ManageWP is the tool we use to manage all the WordPress sites on our Care Plans.  The serivce provides us with backups, security scanning, reporting, up time monitoring and show us what sites require updates.  Via the dashboard we can run the updates and even login to every site.

The best thing about ManageWP is that it is free to use!  There are some limitations, backups only run once a month, the reports can only be run manually along with the security scans.

For more information visit their website: https://managewp.com

We install iThemes Security Pro on all our WordPress websites.  The plugin is configured to ensure the site is safe and protected against brute force attacks, XML-RPC attacks and more.  Strong passwords are enforced for all administrator equivalent accounts and we check for compromised passwords.

iThemes offer an annual subscription allowing you to protect as many sites as you need.  For more information visit their website https://ithemes.com

• WP-Rocket is our preferred caching plugin.  It is a fantastic plugin and from the moment it is activated on a site you can see the performance increase.  When the additional features are correctly configured there are not many other plugins that can provide the same performance improvement. Coupled with imagify to compress and optimise images sites load quicker and images are optimised without loosing any of the quality.

WP-Rocket is a premium plugin, they offer an annual subsciption with unlimited sites, more info on their website https://wp-rocket.me.  Imagify is a free plugin but you will need a subscription if you have a lot of images to optimise and you want to off-load the optimisation to their website, check it out, https://imagify.io.

Although ManageWP provides up-time monitoring it does not provide us with the additional monitoring that we use.  Our monitoring checks for the speed of the pages being checked, the size of the page and allows us to monitor the domain name expiration, the DNS records and, when we manage servers the resource utilisation.

The guys over at Status Cake are always on hand to help if you have any issues, https://statuspage.com

We use, what we think are the best of breed services and applications to help run RocketWP.  Other tools we use include:

• Slack – we get all our alerts into our Slack workspace, it’s also how our clients ask for support.
• Slaask – more than just online chat for our webiste, you can also book meetings and check out news. 
• ToDoist – we would be lost with out Todoist.  We use it to ensure that every task we carry out is carried out in the same way every time.
• 1Password – looking after lots of sites requires lots of passwords, every password is stored in 1Password to ensure we always have the right one.
• Teamwork Desk – this is our help desk, where all our clients queries are managed.