Using the Manager

The Manager is the control plane: one browser tab that drives every WordPress site you look after. This page walks the surface in the order an operator actually uses it — get a site paired, get backups running, then everything you reach for once the fleet is in.

1. Before you start

Three things, none of which has to cost anything to get started:

A WP Tender account (Free works — 5 sites, local backups only).
WordPress 5.6+ on PHP 7.4+ on each site you want to manage.
Admin access to those sites, once, to upload a plugin.

There is nothing to install on your own machine. The Manager runs in the browser; the phone app and the Mac app are optional and talk to the same account.

2. Sign up and pick a plan

Go to wptender.com/signup and register.
Confirm your email. Sign-in is blocked until you do, and the confirmation link drops you straight onto the plan picker.
Pick a tier. Starter, Pro or Agency gives you 7 days of that tier as a trial; Free is permanent and narrower. Neither asks for a card. You can re-open the picker later from Subscriptions if you change your mind mid-trial.
You land on the Fleet dashboard with zero sites.

Site caps are per-organization, not per-user: Free 5, Starter 5, Pro 25, Agency 100. The cap is enforced when you add a site, so it's the number to watch. Starter is $5/mo or $45.99/yr, Pro $11/mo or $99.99/yr and Agency $29/mo or $264.99/yr; every paid tier carries the same operational surface, so what you are really buying is capacity.

Free is deliberately narrow. It gives you live status and a manual full backup and restore to the local destination on your own hosting — nothing else. No cloud destinations, no schedules, no migration, no plugin, theme, content, user or comment management, no reports, no audit log and no screenshots.

3. Get the Agent onto a WordPress site

The Manager never touches a WordPress site directly. It talks to the WP Tender Agent, a plugin you install once per site. The Agent is bundled with every plan — there is no separate licence, no free/pro split, nothing to buy.

Open Integrations in the Manager sidebar. Click Download wp-tender.zip.
On the same page, copy the activation token. There is exactly one token per organization — the same string activates every one of your sites. (If you ever need to invalidate it, Rotate token is right underneath.)
In WP admin: Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin. Pick the zip, install, activate.
Go to Settings → WP Tender, paste the token, click Save & Verify.

The Agent calls home, your plan is applied to that site, and the site appears in Sites as paired — no second step, no callback URL, no per-site token. If the site wasn't already in the Manager, activating the plugin adds it for you, named after its hostname.

The full install walkthrough, with an animated screenshot of the WP admin screens, is on the WP Tender Agent page.

Adding a site from the Manager first

The other order works too, and is the one to use when you want a proper display name up front. Add site (on the dashboard or Sites) asks for a display name, the WordPress URL and optional notes — a customer reference, a primary contact. The site sits as pending until the Agent on that URL verifies, then flips to paired on its own.

Adding sites is a manager action. Scoped team members can't do it; see Team access.

4. The fleet dashboard

Dashboard is a grid of site cards, not a table — each card is a site you can read at a glance and act on without opening it.

Status pills across the top count the fleet: total, up, warning, down, unknown. Warning specifically means WordPress answered but the Agent's REST namespace didn't — usually a deactivated plugin.
Fleet overview is a collapsible card above the grid: status split, plan name and site slots left.
Each card shows CPU, RAM (or PHP heap, when that's what the host exposes), disk, WordPress and database versions, disk free, the site's cached plan, and the last error if it's down.
Search filters by name, URL or capability. Select all picks up everything currently visible, so search-then-select is how you act on a subset.

The header buttons then act on the selection: Backup, Restore and Install plugin carry the selected count in the label, and Delete only shows up once something is picked. Migrate is the odd one out — it always asks for a source and a target, and pre-fills the source when exactly one card is selected. Every one of them opens a wizard rather than firing on click.

The Refresh control next to them sets how often the page re-reads (default 15s), and it's remembered per browser. Removing a site from the Manager calls the Agent to unpair, then drops the Manager's own records — metrics, screenshots, jobs, events. The WordPress site and its backup files are untouched.

5. The site detail surface

Clicking a card opens the site. The left-hand list is grouped into two sections:

WP Tender Control Plane

System overview & settings — the default landing tab (see below).
Plugins — the WordPress plugin inventory.
Backup & restore — trigger, schedules, local backups, cloud backups, cloud settings.
Migration — push this site's content to another paired site.
URL Replacement — search and replace across the database, with a dry run.
Live Replication (Continuity) — continuous replication to a standby peer.
Recent events — what happened on this site lately.
Log Manager — the filterable log feed pulled from the Agent.
Notifications — which events alert you, and how.

Content management

Themes, Posts, Pages, Users, Comments — day-to-day WordPress content work without logging into WP admin.

Tabs your plan doesn't cover still appear; they show what the feature does and what unlocks it rather than disappearing, so you always know the surface exists.

System overview & settings

The landing tab is a 3×2 panel — read-only metrics on top, knobs underneath:

Live status — CPU, RAM / PHP heap, disk gauges with the last-seen time.
Software — WordPress, PHP, database, web server, Agent version, active plugin count, timezone.
Server — OS, cores, 1/5/15 load, system RAM, PHP memory limit, disk free and total.
Continuity stats — replication throughput and queue depth, when Continuity is installed.
Server cron — see below.
Timezone — a per-site display timezone, or inherit the organization default.

Below that: a debug log card that toggles WP_DEBUG and tails debug.log live (the toggle reads the constant out of wp-config.php, so it reflects reality rather than a cached value), a Site info card with pair status, 24-hour uptime, tags and one-click links to the front page and WP admin, and a Home preview screenshot at the very bottom.

The Manager never holds your WordPress admin password, so there is deliberately no auto-login button — the WP admin link opens the normal login screen.

The header carries a per-site colour theme, a Monthly report button, a Pull now button that forces a metrics read, and Unpair.

6. Backups

Two ways to start one.

Per-site — site → Backup & restore → Trigger. Pick a type and go:

Full — database + media + WordPress core files. Available on every plan.
Database — all tables: posts, options, plugin tables.
Media — wp-content/uploads only.
Pages — just post_type=page rows.
Posts — just post_type=post rows.

The four granular types are a paid feature; on Free they're visible but locked to Full. The trigger always writes a local backup — pushing a copy to cloud is a separate action (see below), which keeps this screen down to one decision.

Bulk — on the dashboard, select site cards and click Backup. The wizard is four steps: Sites → Type → Schedule (optional) → Review. The Manager fires one job per site in parallel.

Either way the job lands in Jobs with a live progress bar, and a live activity panel appears right under the trigger card so you don't have to leave the tab. Failures stay in the list with the error text attached.

Where the archives live

On your own WordPress sites — wp-content/uploads/wptp-backups/ by default. The Manager stores metadata (job rows, timestamps, sizes) and optional homepage screenshots, and never the archives themselves. When you wire a cloud destination, the Agent copies straight from the site to your bucket; the bytes never route through us.

The Local backups tab lists what's on the site, filterable by type and age. Per row you can download, restore, upload to cloud or delete.

7. Schedules

Recurring backups can be set up from either side:

One site — site → Backup & restore → Schedules → Generate schedule. Pick type, frequency (hourly / daily / weekly / monthly) and how many copies to keep.
Many sites — the dashboard Backup wizard, with the optional Schedule step turned on. Same fields, applied to every picked site.

Existing schedules are listed underneath the form: name, type, frequency, how many copies are kept, whether it's active or paused, and when it next runs.

The Manager pushes the schedule down to the Agent; the Agent's own WP-Cron runs it. There is no Manager round-trip per execution, which is what makes a hundred scheduled sites cheap.

The catch is that WP-Cron only fires when someone visits the site. On quiet sites, turn on Server cron in the site's System overview tab (or fleet-wide in Settings → Manager-managed cron pulse) and our servers will hit wp-cron.php on a real interval instead.

8. Cloud destinations

Off-site copies are configured per site, under Backup & restore:

Open the Settings sub-tab and pick a provider: Amazon S3, Cloudflare R2 or Google Drive.
S3 wants bucket, region, access key ID, secret and an optional endpoint. R2 wants your Cloudflare account ID, bucket and key pair. Google Drive is an OAuth consent flow — click connect and approve in the browser.
S3 and R2 key pairs are forwarded straight to the Agent. The Google Drive refresh token is held encrypted on the Site row and handed to the Agent so it can upload on its own; it is never returned to the browser. Disconnecting wipes it and tells the plugin to drop its copy.

With a provider connected, the Cloud backups sub-tab lists what's in the bucket and lets you take a fresh cloud backup, restore from one, download one through a one-shot signed URL (your credentials never reach the browser) or delete one. You can also push an existing local archive up from its row on the Local backups tab; if a site has more than one provider connected, you get asked which.

9. Restore

Restore is destructive by definition, so every path asks for an explicit confirmation.

One site — Backup & restore → Local backups → Restore on the row you want. The confirm dialog offers take a safety backup first; with it ticked the button reads Take safety backup, then restore. Take it.
Many sites — dashboard → Restore. Three steps: Sites → Backup file → Review. Per site it defaults to the newest archive, and you can narrow by type and age before picking.

A restore-activity panel sits above the backups list and starts polling the moment you confirm, so progress shows up without a page change.

10. Migration and URL Replacement

Migration copies one paired site's content into another paired site. The source site's Migration tab gives you a target picker, a start button and the history of migrations that began there. Migrate on the dashboard is the fuller path: it compares the two runtimes before you commit and flags it when PHP or database versions diverge.

The thing worth internalising before you run one: the target keeps its own address. A migration moves content, not URLs — the engine points siteurl and home at the target's own URL after the import and rewrites source URLs to target URLs through the content. The source site isn't modified at all.

Changing a site's own address is the other tool: URL Replacement, on its own tab. It has a real dry-run mode that reports affected-row counts and sample before/after values without writing anything, so an address change can be rehearsed. Migration has no dry run.

Both, in full, on the migration page — including the deactivate plugins after restore safety net and what to do when the runtimes don't match.

11. Plugins, themes and content

The Plugins tab is the full WordPress plugin inventory for that site, filtered by All / Active / Inactive / Updates with a live count on each: activate or deactivate, and run one-click updates. From the dashboard, Install plugin pushes a premium plugin .zip from your machine to every selected site — the Manager holds it briefly and hands each site a short-lived signed download URL, so the sites never need to reach your machine.

Under Content management:

Themes — see what's installed and activate one.
Posts and Pages — filter by status, search, write a new one in the built-in editor, edit an existing one, publish, move to draft, move to trash or restore. Each row links out to the live URL.
Users — list and search the site's WordPress users, and promote to administrator or demote to subscriber.
Comments — filter by any / approved / pending / spam / trash, then approve, unapprove, mark spam, trash or restore.

Every write the Manager performs is logged on the site itself with a [manager-url] prefix, so a client reading their own WordPress log can always tell which changes came in remotely and from where.

12. Jobs

Jobs is the fleet-wide activity feed — every backup, restore, screenshot, migration, cloud backup and replication, with status, progress, duration and the error text on failures. Filter by state (active / done / error), by type, by site, and by time (last hour, 24h, 7d, 30d or a custom range; it defaults to 7 days). The list refreshes every 5 seconds.

The Activity popover in the page header carries a live count of running jobs, so you can start something long and keep working elsewhere.

13. Reports

This is the part clients see. Reports lists one card per site with that month's action count and its busiest categories; opening one gives you the full maintenance report for the period.

Switch between month and ISO week periods, back to the month the site was added (12 months / 8 weeks in the picker).
Download PDF renders a print-quality A4 file.
Email to client sends that PDF to the site owner through your organization SMTP, with the address pre-filled.
Download all (ZIP) on the index gives you every site's report for the month in one archive — the monthly ritual, in one click.
Owners and admins get an inline editor for the report's layout and a written note to the client.

Reports carry your agency identity, not ours. Set the logo, report name, accent colour and footer once in Settings → Agency branding.

14. Logs, events and notifications

Recent events (per site) — the last things that happened, newest first.
Log Manager (per site) — the Agent's own log feed, filterable by source, feature (backup / restore / cloud / migration / schedules), severity and time range, with a severity breakdown chart. This is where you look when one site started failing overnight.
Notifications (per site) — which events raise an alert (backup failed, licence expiring, site down…) and on which channels: in-app, email, or both. You can set a per-site recipient and BCC. The Agent reports raw events; the Manager owns the rules.

15. Team access

On Pro and above, owners and admins get a Team entry in the sidebar. It is built for the case where a contractor should touch three client sites and nothing else.

Add member — name, email, initial password (min 10 chars, mixed case, digit, symbol).
Pick a role: Read-only (view assigned sites, run nothing) or Write, which then asks you to tick exactly which capabilities they get.
The capability list is granular: backups, restore, cloud backups, plugin & core updates, themes, content, WordPress users, comments, migration & replication, site settings. Restore is flagged critical, because it can overwrite live data.
Assign sites — members only ever see the sites you tick.

Each member row shows their site count, capability count and last login. The Active switch disables login immediately and kills existing sessions — that's the control to use the day a contractor's engagement ends. Adding sites, managing billing and managing the team stay with owners and admins.

16. Organization settings

Settings holds everything that applies across the fleet:

Timezone — the default display timezone for everyone in the organization. Per-site overrides win, which is what you want when clients span regions.
SMTP for your WordPress fleet — one outbound profile. WP Tender sends notification email (backup results, job alerts, site-down alerts) from its own server using these credentials; they are never copied to your WordPress sites, and the sites don't need their own SMTP setup.
Manager-managed cron pulse — the fleet-wide version of the server-cron toggle.
Agency branding — logo (max 2 MB), report name, accent colour and footer note for client-facing reports.

Your own name, email and password live under Profile, reachable from the bottom of the sidebar.

17. Keeping the Agent current

Integrations is also the update surface. It lists every installation that has verified its token at least once, with the installed version, when it activated and when it last verified. Installations re-verify daily from the plugin's own cron; rows that go quiet for 7 days expire on their own.

When a new Agent build ships, a banner tells you how many sites are behind and outdated rows are badged. You upgrade per row, with the Update button next to each one — deliberately, so each site reports its own outcome instead of one toast speaking for the whole fleet. The upgrade runs remotely over the existing signed channel and the site re-verifies itself afterwards, so there's no WordPress.org channel and no re-uploading zips. Revoke on a row cuts a site off immediately.

18. Subscriptions & billing

Subscriptions shows the current plan, the tenant-wide usage counters (sites used, support credits left) and the full plan grid. Starter is $5/mo or $45.99/yr, Pro $11/mo or $99.99/yr, Agency $29/mo or $264.99/yr — annual billing is about 23% cheaper than monthly. Billing runs through Freemius: card details never reach our servers, and a signed webhook tells us when the licence state changes. Manage billing opens the Freemius customer portal, where invoices download as PDF.

19. Support

Support is an in-app ticket queue — open one, attach screenshots (JPG, up to 2 MB each), follow the thread, close it when done.

Tickets are not bundled with a plan. They are bought as credits: $5 for one ticket, or $20 for five. Opening a ticket spends one credit, and one ticket covers one site — you raise it against a specific site and the credit is consumed for that site. Credits are a balance rather than a monthly allowance, so they do not reset or expire, and your remaining count sits next to the plan on Subscriptions.

20. On your phone and on your Mac

The same account works in the iOS and Android app and in the macOS app. Same backend, same fleet, no separate purchase — useful when a site goes down and you're not at a desk.

Platform security notes worth knowing

Activation tokens are AES-256-GCM-encrypted at rest in the Manager database.
The Manager never sees or stores a WordPress admin password. The only credential is the activation token paired with each site's ops token.
Every remote write is mirrored into the site's own audit log with a [manager-url] prefix.
All inbound traffic goes through Cloudflare with origin certificate pinning.

Got stuck?

Open a ticket from Support in the app, or from the contact form on the marketing site. Replies land in your inbox within one business day. If your question is more general, the FAQ probably covers it.