Let me paint you a picture.
It’s 7:43 AM. You haven’t finished your coffee. Your phone buzzes — a client site is down. You fix it. Another buzz. A plugin update broke a contact form on a site you haven’t thought about in four months. You fix that too. By the time you actually start your “real” work, it’s 10:15 and you’ve already put out three fires, responded to two panicked emails, and questioned every career decision you’ve ever made.
Welcome to my life. I manage 180 WordPress websites.
How Did We Get Here?
Nobody wakes up one day and says, “You know what sounds fun? A hundred and eighty WordPress installs.” It creeps up on you. You take on one client, then another. You build a little system. You think you have it under control. Then one day you open your management dashboard and the number staring back at you is three digits and somehow it just keeps going up.
Each site seemed like a good idea at the time.
The Update Treadmill
WordPress core updates. Theme updates. Plugin updates. There are roughly 8–15 plugins per site if you’re being conservative. Do the math. That’s potentially 1,400+ plugins across the portfolio, all on their own update schedules, all capable of introducing breaking changes at any moment.
And here’s the thing about updates — you can’t just blindly run them. One innocent WooCommerce update once wiped out a client’s entire checkout flow on a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend. So now you test. But testing 180 sites takes time you don’t have. So you prioritize. And then the sites you deprioritized get hacked because you didn’t patch a known vulnerability fast enough.
It’s a beautiful, no-win situation.
Security: Playing Whac-A-Mole at Scale
WordPress powers roughly 43% of the internet, which makes it the single most attacked CMS on the planet. Congratulations. When you manage 180 of them, you’re not just a target — you’re a buffet.
Malware injections. Brute force login attempts. Nulled themes someone’s nephew installed three years ago. Spam form submissions that somehow route through a legitimate client’s email server and get the domain blacklisted. You will see all of it. Often at the same time. Often on a Friday.
The Client Factor
The sites themselves are only half the problem. The humans behind them are the other half.
There’s the client who installs random plugins they found on a blog post from 2017 without telling you. The one who gives their “tech-savvy” teenager admin access. The one who calls because their site is broken and it turns out they accidentally deleted the homepage. The one who hasn’t renewed their hosting in three months and is genuinely surprised the site is down.
Multiply this energy by 180 different personalities and you have yourself a part-time job that somehow became your entire career.
The Tools That Save My Sanity (Partially)
Let’s be fair — it’s not all chaos. Centralized management tools like ManageWP, MainWP, or Kinsta’s dashboard make bulk updates survivable. Uptime monitors mean you’re not waiting for a client to tell you their site is down. Staging environments catch the worst disasters before they go live. Automated backups are the only reason I sleep at all.
But no tool eliminates the cognitive load of keeping 180 distinct websites mentally organized. Every site has its own quirks, its own client expectations, its own ancient page builder that hasn’t been updated since Obama’s second term.
Would I Recommend It?
Honestly? Not without a serious conversation first.
Managing WordPress at scale requires systems, documentation, boundaries, and a genuinely unhealthy tolerance for context-switching. It can be lucrative. It can also consume you if you let it.
If you’re heading down this road, build your processes before you need them. Standardize everything you can. Raise your rates earlier than feels comfortable. And for the love of all things holy — stop taking on clients who want “just a quick favor.”
There is no such thing as a quick favor at 180 sites.
There is only the queue.
