ManageWP announced today that it has made its way into cPanel on sites hosted with SiteGround via their new hosting partnership program. SiteGround customers will now find a ManageWP button within cPanel, which includes one click ManageWP account activation and also allows users to automatically add existing websites to the management dashboard.
I had the chance to chat briefly with Vladimir Prelovac, the founder of ManageWP, to find out more about the new account provisioning API that powers the hosting partnership. “We created this API with hosting partners in mind,” he said. The development team then built a cPanel plugin on top of the API so hosting companies can easily plug ManageWP functionality into their hosting offers.
Tina Kesova, SiteGround’s business development strategist, said that ManageWP services have significantly improved SiteGround customer satisfaction: “The great amount of signups and extremely fast adoption of ManageWP by our customers proves that it is a great solution for our clients’ needs and adds great value to our service offering.”
Partnering with Hosts
Partnering with hosting companies is nothing new when it comes to integrating both free and commercial WordPress products. WP-CLI, the WordPress command line interface, comes pre-installed on many major hosting providers. Hosts also commonly integrate and/or recommend caching solutions, staging, GIT version control, as well as WordPress auto-installers.
Prelovac said they are targeting more hosts for integration with ManageWP. “At this moment, we are looking for hosting companies that have great reputation as WordPress hosts. Of course we also have a lot of plans, including very close integration with hosting products and perhaps being a part of the ultimate WordPress hosting product in the near future,” he said. Though he would not offer more specifics, Prelovac anticipates the that more hosts will begin to see the value of integrating WordPress-related products. He predicts, “Given the popularity of WordPress, I expect that in the future ManageWP will become a standard on hosting panels similar to how CloudFlare is now, so that people who can really benefit from using our solution can do so more easily.”
According to W3techs, WordPress currently powers 21.2% of the web. It’s a prudent move on the part of hosting companies to try to attract more WordPress users by adding WordPress-related tools to their control panels.
With ManageWP successfully working its way into cPanels across SiteGround servers, do you think we’ll see more commercial WordPress products seeking hosting partnerships? This seems like a smart thing to do, especially if you offer WordPress backup services or anything related to migration and staging. If a host doesn’t already include generic options for these products and services, this is one easy way for the company to extend its capabilities.
Great news! Congrats on the partnership.