As a blogger I realized that ManageWP is an essential tool for me. When I started working at ManageWP a few years back I added my sites with the intention of familiarizing myself with the dashboard, and have never left since. I have a few blogs that I run on the side, and my life has become so much easier since taking advantage of all of the tools. It’s also occurred to me that at ManageWP we focus on WordPress freelancers and agencies, and have never reached out to bloggers who need us. So, here it is, bloggers I am going to tell you why you need ManageWP to help you run your blog.

Most of my time goes into thinking about what to write. Are my ideas creative enough, are they too abstract? As good as I am at organizing my thoughts, structuring my articles and publishing, I am terribly irresponsible when it comes to looking after my blog. I forget to pay my domain, I dread going into my WP admin panel and clearing out comments, looking for updates and doing a backup. In fact I find excuses why I can’t or don’t have time to polish my blog under the hood.

Here’s the thing, being the creative type still means you need to pay attention to the tech, and with ManageWP you can get away with spending the least amount of time doing that.

The blog basics

You need to have the most updated WordPress core running, and updated themes and plugins, primarily in order to keep your website secure, but also to make sure you are running the latest version of all your installs. With ManageWP I log into one place, and straight away on my overview screen I see what needs updating. I only install plugins I know are safe, so I am happy to just bulk update on all websites with one click. That means updates on 4 websites done in under one minute.

Next on my list of need to have is a recent backup. Sites go down like flies, so you need to have a backup, otherwise all of that hard work and thousands of words gone. If I had to insist on spending money for one tool, this would be the one. Still on the same screen I glance at the backup situation, and my loyal dashboard tells me I have backups on 4 websites all done successfully. Time spent checking on backups 30 seconds. Setting up a backup and scheduling it daily will take you all together 5 minutes and cost you $2/mo per website.

Third blog basic is uptime. Has my blog had any downtime, and am I losing readers because they get to my page and see a 400 or 500 error. Having some blog downtime could mean sometimes nothing major, and your site is back up in moments, or you forgot to renew your domain (like me) and it’s just down. ManageWP on the overview screen gives me the overall uptime, and tells me if all of my websites are up and running. Time spent checking uptime 30 seconds. Uptime will cost you $1/mo per website.

All of your blog basics can be checked in under 2 minutes. That’s 2 minutes if you have one blog and still 2 minutes if you have 4 like me.

The cherry on top of the blog

Once all of you blog basics are handled, the rest can be seen as the icing on the cake. As a blogger one of the most important things to understand and track is how many people are reading your posts. There are many tools out there that will give you this information, but imagine having these tools in one place. In the ManageWP dashboard you can both track SEO rankings and Google Analytics.

The beauty of it all is logging in once and having access to all of the information you need. You can integrate Google Analytics with ManageWP and be able to monitor it on a per website basis, or if you want to know the overall success of your blogs you can have a look at that in the overview screen. Checking your GA takes you 30 seconds, and the integration around 5 minutes.

SEO Ranking is our own tool that will monitor your keywords and report on how you rank. You will be able to see how your ranking changes from week to week, and additionally you can see how you rate against your competitors. If you are blogging about fashion, you want to know who else is, and how you compare to them. That way you will know if you need to up your game. Monitoring SEO won’t take more than 30 seconds, and setting it up less than a minute. This tool does come with a price of $1/mo per website.

Under the hood of your blog

All on the same widget, called the Services Widget in your overview screen, you will be able to monitor your security and performance. Both of these tools come in a paid and free version. Let’s look at the free version. It’s manual Security and Performance Checks.

There are so many security breaches out there today, but if you are running the latest updates and have a recent backup, you have nothing to worry about. You can restore your site in minutes. However, you need to know if something is up. Our security scan will check that for you, is your website blacklisted, or if you have malware. Running a Security Check manually takes you around one minute, and if you splash out $1/mo per website all of that becomes automated and you spend no time at all.

Website performance. Reader happiness, and google ranking, which both drive growth for your blog are affected by website performance. If your site is slow people will leave, and worse yet they won’t find you on google. The Performance Check gives you insight into what is happening with your website and how it’s performing. Know your weakness. Having a performance report you will know if you need to work on speeding up your website. Like with the Security Check, the Performance Check can be run manually in around a minute, or automatically at a price of $1/mo per website.

How much time do you save?

With ManageWP performing tasks that are necessary to run a successful blog (uptime, backups and updates) will take you 2 minutes all together, add to that another 3 minutes for the extras (seo, google analytics, performance and security scans), and in 5 minutes you can be sure that you have done everything you need for your blog. That means you have 7h and 55 minutes of your workday left to write, and still have time to see your friends, exercise, relax or anything that takes your fancy. If you choose to automate everything, and pay for the SEO, Backups, Uptime, Performance and Security Checks that will cost you $6/mo per website. That’s $1 more than one Grande Pumpkin Spiced Latte from Starbucks, and 380 calories less.

ManageWP is a dashboard that helps save you time even with one website. For us bloggers it’s also our friendly technical support platform so that you no longer have to worry about the technical aspects of your blog. Want to add your websites for free, sign up here.