Siteward
Manage multiple WordPress sites from one self-hosted dashboard: uptime monitoring, bulk updates, backups & alerts. Unlimited sites, no fees.
Solid choice
Siteward is a solid plugin choice in 2026, with a few things worth checking first. Is rated 5/5 and was last updated 9 hours ago, and scores 71/100 on our health check.
- Actively developed — last update 9 hours ago
- Tested with the latest WordPress (7.1)
- Small user base (<10 active installs)
- Very few reviews so far
Daily downloads
Download spikes usually follow a new release — each site that auto-updates counts as a download.
Rankings
Where Siteward stands todayWordPress.org search rankings
Live position in the plugin search, top 100| Keyword | Position |
|---|---|
| bulk updates | >100 |
| Manage Multiple Sites | >100 |
| site management | >100 |
| uptime monitoring | #62 |
| website maintenance | >100 |
Rating breakdown
★★★★★★★★★★ 5 from 1 reviews
About Siteward
From the official readme · v0.16.1Description
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:
- Vulnerability monitoring: every installed plugin, theme and core version is checked against a live feed of known vulnerabilities, with severity, CVE and the version that fixes it. Free, no API key, no account.
- Uptime monitoring: each site is checked on a schedule; retry-then-alert avoids false alarms, you get an email the moment a site goes down or recovers, and every site shows its uptime over the last 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days.
- 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.
- Site notes: keep client contacts, hosting details or anything else on each site’s page, searchable from the Sites list.
- 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.
Full feature list, screenshots and setup guides: omniswp.com
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.
External services
This plugin downloads a vulnerability data feed so it can tell you which of your managed sites are running software with a known vulnerability.
The feed is fetched from https://omniswp.com/wp-json/omnis-updates/v1/vulnerabilities (and a small /vulnerabilities/meta document used to check whether the feed has changed since the last download). It is requested twice a day, and when you press “Refresh & rescan” on the Vulnerabilities screen.
These are plain downloads. No data about your managed sites or the software installed on them is sent: the matching between the feed and your sites happens entirely on your own server. As with any request WordPress makes, omniswp.com can see the dashboard’s IP address and its web address, which WordPress includes in its standard User-Agent header. Server logs holding these are kept for 7 days.
The feed is built by Siteward from the Wordfence Intelligence vulnerability database, provided by Defiant, Inc., and redistributed under its terms. Wordfence’s terms of service: https://www.wordfence.com/terms-of-service/ Wordfence Intelligence terms and conditions: https://www.wordfence.com/wordfence-intelligence-terms-and-conditions/ omniswp.com privacy policy: https://omniswp.com/privacy-policy/ omniswp.com terms: https://omniswp.com/terms/
Vulnerability records that originate with MITRE carry MITRE’s copyright notice, and records from Defiant carry Defiant’s; both are displayed on the Vulnerabilities screen, as their licences require.
If you would rather the plugin never made this request, add define( 'SITEWARD_DISABLE_VULN_FEED', true ); to wp-config.php (or return false from the siteward_vuln_feed_enabled filter). Vulnerability detection then stays off. No other feature of the plugin contacts an external service: uptime checks, syncs and updates only talk to the sites you connect.
Installation
- Upload the
sitewardfolder to/wp-content/plugins/, or install it from the Plugins screen. - Activate the plugin through the Plugins screen.
- Open the Siteward menu and choose Add Site.
- On each site you want to manage, install and activate the free Siteward Child plugin (search “Siteward Child” under Plugins → Add New, or https://wordpress.org/plugins/siteward-child/). On that site, open Settings → Siteward Connection, copy its REST URL and one-time connection key, and paste them into Add Site.
- (Recommended) Add a real server cron for accurate scheduled checks, the dashboard shows the exact line to add.
Frequently asked questions
Where does the vulnerability data come from, and does it cost anything?
It is built from the Wordfence Intelligence vulnerability database and served by Siteward. It costs nothing and needs no API key or account: you do not have to sign up with anyone or paste a licence key. Your dashboard downloads the same public feed everyone else does and does the matching locally, so nothing about your sites is sent anywhere.
A plugin I just licensed is not showing an update. Why?
Sites answer from a cached update check that can be up to twelve hours old, and premium plugins only report an update when their licence is active at the moment of that check. So a licence you have just bought or renewed will not appear until the cache expires. Use “Check for updates” on the Updates screen to make every site ask its licence servers again straight away. That needs Siteward Child 0.7.5 or newer on the managed site.
Do I need another plugin on the sites I manage?
Yes. Install the free Siteward Child plugin on each managed site and connect it to this dashboard.
Is there a limit on how many sites I can manage?
No. The free dashboard manages unlimited sites.
How are connections secured?
The dashboard generates an RSA keypair and signs every request. Each child site verifies the signature, rejects stale timestamps and blocks replayed requests.
Does it detect outages even if WordPress is down?
Yes. Uptime checks hit each site’s public URL directly, so a full outage is caught even when WordPress is unreachable.
What does Siteward Pro add?
Backup, WP-Cron and health monitoring are all included free in Siteward. Siteward Pro is an optional, separately-distributed 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 sends one alert when a whole server goes down instead of one per site, and Zapier webhook notifications.
Changelog
Backup and WP-Cron health monitoring are now included free.
0.16.1
- New: safe updates, on by default. Sites save the current version of each plugin and theme before updating, check their own homepage and admin area afterwards, and put the previous version back automatically if the update broke the site. The update shows as rolled back with the reason, and you get an email (Settings, Notifications, “Update rolled back”). Needs Siteward Child 0.8.0 or later on the site; turn it off under Settings, Safe updates. WordPress core updates are not covered, and changes an update made to the database are not undone.
- Fix: on the Updates page, the heading and the “Update all” button now follow the search and tag filters. “Update all” runs exactly the updates visible on the current tab and shows how many; before, its label always showed every pending update even when a tag filter was on. The tag filter now also applies to the WordPress tab, and a plugin search no longer filters the By site tab by site name.
- Update requests now use the Update timeout setting instead of the shorter sync timeout, so a single large update is no longer reported as timed out while it is still running.
0.15.1
- Fix: the icons on the empty Updates (“Everything is up to date”) and Vulnerabilities pages are back to their blue circle, instead of a tiny black tick and a small emoji.
0.15.0
- New: rename a site. Use the pencil next to its name on the site’s page. This only changes the name shown in Siteward; the site itself is not touched.
- New: notes on each site, for client contacts, hosting details or anything else you need to hand. Web and email addresses in notes become links, sites with notes show a small icon on the Sites list, and the Sites search now looks in notes too.
0.14.0
- New: uptime percentages. Each site’s page has an Uptime card showing how often it was up over the last 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days, plus its average response time, worked out from the checks Siteward already runs. Sites with less than 30 days of checks show the figure since monitoring began, labelled with the real start date. The Sites list shows the 30-day figure under each site’s status (hover it for the 24-hour and 7-day figures), in amber below 99.9% and red below 99%. Uptime figures cover 30 days whatever the History retention setting.
- Fix: the uptime log now keeps a full 30 days on dashboards in timezones behind UTC. Before, old checks could be pruned a few hours early.
0.13.5
- New: switch off the vulnerability feed with
define( 'SITEWARD_DISABLE_VULN_FEED', true );in wp-config.php, so the dashboard never contacts omniswp.com. - The External services section now describes exactly what a feed request reveals (the dashboard’s IP and web address) and how to switch it off.
0.13.4
- Fix: the Siteward logo in the dashboard header, and the icon on the empty Sites page, are now crisp vector images, instead of a text character that looked thin and fuzzy on some screens.
Screenshots
For developers
Is this your plugin? Show off the numbers.
Add a live badge to your site, docs or GitHub README. It updates on its own — no account needed.
FAQ
Siteward: quick answers
Straight answers, pulled from live WordPress.org data.
Live data from WordPress.org · checked Oct 21, 2026
Is Siteward free?
Yes. Siteward is free to download and use from the official WordPress.org plugin directory.
Is Siteward safe to use in 2026?
Siteward is a solid plugin choice in 2026, with a few things worth checking first. Is rated 5/5 and was last updated 9 hours ago, and scores 71/100 on our health check.
How many websites use Siteward?
Siteward is active on <10 WordPress websites and has been downloaded 990 times since it launched in July 2026. It was downloaded 401 times in the last 30 days.
Does Siteward work with WordPress 7.1?
Yes. The developer has tested Siteward up to WordPress 7.1.3, the latest release. It requires WordPress 5.8 or newer.
What PHP version does Siteward need?
Siteward requires PHP 7.4 or higher. Most hosts run PHP 8.x today, so it works on any modern WordPress hosting.
When was Siteward last updated?
The latest version, 0.16.1, was released on October 20, 2026 (9 hours ago).
Who makes Siteward?
Siteward is developed and maintained by OmnisWP.
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