail­able for Man­ageWP. Being beta, I have been test­ing a free account, but the lack of con­crete plan details made me reluc­tant to com­mit to the ser­vice. I’m happy to pay for ser­vices that I think are pro­vid­ing value, but I didn’t want to set my heart on one option only to find that it was too expen­sive to be viable.

For­tu­nately, the pric­ing page has just been updated, and Man­ageWP have said the sys­tem will be free for up to five sites, $5 per month for 10 sites and $50 per month for 500 sites, with more tiers in between. That suits me fine — I will prob­a­bly start off with five sites and if I do end up with a few extra, $5 per month seems cheap con­sid­er­ing the time I would save and the flex­i­bil­ity that it will give me.

So for now, Man­ageWP will be the way I will go for man­ag­ing mul­ti­ple Word­Press installs. No doubt I’ll be post­ing about it again, for bet­ter or for worse!