WP Remote has had a few years to grow and mature since its inception in 2010. For an interesting backstory, you can read the history of WP Remote. WP Remote was a free product for years. It was a solution from Human Made to scratch an itch. It’s always been supported, but only more recently received their full attention.
This product has iterated, grown, and improved consistently for a long time. And their hard work is paying off. WP Remote is now quite polished, still free for basic features, and very affordable for advanced features.
Today, the Human Made team is announcing a new WP Remote.
An all new WP Remote
WP Remote has been completely redesigned, from branding to app interfaces; but the simplicity that has always been WP Remote’s best feature is still dominant, despite the now significant power of the app.
WP Remote also has an amazing new API. How can I say it’s amazing, you say? Well, it’s true, I haven’t used the code myself. But WP Remote does. In fact, they use the WP Remote API to run the WP Remote app itself. Check out the API features and documentation to see what you can do with it in your projects.
An example use case for the API, where it’s used in a completely different way than the web app, is the WP Remote CLI, a command line site management tool inspired by the WP CLI project.
WP Remote commercial plans
With the new WP Remote, they’ve added some commercial features.
- Automatic backups stored on WP Remote, Amazon S3, or Dropbox
- Automatic Core (minor and / or major versions can be selected), theme, and plugin updates.
- A daily email of account activity.
- Users can install and manage themes and plugins right from the WP Remote interface.
- An historic log of all major site activity.
With the free version of WP Remote, I’d say it’s well suited for site monitoring and on-demand backups, but not site management. The new commercial features bring WP Remote into the same realm of functionality (maybe more in some ways) as other site management tools such as ManageWP and InfiniteWP.
A “premium” or commercial account for WP Remote is tier based, with discounts for managing more websites. 5 websites can be managed for $24 per month ($4.80 / site), 10 websites for $39 per month ($3.90 / site), and 50 websites for $149 per month ($2.98 / site).
A screencast (by me!) of WP Remote in action
Yep, I did my first Post Status screencast. It’s a thirteen minute walkthrough of the web app and WP Remote features, from adding the plugin to your install to fully managing your websites with WP Remote.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JByJYwxS6lI
I’d love your feedback on the video. If y’all like stuff like that, I’ll try to do it more often.
Discounts for you
All new signups will get 50% off of WP Remote as a launch promotion. But the Human Made team kindly made a special discount available just for Post Status readers. Up to 50 of you fine folks can use the coupon code “poststatusrocks” to get an extra 20% off of WP Remote for the first 6 months.
My overall impression of the new WP Remote
I asked Tom Willmot, the CEO of Human Made, about what this release means for them and the future of WP Remote, as it appears at this point to be a much bigger priority project for them than it was in the past.
We’re really excited about what we’ve built with WP Remote. The re-design, premium plans and the new API give us a really strong foundation for our future plans (and there are many!).
At Human Made we take real pride in the work we put out in the world and I feel incredibly proud of how our whole team has come together to make this large release a reality. I really hope you find WP Remote as useful as we do.
I’ve used WP Remote to varying degrees since the early days. For the first time, I really feel as if I can manage my websites with this product. I used to think it was cute, and good for monitoring, but to do anything I still had to go into each admin, which inevitably made it less worthwhile for me.
Now, I don’t see why someone managing more than one or two sites wouldn’t want a tool like this. WP Remote is a very effective, and in my opinion, extremely affordable solution for managing WordPress websites.
Congratulations of the revamp ID, looks stunning. Reading this blog post, I’m surprised that WPRemote has been around since 2010, yet I only discovered them a few months ago, can’t remember which blog carried their review.
Before then, I tried my hand at ManageWP, however I didn’t last with them because its a premium offering altogether.
I’ve list all sites under my portfolio with WPRemote and happy to say, its such a lifesaver…just this morning I did an update with just one click for 55 sites.
I was to hate these updates before and obviously I only updated important websites, the rest ignored until further notice…now all sites under my roof are always up to date.
Thank you very much WPRemote from sunny Johannesburg…
Hey Muzi,
Feel free to shoot me an email at [email protected] if you ever have any questions/comments about ManageWP. You said you didn’t choose ManageWP because its a premium service? I’d love to discuss that further with you to learn more about your reasons.
Thanks!
Looking better than ever (nice logo too). I’ve been amazed at how much this thing does even considering how long it’s been available now. I considered using it for backup and updates recently, even though I have but a handful of sites.
I decided not to because (as with 1Password, which I bought and don’t use) it creates a central means of potential disaster. They do have 2-step and it seems every reasonable measure is in place but any security expert will still tell you the added convenience also increases risk.
(Woah, Post Status has live AJAX comment refreshing!)
If I could swallow my ultra-cautious security thoughts (getting an email this morning from Adobe about getting hacked doesn’t help), I’d use this (and 1Password) in a heartbeat. Big time saver and the price is very reasonable and would scale well in my opinion.
I was getting services confused. Even after making a spreadsheet to compare features, I still get things confused! It doesn’t look like WP Remote has two factor authentication yet? In any case, it looks like these guys have some good competition for ManageWP now. Looking really attractive.
Hey Steven,
I’m James Mowery, CEO of ManageWP. And over at ManageWP, we take security very seriously. In many instances, we go above and beyond security standards — even have a full-time security consultant — to improve security. We opted not to use the XML-RPC protocol that WordPress uses and rolled our own OpenSSL communication between your sites and ManageWP.
You can read more about our procedures here: https://managewp.com/how-managewp-handles-security
And yes, two-factor authentication should be a standard of every serious business who values their site’s, viewers’, and customers’ security, which is why we implemented it.
We also have a full-time staff of nearly two dozen at the ready to address any needs, which is also something our customers rave about.
Let me know if you have any questions. 🙂
Excellent article.
I remember chatting with the Human Made guys at WordCamp Edinburgh in 2012 and being amazed that they didn’t seem to have thought about the commercial potential of WP Remote.
At the time, ManageWP had already launched their commercial offering but their initial pricing structure left a lot of room below for competitors to grab the mass market. It seemed to me that no company was spotting an obvious opportunity and, as WP Remote had actually arrived before ManageWP, it seemed that they were well-positioned. The vibe I got from Tom and his guys, however, was that it was probably just going to remain a simple side project that they were, very decently, willing to continue providing for free to the community, but their focus would remain on client work.
So, it was ManageWP that took the ball and ran with it, creating one of the really great WordPress companies.
I’m guessing that the recent addition of Noel Tock to the Human Made team is the impetus behind their new-found interest in turning WP Remote into a product . At this stage, however, it will be much harder to establish themselves in the market; ManageWP significantly improved their pricing structure, making their Standard plan a credible choice for low-end customers, and their overall pricing now seems to be much more competitive.
More importantly, ManageWP do an incredibly good job of communicating their product and, although it is early days for Human Made’s commercial offering, their website is simply not in the same league. This is a particularly big problem because they have chosen to position themselves at twice the price of ManageWP’s Professional plan (even with the 50% discount).
Of course, for that money, they are actually providing backup storage, a resource-intensive but very convenient feature, putting them into roughly the same territory as the far-more-expensive VaultPress, but their website utterly fails to communicate the value of that – how frequent are the backups? How easy will it be to restore a site from them? Will WP Remote provide any assistance? etc.
Going up against an entrenched competitor, you need your message to be at least as clear.
Thank you for the kind words, Donnacha!
Hey, Brian, can you check to see if my other comment went to spam?
I was an avid user of the free version of WP Remote, but find their premium offering a little expensive for what it offers (especially when converted to SA Rand). My WP management tool of choice is now iControlWP (www.icontrolwp.com).
Thanks for the word of support Russell! : )
For those that are interested in learning more about iControlWP and all the features on offer, including backup that works for websites of ANY size (no limits!), drop me a line, or grab our free full-featured trial.
Thanks!
Paul.