GoDaddy buys ManageWP to invest more heavily in WordPress

ManageWP will remain a free product, even as its team joins GoDaddy and its features are integrated

Founded in 2010, the Belgrade-based ManageWP enables web designers and developers to manage multiple WordPress sites from a single dashboard, no matter where they are hosted. It also offers site monitoring, backups, automated migration, deployment, publishing, client reporting and security features.

In a blog post, Jeff King, Senior Vice President of Hosting at GoDaddy, revealed that the entire ManageWP team will be joining GoDaddy, and that the company has "an exciting combined vision to bring the ManageWP tools to millions of WordPress developers and further support the WordPress community."

That means integrating ManageWP features like backups, staging, cloning and site migrations into GoDaddy’s WordPress hosting. 

"ManageWP is a popular tool for WordPress developers that helps them collectively save thousands of hours every day managing their clients’ websites. Their new product, Orion, has blown away the market. Its single dashboard manages any number of WordPress sites, enables simple updates for plugins and themes, and enables management for site security, performance, backups and more," King said.

Meanwhile, ManageWP will still be offered as a free product, and users will be able to use ManageWP on sites hosted anywhere, not just GoDaddy.

"The fact that our whole team has unanimously decided to join GoDaddy and to keep working on ManageWP speaks a lot of what we expect from the acquisition, both for you and for us," Vladimir Prelovac, Founder of ManageWP, wrote in a blog post. 

While GoDaddy benefits by getting access to ManageWP's tool set, ManageWP wins by getting access to GoDaddy's reach and scale.

"As a bootstrapped European company, we’ve reached a point where we achieved a lot of the goals we’ve set, but we want to take things to the next level. As some of you know, managed WordPress hosting is one of the things we planned," wrote Prelovac.

"GoDaddy already has a mature WordPress hosting product, and it made much more sense to further develop it as opposed to doing it from scratch (although you’ll miss out an exciting new pricing model we were planning for our hosting, it would require 3D glasses for full shopping experience). With GoDaddy we’ll be able to tightly collaborate with experienced hosting veterans and provide a hosting solution that works perfectly with ManageWP."

In addition, King made mention of ManageWP's "stunning office in the heart of Belgrade," which GoDaddy will be expanding this year, hiring both developers and support roles.

The entire ManageWP team will be continuing to operate in Serbia. Only Prelovac will be relocating to GoDaddy’s California office.

This is only the second acquisition from GoDaddy this year. In May it acquired FreedomVoice, a provider of cloud-based VoIP phone systems.

(Image source: managewp.com)