If you like using ManageWP, but want to know where it’s headed, you’ve come to the right place. Below, we’ve outlined where we started, where we are currently, and the direction in which ManageWP is moving to provide you with the best WordPress management tools available.

The history of ManageWP

ManageWP was founded way back in 2010 by Vladimir Prelovac. It was officially released in January 2012, and users were managing 100,000 websites through the platform within the month.

Over the years, WordPress evolved and ManageWP adapted right alongside it with the release of Orion in July 12, 2016. Not long after the Orion launch, our small Belgrade crew of 20 or so people was maintaining the platform and supporting 7,000 users with more than 300,000 websites.

On September 6, 2016, we joined forces with GoDaddy. This was an amazing milestone for us, and a testament to the dedication we put into making ManageWP the best and largest WordPress management platform in the world.

Despite some concerns after the acquisition, we successfully preserved our support level and the quality of ManageWP while continuing to invest in our product. We released numerous new features (Automated Security and Performance checks, Automation for Client Reports, Safe Updates with automatic restore, Automatic Updates, Drag and drop widgets, Bulk Add Websites, Multisite management, Envato integration, the Ticketing tool, Template Builder, Local Sync, and more) and kept improving our existing ones as well.

However, we would not be where we are today without you – our dedicated users – giving us both positive and constructive feedback and encouraging us to push forward. We truly believe that by working with you and listening to your needs we have been able to vastly improve ManageWP over the years.

ManageWP Today

Having learned from our prior experiences, we’re currently working to grow our platform and address key elements that may be areas of concern. Here’s the current state of ManageWP, and the projects our team has their hands on at the moment.

Scale

Our user base has grown significantly since the launch of Orion, reaching a figure that is 10 times larger than the one that represented our customers three years ago.

Our platform currently has more than 1.5 million sites under management, likely making us the largest platform for WordPress website management in the world. Over 900,000 of those sites are managed through the ManageWP Worker plugin and another 600,000+ through other GoDaddy products, platforms (such as Pro Sites) and services, which share the same backend for site management.

Our user base started to grow rapidly after the acquisition but for the most part, it had been a predictable, linear growth over the years. However, we had a huge jump in users in 2019 that has forced us to react quickly and make some unplanned changes.

Support

While our support team used to respond to most tickets within a few hours, that unfortunately is not currently the case. Since they’re addressed in chronological order, any spike in tickets usually means there’s a significant increase in response time until the queue is emptied.

Helping new users to become experts in WordPress, our platform, and customer communication while accurately and quickly resolving user issues within our first response (80 percent of tickets are resolved after our support team’s first reply) is a process that usually takes months.

Simply put, we could not scale up quickly enough to accommodate the sudden increase in users. Our response time began to steadily to go up with the near constant influx of users needing help and guidance.

What we’re doing about it
We are continuing to hire and train new people for our support team. We hope to have the situation resolved soon with twice as many people answering tickets than we had at the beginning of 2019.

Our support team is still available for you and goes through each and every ticket. It just might take them a while longer to respond until we have the team at full strength.

We want to thank you for your patience and let you know that we’re doing everything we can to get back on track as soon as possible.

Platform

Following some major issues with service providers (AWS and Cloudflare) back in June that severely impacted the normal operations of our service, our development team started several long-term projects. We are now fully restructuring our architecture. After its distribution, no single service, tool, or third-party provider should impact the entire system.

What we’re doing about it
Several short-term projects were completed within the first couple of weeks of July. We have already successfully distributed most of the new services which make the system much more resistant to failure.

Until our long-term projects are completed, we have stopped the development of new features and are focusing on improving the platform. You may experience an occasional glitch as we are trying to upgrade and fully stabilize the platform. We understand this may cause some inconvenience. Nevertheless, this is something that needs to be done in order to stabilize the system for further scaling, and to make sure we do not encounter similar issues in the future.

We also started to roll out our new, backup v2 beta version that’s been in the works for some time now. As with any new service or improvement, you can expect a few hiccups along the way until we iron out all the edge cases. However, this should impact only a very small portion of sites and in no way impact the data integrity.

We are very close to launching backup v2 solution globally. It should be significantly faster than the current version, as well as much more scalable and reliable.

Extreme attention is dedicated to making sure that upgrades do not impact the system or data security, making the work progress slowly. This also enables us to ensure that after each step, user data and sites are always kept safe.

Communication & Transparency

Here at ManageWP, we try to be as transparent and open as possible, and have always strived to stick to those principles.

That’s how our managewp.com/status page came into existence some time ago. Besides wanting to share the whole story behind any persisting problems, we wanted a resource where our users could access current status updates in case of any global issue. It also provides full transparency by keeping and displaying the history of any such issues in the past.

Recent problems have also been a learning opportunity for us. We discovered that there are users who would appreciate more than just global status updates, and want to be notified more often of any issues, no matter how small or whether they directly affect them or not.

You spoke – we listened. That being said, we can’t just copy and paste solutions from other global tech giants, we can only build upon what we currently have – one step at a time. We are looking at several options that can help us enhance our communication methods and hope to have a solution soon.

We’re dedicated to continuous improvement. Each and every message sent through our ‘Send feedback’ form is read by several team leaders and our entire support team. We always appreciate constructive feedback with concrete suggestions. We want to thank everyone that shares their thoughts and opinions, with a special shout out to all our Early Access members.

The future of our platform

Once the platform upgrades are completed within a month or two, and our support team is back to full strength, we should have the situation well in hand.

No one can predict what the future holds, especially in this fast-paced age where even global tech giants are not immune to disruptions in the market. That said, ManageWP is here to stay.

There are no plans to shut the platform down, and we’re committed to supporting it as we always have. In fact, we plan to grow and continue investing in improving the platform. No matter what the future brings, you’ll always have the ability to easily manage your WordPress websites with a better product than what you see today.

We know that there will be challenges along the way, but also opportunities to continue building something great. Thank you to all that continue to help and support us along the way!