What WP Octo does
A dashboard for a fleet of WordPress sites, and a plugin on every site that does the work.
WP Octo manages many WordPress sites from one place. An agency or a hosting company connects each site it looks after, and WP Octo takes care of the routine: safe updates with a backup and a rollback, scheduled backups to object storage, uptime monitoring, and a record of what happened on every site.
Two parts
- The application, at wpocto.com: the dashboard where sites are added, updates are run, backups are scheduled and restored, and monitoring is read. Every customer works in a workspace of their own; nothing in one workspace is visible from another.
- The worker plugin, installed on every managed site. It performs updates, makes and restores backups, and reports the site's state. The application tells it what to do; the plugin does the work on the site itself, in steps small enough for shared hosting. It has a section of its own.
What it does for a site
| Updates | Plugins, themes and WordPress core, in a scheduled round: a backup first, the updates, a check of the site's pages afterwards, and a rollback when the check fails. |
| Backups | Made in steps, verified before they are called complete. Kept on the site, in object storage, or both, on the schedule the site's package sets. Restorable from either copy. |
| Monitoring | Uptime and certificate checks on the site's pages, with a log per site and an email when a page goes down and when it comes back. |
| Inventory | The site's plugins, themes, users and core version, kept current whether the platform can reach the site or only the site can reach the platform. |
| Recovery | A plugin that keeps a rollback copy of itself and can be put back even when it cannot load, and a maintenance mode that lifts itself if a round never finishes. |
How the dashboard is organised
The dashboard is organised around the website: everything a site has — its plugins, its backups, its update rounds, its monitoring — is a page of that site, and the fleet-level pages summarise across sites.
| Area | What is there |
|---|---|
| Dashboard | The fleet at a glance: how many sites, how many operational, open issues, average health, recent activity, security status, and the update rounds in flight. |
| Websites | Every site in the workspace, with its status, worker version, package and last update round. Open one for its pages. |
| Update rounds | Every update round across the fleet, with its outcome and the rollback actions. |
| Backups | Every backup across the fleet, restorable or not, and where each copy is. |
| Clients | The customers the sites belong to. |
| Packages | The service levels sites are on. |
| Team | The workspace's members and invitations. |
| Workspace settings | Name and details, API keys, storage, billing where it applies. |
A site's pages: Health · Plugins · Themes · Core · Users · Backups · Restores · Update rounds · Monitoring · Regression · Reports · Notes — and two placeholders, Security and Performance, which say so on the page.
Who sees what
An administrator sees and does all of it. A user sees every site and its pages and can log in to a site, but changes nothing on the platform. A client sees only the sites of the client accounts they are attached to, read-only. Roles and permissions has the table.