The scale problem is real. More than half of Cloudways customers now manage 16 or more websites, and the tooling that works for a five-site portfolio — a patchwork of plugins, dashboards, and manual checks — breaks down as that number climbs toward 50 or 100. The launch of Site Manager, which entered public preview with over 15,000 applications and more than 4,000 users onboarded, suggests the demand for a consolidated solution was already waiting.
The core proposition is native integration. Unlike plugin-based management tools, Site Manager is built directly into the Cloudways platform, which means agencies are not adding another layer on top of an existing stack. Updates, monitoring, and performance can be handled from a single interface without the context-switching and performance overhead that third-party management plugins typically introduce.
Agencies are no longer just building websites, they're operating at scale. As portfolios grow, the operational burden increases quickly. Site Manager is designed to remove that friction by centralizing workflows and automating critical tasks.
Site Manager was built in partnership with BlogVault, and is framed as the first step in a broader roadmap toward more automated and intelligent website operations. The direction of travel is toward reducing the proportion of agency time spent on maintenance tasks — updates, security checks, performance monitoring — and redirecting it toward client-facing work.
"Agencies are no longer just building websites, they're operating at scale," said Suhaib Zaheer, SVP of Managed Hosting at DigitalOcean and GM at Cloudways. "As portfolios grow, the operational burden increases quickly. Site Manager is designed to remove that friction by centralizing workflows and automating critical tasks."
Cloudways Site Manager is available now. Cloudways is a DigitalOcean company.
