Choosing a WordPress control panel

A control panel sets up and runs the server underneath your WordPress sites: the web server, PHP, the database, SSL certificates, backups and staging copies. This guide explains how I score panels and which ones come out on top in each of the four groups I split them into. The full ranking of 26 panels, with the reasoning for every score, is in The best WordPress control panel: 26 panels ranked.

Four groups, split by who runs the server

The biggest difference between the options isn’t the feature list, it’s who runs the server and whether you get root access to it. Root is the server’s administrator account. With it you can install anything and change any setting, including the ones that matter for speed, such as PHP workers, the object cache and the page cache. Without it you’re limited to what the host lets you change, and in return the host is responsible when the server breaks.

How I score panels

Each panel gets a score from 0 to 5 on six criteria, and each criterion has a weight. The total is the sum of weight x score / 5, so a panel that scores 5 everywhere gets 100.

Staging and cloning count as one criterion, whatever the vendor calls the feature (staging, cloning or migration), because they do the same job: a copy of your site to test plugin updates on. The copy scores 5 if it can go to a server in another data centre, 4 if it can go to another server in the same data centre, and 3 if it only ever lands on the same server. A copy you’d have to build by hand from a backup scores 1. Copying a whole server or a whole account doesn’t count, because it isn’t a copy of one site to test on.

Every score comes from the vendor’s own pricing pages and documentation, and where those leave something unclear, from the vendor’s forum, changelog, source code or staff answers. A feature I couldn’t confirm scores low, not high.

The ranking only scores control panels. WP Engine and Kinsta are managed hosts rather than panels, so they’re not in the ranking: they’re in the third group because support is what you’re paying them for.

The top picks in each group

Panel on your own server: RunCloud and Enhance

RunCloud (91 out of 100) manages a server you rent from any provider. It runs nginx by default, with OpenLiteSpeed or Apache as options. Staging is one click and syncs in both directions, with a choice of all database tables or only the ones you select, which is what lets a WooCommerce store push settings back to live without overwriting orders taken in the meantime. Cloning to a server at another provider is on the Professional plan.

Enhance (96 out of 100) came top of the ranking. It’s sold mainly to hosting companies and priced per site across all your servers, with a monthly minimum, so a single site owner pays the minimum. It offers LiteSpeed, OpenLiteSpeed, Apache or nginx, and runs each site in its own container. A site can be cloned to any server in your Enhance cluster, and those servers can be at different providers. Its staging pushes the whole site to live, files and database together, and there’s no pull from live into staging.

Managed panel: GridPane’s PeakFreq and Cloudways

Both run the server for you, so you never patch or monitor it yourself, but neither lets you bring your own server.

PeakFreq is GridPane’s managed service on Vultr servers in the Vultr data centre you choose. The server price is included, and GridPane monitors the server and handles security updates. It runs nginx or OpenLiteSpeed, and GridPane’s FAQ says “you will have full root access to our PeakFreq servers”.

Cloudways (75 out of 100) sells servers from DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS and Google Cloud at its own price. It runs nginx with Varnish, its staging pushes and pulls in both directions with a choice of tables, and support is 24/7 chat. Cloudways doesn’t give root access: its master user has the most access you can get, but it isn’t root.

Managed hosting for the support: WP Engine and Kinsta

You pay more for the hardware than you would on your own server, and in return you get WordPress specialists who will look at your site. Neither gives you root.

WP Engine has 24/7 chat support from its user portal. Its SSH Gateway connects you to a container beside your site with your files and database, and WP Engine’s documentation says you can’t use it for “any actions that require root or sudo access”.

Kinsta says its support is “24/7/365” and “delivered by real WordPress engineers”, through chat in its MyKinsta dashboard. SSH gets you into your site’s own environment for tools like WP-CLI, Git and Composer, not the server.

Free and open source: EasyEngine and Virtualmin

Both are free, you install them on a server you rent, and you have root. Support comes from the community, or you pay for it.

EasyEngine (85 out of 100) is a command-line tool from rtCamp, MIT-licensed. Each site runs in Docker with nginx, and ee site clone and ee site sync copy a site to another server over SSH, with files, database or uploads on their own if you want.

Virtualmin GPL (82 out of 100) is the free edition of a hosting panel built on Webmin, with Apache by default or nginx. It has a Clone button, Transfer copies a site to another Virtualmin server over SSH, and scheduled backups go to Amazon S3 or any S3-compatible storage. It’s a general hosting panel rather than a WordPress one, so it doesn’t manage Redis or a page cache for you.

Further reading