Making money with WordPress is nothing new, and neither is providing site management services. However, a tool such as Dollie can help you start small, grow fast, and earn greater repeatable revenue. If you’re sticking with old tactics to generate income, think of Dollie as the catalyst for your own WordPress monetization revolution. This is especially true when you dive deeper into Dollie’s custom dashboard – Control HQ.
In this post, we’re going to look at Dollie’s Control HQ functionality and show how it can lead a WordPress monetization revolution for your own site. Throughout, we’ll break down exactly what makes Control HQ tick, and how you can leverage it.
A Quick Primer on Dollie
We don’t need to go into too much detail on what Dollie is and does – it’s something we cover elsewhere on the WP Mayor blog. Our in-depth review has plenty of favorable things to say about the site management tool, and we encourage you to give that a read from top to bottom.
However, to sum up Dollie, it takes site management for WordPress, builds in some unique monetization functionality, and ‘skins’ it all with a gorgeous User Interface (UI). The last point is something you shouldn’t skip – it’s important that you can navigate around your various sites with efficiency and speed.
In fact, this brings us onto the primary focus of this post. While Dollie offers a few different solutions to help you monetize your site management – the Hub Builder and Private Cloud – Control HQ knits it all together.
In the next section, we’ll talk about the positives Control HQ can provide. From there, we’ll take an even deeper dive into what this custom dashboard solution can help you achieve.
How Your WaaS Benefits from Dollie’s Control HQ
Control HQ is where you’ll spend most of your time when using Dollie. It’s how you manage client sites, but will also include lots of other functionality.
Essentially, Control HQ gives you a way to carry out three important tasks when it comes to monetizing your site:
- You’re able to monitor and manage a practically unlimited number of sites. This includes uptime monitoring, performance analysis, software updates, and more.
- You can achieve all of the most important tasks associated with your site at scale, in bulk, and with high productivity.
- Alongside Dollie’s other tools – the Hub Builder and Private Cloud – you can begin to make recurring revenue without the need for further tools.
There will be a lot of crossover between Control HQ and other Dollie solutions, but everything begins within the dashboard. With this in mind, let’s see what you have at your fingertips.
What Control HQ Lets You Achieve
It’s time to look closer at Control HQ. On the surface, the dashboard is simply that – attractive visuals that help you move around the different management options. However, as you explore Control HQ, you’ll see it provides much more than aesthetics – and greater functionality from solutions such as ManageWP and MainWP.
We’ll dissect Control HQ in three areas. Let’s start with the options you have to manage client sites.
Site Management
Managing sites will be a big aspect for your business, so you need the right blend of tools at hand. Control HQ lets you manage almost every aspect of each site from its dashboard. This means you don’t need to head into individual WordPress installations to change key site elements.
The Sites > View Sites screen within Control HQ will give you an overview:
You’ll see information relating to the site’s status, updates, and security. We’ll look at some of these in more detail later. However, if you click on a site, you’ll come to a comprehensive dashboard that will give you plenty of management options.
There are a wealth of screens here, but you’ll use the following pages all the time:
- Reports. These are site analytics in general, much like Google Lighthouse or similar. When you want to optimize sites, you’ll come here first.
- Plugins. Control HQ includes not only a full-featured update manager, but the ability to install and manage plugins from the WordPress Plugin Directory too. This is all without the need to head to the WordPress.org website.
- Themes. You have the same functionality available for themes as you do plugins. This is something else we’ll discuss later.
You’ll use site blueprints quite a lot too. These are full site templates to help you set up new sites fast. The dashboard for these looks similar to typical sites, which means you have the same management tools at your disposal.
Security and Optimization
Site security must be a priority for any business that sells WordPress services. Control HQ has access to plenty of functionality here, much greater than the competition too in different ways.
There are a few dedicated pages to help you for each individual site. The Activity Report screen gives you a breakdown of the current state of your site. This includes plugin and theme installs, security scanning, and much more. Even better, this is something you can download and present to others:
The Reports screen gives you the performance analytics you’ll need, which you may not find in other site management solutions. This lets you monitor how specific sites perform based on Core Web Vitals:
Two metrics that display front and center on a site’s Control HQ dashboard are the results of security scans, and uptime monitoring. The latter is something that services such as ManageWP and wildcloud either can’t offer, or charge you more money to access.
However, it’s essential in our book – and you can see it update every five minutes for each site:
Next to this metric is your security scan status. This is another real-time overview of a specific site that uses the excellent WPScan database to determine whether updates need to happen for your themes and plugins. Unlike apps such as ManageWP though, the full feature set of this available without an additional cost.
In fact, much of the functionality you’ll use to secure sites will leverage automation. Let’s talk more about this next.
Automation and Bulk Management Options
If there’s one aspect that can enhance productivity and efficiency, it’s automation. Control HQ gives you plenty of ways to automate all of the most vital tasks and checks for your sites. As we discuss, security scans happen without your input, and will alert you if there’s an issue.
It’s the same for theme, plugin, and WordPress core updates. There are a multitude of ways to manage these. For instance, you can access the individual Plugins, Themes, and Core screens for each site, and set up auto-updating:
However, you can handle these in bulk for every site you run from the Updates Manager:
Of course, you need to take care if you update in bulk for all sites. This is why you can drill down to individual sites and manage updates:
One final aspect of site management that will benefit from automation is backups. Control HQ lets you create a manual backup at any time from the Backups screen:
However, an automatic backup happens once per day too – peace of mind, with no additional cost (unlike ManageWP), and without the need for additional plugins (unlike WPMUDEV).
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
You may only want the key details about Dollie and Control HQ, and that’s okay! Next, we’ll offer up some quick-fire questions for you, complete with concise answers for you to ponder over. As always, if you have a question that we don’t cover, ask us in the comments section below!
What is Dollie?
Dollie is a site management solution that helps to transform your WordPress website into something that can generate huge revenue. It offers seamless integration and modern workflows that incorporate unique opportunities to monetize your site.
Is It Straightforward to Integrate Dollie with My WordPress Website?
Dollie provides seamless integration with your site through a WordPress plugin. This also includes WooCommerce integration, much of which you can access through Control HQ – without having to hit the WordPress dashboard at any point.
Why is the Control HQ So Important and What Does It Do?
Control HQ is the central dashboard for Dollie. It lets you achieve practically everything you need to manage sites, offer support, win repeatable revenue, and much more.
We can’t understate its importance. Control HQ enables you to manage client sites and revenue streams without accessing the WordPress dashboard. This custom control panel is a time-saver, workflow enhancer, and much more efficient than competing tools and services.
What Plans Does Control HQ Feature On?
Control HQ is central to Dollie. As such, it features on every available plan. This includes the powerful free tier, which lets you and two other team members use Dollie.
Why Should Dollie Be at the Center of Your WordPress Monetization Revolution?
Typical site management platforms don’t give you a comprehensive opportunity to monetize your site unlike Dollie. Of course, you can manage client sites. However, you can also sell services, manage customers, handle billing, and more. All of this can happen using your own branding for maximum integration and trust – something plenty of successful businesses rely on.
That’s a Wrap!
It may feel like a stretch to call Dollie’s feature set part of a WordPress monetization revolution, but the argument is strong. Control HQ is central to the concept – it lets you untangle your support and development workflows, monitor performance, and manage all of your client’s sites. What’s more, Control HQ is a part of every plan – even the free tier.
Are there any other tools and services you think are a part of a WordPress monetization revolution, such as Dollie? Let us know your opinions in the comments section below!
