Frequently asked questions
Answers to the questions we get most. Missing yours? Get in touch.
Plans & pricing
Do I need a separate licence for the WP Tender Agent?
No. The Agent is the WordPress plugin the Manager talks to — it has no separate licence, no free / pro tiers, no checkout. It's bundled with every WP Tender plan (Free included). Install it on as many sites as your plan's site cap allows.
What does the 7-day Pro trial include?
Every WP Tender Pro feature, capped at the Pro plan's site limit (25 sites). No credit card. After 7 days you pick a plan or your account drops back to Free.
How is billing tiered?
WP Tender is billed per-organization, not per-site. One subscription covers up to N sites depending on tier — Free 5, Starter 5, Pro 25, Agency 100. Starter is $5/mo or $45.99/yr, Pro $11/mo or $99.99/yr, Agency $29/mo or $264.99/yr; annual billing works out about 23% cheaper than paying month to month. Every paid tier carries the same operational feature set — Pro and Agency add team management. See pricing for the full grid.
What exactly does the Free plan include?
Up to 5 WordPress sites, live status, and manual full backup + restore to the local destination on your own hosting. That is the whole surface, deliberately. No cloud destinations, no schedules, no migration, no plugin / theme / content / user / comment management, no reports, no audit log and no screenshots — those all start on Starter, which costs the same $5/mo whether you run one site or five.
How do support tickets work?
Support is bought as credits, not bundled as a monthly allowance. One ticket costs $5, or five for $20. A credit is spent when you open a ticket, and one ticket covers one site — a ticket is raised against a single site and the credit is consumed for that site. Credits are a balance rather than a quota, so nothing expires at the end of the month and unused credits roll on indefinitely. If you expect to need help across a large fleet, buy the volume to match.
Can I cancel anytime?
Yes. Card-on-file cancellations are immediate; you keep access until the end of the paid period. No refund for partial months.
Where can I get an invoice?
From the Subscriptions page → Manage billing. That opens the Freemius customer portal where invoices are downloadable as PDF.
Platform security
How is the activation token stored?
The activation token the Agent uses to talk to the Manager is encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM using a server-side key (SECRET_KEY). Even with full DB access, an attacker can't use the token without the key file.
Does the Manager have access to my WordPress admin password?
No. The only credential is the per-org activation token paired with each site's ops token. We never see or store WordPress passwords.
Where do my backups actually live?
On your own WordPress sites — in wp-content/uploads/wptp-backups/ by default, or in your own S3 / R2 / Drive bucket if you wire a cloud destination. The Manager only stores metadata (jobs, timestamps, sizes) and optional homepage screenshots. We never store your backup archives on Manager servers.
Are SSRF / private-network requests blocked?
Yes. The Agent's outbound calls refuse RFC1918, loopback, link-local and cloud-metadata IP ranges by default. There's a dev-only env var to relax this for local testing.
Cloudflare in front?
Yes — full-strict mode with a 15-year origin certificate. Direct-to-origin connections fail TLS validation, forcing all traffic through Cloudflare (DDoS, WAF, bot management). HSTS preload + 2-year max-age.
Hosting compatibility
Will the Agent work on WP Engine / Kinsta / Pagely?
Yes. You may need to whitelist /wp-json/wpt/* in their WAF / firewall settings. Some managed hosts disable file_get_contents to remote URLs — replication needs it enabled.
Shared hosting?
Works in most cases but slow for backups of large sites — shared hosts often have aggressive PHP timeouts (30s) and small memory limits (128 MB). For sites over 1 GB consider a VPS.
WordPress multisite?
The Agent supports backing up the whole network or individual subsites. The Manager treats each subsite as a separate site, so you'd need one activation per subsite.
Minimum WordPress / PHP versions?
WordPress 5.6+, PHP 7.4+. We test against PHP 8.1, 8.2, 8.3. PHP 8.4 should work but isn't officially tested yet.
Operations
How often does WP Tender pull data from each site?
Live ping every 60 seconds (up/down + plugin presence). Full metrics every 5 minutes (CPU, RAM, disk, versions). Screenshot every 15 minutes by default. All intervals are configurable per site.
Can I restore a backup to a different domain?
Yes — that's the site-to-site migration flow. The destination site's siteurl is automatically used; search-replace runs on the database after restore. See migration for exactly what gets rewritten.
How are Agent updates rolled out?
From the Manager's Integrations tab. When a new Agent build ships you get an Agent update available banner and every outdated row in Active installations is badged. Upgrades are per row — click Update on each one. That's deliberate: a fleet-wide button reported one result for everything, so a single failing site could hide behind a success toast. The upgrade runs remotely over the existing ops-token channel and the site re-verifies afterwards. No WordPress.org channel, no per-site ZIP upload.
What happens to my data if I cancel WP Tender?
Your WordPress sites are untouched — the Agent keeps running, backups continue, and restores continue to work from the WP admin. You lose the multi-site dashboard, scheduled-backup push, and audit log on the Manager side. The activation token on each site stays valid until you remove the plugin or rotate the token from the Manager.
Can I export my data before cancelling?
Yes. From the Manager: Settings → Export everything downloads a JSON archive of every site, job, metric, screenshot, ticket, and audit event.
Migration & replication
What is site-to-site migration?
One-shot copy — take a backup of site A, ship it to site B, restore. Use for: moving hosts, dev → staging → prod, cloning a site. Both sites must have the Agent installed and be paired with the Manager.
Does a migration change my site's address?
No. This is the single most misunderstood part of the product, so to be precise: a migration copies the source site's content into the target site, and the target keeps its own address. Right after the database import the engine sets siteurl and home to the target's own URL — never the source's. URLs buried inside the content are not left pointing at the source either: a search-replace phase rewrites source URL → target URL across the tables, covering post content, media paths and serialized option values. The source site is not modified at all. Content moves; the address does not.
Then how do I change a site's own address?
With a different tool: URL Replacement, on the site detail page. It has an “also update siteurl” option and a real dry-run mode, so you can rehearse an address change and see the affected-row counts before anything is written. Migration itself has no dry run — the server rejects any request asking for one rather than silently running a real migration. Full detail on the migration page.
Will migration overwrite my target site?
Yes, by design — the target's database and wp-content are replaced. Don't point migration at a target you care about. If the source and target runtimes diverge (different PHP or database versions), tick deactivate plugins after restore in the migrate wizard: the target comes up with every plugin off except the WP Tender Agent, so a third-party plugin can't break the first boot. You reactivate them from WP admin once the site is up.
Mobile & Mac apps
Is there a mobile app?
Yes — a WP Tender app for iOS and Android. It signs in with the same account as wptender.com and works against the same backend, so the fleet you see on your phone is the fleet you see in the browser: dashboard, sites and site detail, jobs, reports, integrations, team, subscriptions and support tickets. It isn't a separate purchase — your plan carries over. See the mobile app page.
Is there a Mac app?
Yes — a native macOS app covering the dashboard, sites and site detail, jobs, reports, subscriptions, team and settings. Same account, same backend, no separate purchase. Your session is stored encrypted by macOS on your own machine. See the Mac app page.
Is the Mac app on the Mac App Store?
No. It ships as a signed and notarized .dmg you install yourself — Developer ID signed and stapled, so Gatekeeper opens it without warnings. There is no Mac App Store listing, and there's no plan for one.
Misc
Can I host the Manager myself instead of using wptender.com?
Not on a published plan. Self-hosting is a custom arrangement — an on-prem image plus initial deployment support, quoted case by case. Contact sales.
Is the source code open?
The WP Tender Agent is licensed under GPLv2-or-later (per WordPress.org rules); source ships with the plugin. The Manager SaaS itself is proprietary; not open-sourced.
Roadmap?
- Public REST API for tenant automation
- SSO (SAML, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365) on Agency+
- Push alerts and on-call rotations in the mobile app
Tell us what you need most via the contact form.