Manage WordPress sites with the WordPress Manager

Once a WordPress site lives on NovaPanel, the WordPress Manager keeps it patched — either with one-click updates when you want them, or on an unattended nightly schedule. This guide covers managing sites that are already on the panel. If you're bringing a site in from another host, start with Migrate a WordPress site instead.

Where to find it

Open the customer panel and go to WordPress. Every action here runs through WP-CLI as the site's own Unix user, scoped to that site's directory — nothing runs as root and nothing can reach outside the site root.

The page scans each of your PHP sites for a wp-config.php on every visit and lists one card per WordPress install it finds. Sites without WordPress are simply omitted. Each card shows the current version and whether a core, plugin or theme update is waiting. Use Rescan in the top right to re-check after installing or removing something.

The WordPress Manager is available on every tier — both the on-demand updates and the nightly auto-update schedule are free, with no license gate.

Running updates on demand

Each site card has an Update all button plus individual Update core, Update plugins and Update themes buttons. A button is disabled when there's nothing of that kind to update, so you can tell at a glance what's pending. Update all only touches the targets that actually have a pending update, so it won't fire needless checks against WordPress.org.

Updates run in order — core first, then plugins, then themes — and each target is independent: if one plugin refuses to update cleanly, core and themes still get updated. When that happens the panel reports a partial result ("Updated with some failures") so you know to check what stayed behind. You only see an outright failure if every attempted target failed.

Updates get a generous time budget (up to 15 minutes), which matters on plugin-heavy sites where a 60-second cap used to cut updates off mid-run. The work is also detached from your browser connection: if you close the tab or lose your network mid-update, wp-cli keeps running to completion on the server rather than being killed with a half-swapped install. You just won't see the result toast — hit Rescan afterward to confirm.

Each card also offers a few housekeeping actions: Flush cache (clears the WordPress object cache), Maintenance on / off (toggles the site's maintenance mode), and Open wp-admin (jumps straight to the site's dashboard). If a site shows Setup pending, its files are staged but WordPress hasn't been configured yet — finish the install at /wp-admin/install.php on the site before the update actions become available.

Nightly automatic updates

To keep a site current without touching it, tick Auto-update nightly on that site's card. When enabled, you choose what to keep updated with the Core, Plugins and Themes checkboxes. The setting is per site — enabling it on one site doesn't affect the others. If you switch the schedule on without selecting any target, it defaults to updating everything, so a schedule can never be "enabled but does nothing".

Scheduled updates run at a fixed 4 AM server-local time — a quiet hour that keeps any rare update blip off your peak traffic. You choose what gets updated, not when; there's deliberately no per-site hour picker. The scheduler checks every hour but only does real work at 4 AM, and each site is updated at most once per day. If a nightly run is interrupted (for example, the panel restarts mid-update), that site is left unmarked and retried on the next run rather than sitting half-updated until the following night. Suspended sites are skipped entirely.

There is no automatic backup before an update. WordPress core updates are generally safe, but a bad plugin or theme release can still break a site. Before enabling auto-updates on anything you care about, set up scheduled backups so you can roll back if a nightly update goes sideways — see Restore from a backup.

Troubleshooting

• A site isn't listed. The page only shows PHP sites that contain a wp-config.php. If your install is staged but not yet configured, it appears as Setup pending — finish setup at /wp-admin/install.php, then Rescan.
• "Updated with some failures". One or more targets couldn't update. Open the site's wp-admin and look at the specific plugin or theme that stayed on the old version — a persistent failure usually needs a manual look (an abandoned plugin, a paid update, or a version conflict).
• An update seemed to hang, then the tab closed. The update keeps running server-side. Wait a minute and hit Rescan to see the real state before retrying.

Next steps

• Migrate a WordPress site to NovaPanel — bring an existing site in from another host.
• Restore from a backup — set up scheduled backups and roll back if an update breaks something.