GoDaddy Acquires ManageWP to Manage WordPress Websites from a Single Dashboard

Popular domain registration and web hosting company GoDaddy (NYSE: GDDY) announced Sept. 6 that it has entered into an agreement to acquire ManageWP, a WordPress site management tool.

ManageWP enables web designers and developers to manage multiple WordPress sites from a single dashboard, regardless of where they are hosted.

The platform includes site monitoring, backups, automated migration, deployment, publishing, client reporting and security features. Currently, ManageWP serves more than 280,000 sites.

With a market share of nearly 60 percent, WordPress is the most popular web content management system on the planet, according to W3Techs.com, a web technology survey site.

Despite its popularity, managing multiple WordPress sites can be difficult. Designers and developers have to remember multiple usernames and passwords and conduct routine tasks such as updates, backups, security, content publishing and comment management on each site independently, and often manually - a job that can take hours to accomplish.

“We have more than one-half million web pros who use our GoDaddy Pro line of products and services,” said Jeff King, SVP of Hosting at GoDaddy in a telephone interview with Small Business Trends. “Many of them told us that working with WordPress can be a pain. They either tough it out or ignore it or use a tool like ManageWP.”

GoDaddy Pro lets web designers and developers manage all their GoDaddy customers from a single dashboard. By bringing ManageWP into the mix, Pro customers now have a way to manage all their WordPress sites in one place.

King said that the desire to simplify site management and help Pro customers build a recurring revenue stream proved to be the primary motivators for acquiring ManageWP.

“Our goal is to help web pros save time in managing sites so they can build a bigger base of business,” he said. “We talked to pros who just wanted to design a website and move on to the next. We felt they were missing an opportunity to create a recurring revenue stream for themselves. By simplifying ongoing site maintenance, they could achieve that goal.”

GoDaddy plans to offer ManageWP to Pro customers free of charge and will even bundle in some of its premium features as part of the package at no additional cost.

Although Pro customers are the primary audience for ManageWP, GoDaddy will integrate some of its principal features, such as automated backup and updates, into the hosting platform, benefitting all its customers, even those with just a single WordPress site, King said.

According to Vladimir Prelovac, Founder at ManageWP, who joined King on the call, the acquisition of ManageWP makes GoDaddy the only large-scale provider of both WordPress management and hosting solutions.

“Today, site owners need to have reliable hosting and suite of management tools to ensure the site is kept up to date,” Prelovac said. “GoDaddy has really good hosting, and we have really good WordPress management. Combining the two solutions brings something unique to the market.”

King said ManageWP would maintain its brand independence and continue to serve clients who host sites with companies other than GoDaddy. Web designers and developers who are not GoDaddy Pro customers will still be able to go to the ManageWP website to sign up.

Read the GoDaddy press release to learn more about the acquisition and visit the ManageWP website to acquaint yourself with the platform's features and benefits.

Image: ManageWP.com

This article, "GoDaddy Acquires ManageWP to Manage WordPress Websites from a Single Dashboard" was first published on Small Business Trends