WPRemote: Easily Monitor, Manage WordPress Sites

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February 15, 2013

12 Comments

It seems there are more and more players in the WordPress management space than I had originally thought – for example, have you seen WPRemote?

It’s another web service that will help you manage multiple WordPress-powered sites and/or blogs for you, keeping you posted on the updates needed for all of them in a single dashboard.

It’s very much like ManageWP that also does similar things. I quickly took WPRemote for a spin, got signed up quickly, and was instantly liking the backend UI and general look and feel – it was clean and approachable.

But that’s where I started to have some major issues.

It prompted me to start adding some sites and that’s what I started doing, except I couldn’t. At all.

But, I kept getting denied:

I tried a few more different blogs and got the same rejection notice. At that point I abandoned the service, but hope that it can be resolved (whatever the issue is) so that I could fully test it out.

Has anyone else had any better luck with WPRemote than I did? Apparently it’s mobile-ready too, which looks very nice:

Let me know if you have any better luck. At this point if you run into the same issue and you need something like this service then you should probably move toward ManageWP instead.

***UPDATE***

Well, it looks like we helped find a bug:

@wpdailyco Fair enough, bug was only introduced yesterday 🙁 bad timing for sure. We’ve just fixed, pushing now.

— WP Remote (@wpremote) February 15, 2013

So, we hopped back in after we were notified that it was fixed.

Voila! Check it out:

Got the API key and then put it into my blog:

Headed back to see if it took:

It noticed immediately and let me know that I need to update Jetpack. Whoops! I tried hitting the “Update” button on the right:

It didn’t work – but that’s because my permissions are a bit different on that site. A slight fix and I tried again.

Done and done:

I tried a few more things and the service worked as intended.

With the incredible price of “free” and the sheer simplicity of the service, this is something that could really be of use to a lot of people. The responsiveness from the team was also very handy:

@wpdailyco Just to let you know, we’ve fixed that bug, sorry you happened to sign up in the time it bug was live, could you try again?

— WP Remote (@wpremote) February 15, 2013

Looks like a good group of guys. I’m looking forward to doing more testing!

There are 12 comments

February 15, 2013 #

Japh Thomson

It’s interesting to see more and more of these pop up. I’ve used InfiniteWP and ManageWP myself. Will have to give WPRemote a trial run too 🙂
February 15, 2013 #

Louis Northmore

WPRemote rocks. It’s easily the best out there. Shame you encountered a bug, We’ve had no issues at all.
February 15, 2013 #

Kevin

I’ve used WPRemote and ManageWP, both have been awesome when I needed to administer multiple sites at the same time…I’d probably say I like ManageWP more though.
February 15, 2013 #

Mike Morris

I’ve been using WP Remote for over a year now, and I love it. I keep 15 different sites updated with it. I’m hoping they re-introduce their online backup feature. That was one of the best features they offered.
- February 15, 2013 #
  
  Tom Willmot
  
  We’re actually working on automatic backups right now, it will be a paid service.
February 15, 2013 #

Christian D.

I tried using WPRemote, at the urging of one of our designers, but we couldn’t get it to do updates. I’m guessing there’s a permission somewhere and I didn’t look through the FAQ. I did find InfiniteWP and set it up on an internal server and I was off and going…no extra permissions needed. Wonder what the difference is?
- February 15, 2013 #
  
  Tom Willmot
  
  Hey Chris,
  
  Sorry to hear WP Remote didn’t work out for you, have you tried it recently, we’re regularly improving things.
  - February 15, 2013 #
    
    Christian D.
    
    Tom – I have not tried it lately (this would have been late December or early January). I’ve got a couple of test sites that I can put it onto and give it a shot. I’ll let you know how things work.
    
    Christian
    - February 15, 2013 #
      
      Tom Willmot
      
      Awesome, thanks for giving it another go, if you have issues feel free to ping me directly at [email protected]
      - February 19, 2013 #
        
        Christian D.
        
        Tom – Got a bit delayed in testing this, but it looks like the issues we previously experienced are gone. I’m still doing a bit of testing, but if this is going to work, I’ll be switching our sites over to your service as I don’t need another site to maintain!
        
        Thanks,
        
        Christian
February 15, 2013 #

Bradley Allen

I have had the same experience as Louis. WP Remote rocks.

I’ve been using WP Remote since Human Made gifted it to the community, and I find this blog post disappointing. WP Remote has provided a valuable service for free, and has been available for over a year. Perhaps it would be better to wait a day next time or contact the developers before publishing about “some major issues”.

WP Remote has 31 Sites monitored for me. I really appreciate that we can now organize our sites into groups, such as ‘Live Sites’ and ‘Staging Sites’. We can also ‘Download a zip archive of your site’s files and database’, view a history of updates, and leave notes about each site.

Thanks John and WP Daily & Tom and WP Remote!
February 19, 2013 #

Qa'id

I’d definitely cosign on kudos for WP Remote.

I use the service to manage 4 project websites while I also use ManageWP.com to handle the maintenance of a number of web projects for client work.

Updating plugins and WP versions is pretty much effortless with the WP Remote tool. One of my sites never successfully functions with WP Remote, but I think it’s because I chmod’ed my directories in such a tight way that the permission levels are too aggressive to allow the remote actions. For that one site, I don’t mind just using the WP Remote link to the site’s admin login to just jump in there and use the baked in WP updating/upgrading.

There was one tricky spot because I also use Wordfense as a layer of security: I needed to whitelist WPRemote’s IP in the Wordfense settings and it wasn’t that easy to find the WP Remote IP’s in their help documentation. Eventually I found the info and didn’t experience any Wordfense related problems thereafter.

Overall, I’d say for that for a free service, WP Remote is a great offering that takes a lot of tedium out of managing multiple WordPress installs.

How do you stay on top of your WordPress game?