Managing and maintaining WordPress sites with a team

Managing lots of WordPress websites with your team can be a challenge. If you’re working in a company with a group of developers you might relate to the experience that websites are built by one or a few developers at a time but not the whole team. And, as you know websites are ever changing, the WordPress core and plugins need to be updated to receive the latest improvements, bug- and security fixes.

Chances are if you’re building websites on a professional level you’ve automated the update and deployment process, can rollback and perhaps you’re using Composer to manage dependencies. Great!

But still – updates need to be tested, change logs need to be read and depending on the level of complexity the colleague(s) which wrote the codebase are probably automatically in charge. How do you keep an eye on the status of websites and the division of tasks?

Using a system for managing WordPress websites within a team

There are WordPress plugins available which allow you to monitor websites and manage the administrative tasks, these will allow you keep track of available updates, maintainers and guard your websites so you can keep your clients happy.

Most of these however come packed with features you likely don’t need, assume you’ll be updating plugins via their interface or require you to synchronise data to their cloud. Call me suspicious but I personally prefer something lightweight and keep my data close, this is why I built something that fit our own needs.

The Sites Monitor for WordPress

My plugin is named Sites Monitor and is available on WordPress.org, you can read more about it at this website’s Sites Monitor plugin page.

But to give you the gist; the plugin can be used to track your websites updates, site health and so on. You can also assign maintainers sou you can leave people in charge and let your team know who is responsible for updating that specific site. It does this by synchronising the data to a WordPress you manage yourself so your data stays with you.

I hope you’ll find this useful as well.