We're always adding new features and improvements to SpinupWP.
See below for the latest enhancements and email us if there’s a feature you'd
like to see next.
We’ve redesigned the Assistant page and made some improvements that make working through your todos even easier.
If you have a lot of servers and sites, your todo list can get very long. To prevent important items from getting lost in the noise, similar todos are now grouped together. Instead of scrolling past a dozen separate “Update WordPress” entries, you’ll see them tidied up into a single group that you can expand.
Also, you can now search by todo title, server name, or site domain, to help you zero in on what you’re looking for.
If you have dozens of servers or sites, our previous dashboard wasn’t a great experience. Lots of paging through servers and sites, no filtering, and no sorting. You pretty much had to use the search feature exclusively because browsing the dashboard was painful.
The new dashboard addresses these issues and more. First, we split servers and sites into their own separate screens and listed them in a table format where you can see a lot of information at a glance.
In both the Servers and Sites screens, you have common features. When the page loads, the focus is on the filter box, so you can just start typing to quickly filter for the servers or sites you want to see.
You can also sort the tables by clicking on the column you’d like to sort by. Clicking the column again will reverse the sort order. Super handy if for example you want to see all the sites sorted by oldest to newest PHP version.
You can also hide and show columns and rearrange their order.
Since the new dashboard surfaces Assistant Todos more prominently, we’ve also recalibrated their priority thresholds to better reflect the urgency of each action item. To reduce the noise, the “Critical” priority will be reserved for sites or servers that are down, or are likely to go down without intervention (eg. running out of disk space). Other items will still rise to the “High” priority to indicate that they should still be addressed promptly for security and to keep things running smoothly.
Although the new dashboard is a huge improvement and exciting on its own, it also opens the door to exciting possibilities like bulk selecting sites and performing actions on them as well as adding tags to servers and sites (e.g. production/staging or client names).
A secondary benefit here is that we’ve taken care of some technical debt. We’ve replaced an older Bootstrap and Vue 2 frontend with a Tailwind, Vue 3, and Inertia frontend. Right now only the dashboard runs on the new stack and the rest of the app is still using the old frontend. As we move forward, we’ll be replacing other parts of the app, keeping the experience as seamless as possible, and speeding up our ability to ship new features and improvements.
Starting today, when a new site is created, it’s configured with a SpinupWP subdomain:
You can instantly access your new site using the subdomain after site creation. And you can turn this subdomain off and on as often as you like from the Domains tab. Existing sites can enable/disable the subdomain from the Domains tab as well.
In addition, we’ve sped up the site creation process by removing the HTTPS and Additional Domains options. You no longer need to configure your DNS to point at your primary domain, enable HTTPS for your primary domain, or configure additional domains when creating a site. All of this can be done any time after the site is created and only when necessary. Creating a test site in SpinupWP has never been quicker!
As part of this, we’ve also updated the Create Site Rest API endpoint to reflect the new site creation process. In addition we added site update endpoints to manage HTTPS, the PHP version, and additional domains, with more site endpoints coming soon. See the Rest API docs for more details.
You might assume that the subdomain only works for WordPress sites, but we’ve actually implemented it in an Nginx config so it will work with static sites, Laravel apps, and any site really.
Previously, when SpinupWP notified you about available non-security server software updates, you would need to SSH into your server and manually run apt update && apt upgrade. Not ideal if you manage multiple servers or prefer to stay in the dashboard.
Now you can install non-security updates directly from the SpinupWP Assistant. When the “Non-Security Server Software Updates” todo appears, simply click Install Updates to open a confirmation modal and kick off the upgrade.
We recommend performing a full server backup before proceeding, and testing your sites after the updates are installed.
You can now manage PHP settings directly from your SpinupWP dashboard, eliminating the need to SSH into your server and manually edit configuration files.
We’ve added a new PHP tab for sites where you can change common settings like memory limits, timeouts and worker management.
We’ve also moved some things around. The Settings tab for sites has been removed and the PHP Version setting has been moved to the new PHP tab. The Public Folder setting has moved to the Nginx tab and the Basic Auth section has moved to its own tab.
In addition, we’ve added a new Nginx tab at the server level for corresponding settings, so that you can increase server timeout limits and upload size limits without needing to SSH into the server.
Previously, when updating WordPress plugins and themes from within SpinupWP, we only showed the number of updates available, leaving you to check the WordPress admin to find out exactly which ones would be updated.
Now when you open the update modal, you’ll see a Show link next to the plugin and theme count. Clicking it reveals a detailed list showing each plugin or theme, its current version, and the version it will be updated to. This makes it easy to review exactly what will be updated, and helps you assess the potential impact of updates.
Previously, any URL containing query string parameters would bypass the page cache. This meant that any traffic from marketing campaigns using tracking parameters such as utm_source, gclid, or fbclid always resulted in cache misses, a slow response time, and increased server load.
You can now specify which query string parameters should be ignored when serving cached pages. New sites will automatically ignore common tracking parameters by default. For existing sites, you can click the Reset to Default button on the Page Cache screen, or define your own list of parameters to ignore.
We’ve also added the option to configure cookie-based cache exclusions directly in the dashboard. Previously, only path exclusions could be managed from the dashboard, and customizing which cookies triggered a cache bypass required manually editing the Nginx configuration via SSH.
In the rare case that you needed to install a custom HTTPS certificate for a site, you previously had to copy the certificate and private key files to the server via SCP or SFTP, SSH to the server with a sudo user, move the files to the proper folder, adjust the file ownership and permissions, and then provide the paths to those files in your SpinupWP dashboard:
An annoying process and lots of room for error. Now you can simply copy your certificate and private key and paste it into the fields in your SpinupWP dashboard:
SpinupWP will install the certificate and private key on your server. See the Custom HTTPS Certificate doc for more details.
you would have to manually make those changes again when switching the PHP version of the site. For example, if I had a site with site user turnipjuice and changed from PHP 8.3 to 8.4, I would manually have to update the PHP-FPM pool config file for PHP 8.4:
/etc/php/8.4/fpm/pool.d/turnipjuice.conf
However, now SpinupWP will automatically copy the PHP-FPM pool config file between PHP versions each time you switch PHP versions. For example, now if I switch from PHP 8.3 to 8.4, the PHP-FPM pool config file for PHP 8.3 will automatically be copied to PHP 8.4:
