Siteward

Siteward is a lean, self-hosted dashboard to manage multiple WordPress sites from one place, a no-bloat way to monitor uptime, run fleet-wide core, plugin and theme updates, watch UpdraftPlus backups and WP-Cron health, and catch critical errors across every site you maintain. It’s a free, unlimited-site alternative to hosted maintenance services, with no per-site fees and no third-party cloud: you own the control panel.

Install it on one central WordPress site, add the free Siteward Child plugin to each site you manage, and connect them with a one-time secure handshake. Then manage everything from your dashboard:

• Uptime monitoring: each site is checked on a schedule; retry-then-alert avoids false alarms, and you get an email the moment a site goes down or recovers.
• Fleet-wide updates: see every pending core, plugin and theme update in one place and apply them one-click or in bulk, with a live progress view.
• Critical-error detection: catches HTTP 5xx errors and the WordPress “critical error” white screen.
• Backup monitoring: see each site’s latest UpdraftPlus backup and get alerted when backups are missing, stale, or failing.
• WP-Cron & health flags: surfaces overdue cron events, recovery mode, plugins/themes auto-paused after a fatal error, and Site Health critical issues.
• Secure & self-hosted: the dashboard initiates all traffic; every request is signed with an OpenSSL keypair and protected against replay. Your data never routes through a third-party cloud.

Every feature above is fully functional and free. Unlimited managed sites. No per-site fees.

Siteward Pro (optional, sold separately): an add-on that adds fleet plugin management (bulk activate, deactivate, install and uninstall plugins across sites), SSL certificate & domain-expiry monitoring, a Dynamic Notification Engine that groups a whole server’s outage into a single alert, and Zapier webhook notifications.