SolidWP Review: Secure & Manage Your WordPress Site

SolidWP, formerly known as iThemes, has built a strong reputation in the WordPress ecosystem. If you’ve used iThemes Security or Backup Buddy before, you’re likely familiar with their website protection and backup solutions expertise.

Now rebranded as SolidWP, this comprehensive suite offers a robust solution designed to secure WordPress websites, provide reliable backups, and simplify site management. As one of the best WordPress security options available, SolidWP combines powerful features to protect your entire WordPress website while streamlining management tasks.

My SolidWP reviews highlight its effectiveness in safeguarding multiple WordPress websites through enhanced security measures and an intuitive user interface. Managing multiple websites with Solid Central and protect with the Nextgen backups.

The SolidWP Suite includes:

• Solid Security Pro – Advanced protection against cyber threats
• Solid Backup – A cloud-first backup solution for reliable site recovery
• Solid Central – Solid Central– A central dashboard for remote multi-site management
• Solid Academy – Expert training and support for WordPress users

SolidWP Suite is an all in one solution for all your websites.

Solid Security Pro (formerly iThemes Security) is the flagship security plugin in the SolidWP Suite, built to defend your WordPress site from evolving cyber threats. With WordPress being a prime target for hackers, having a robust security solution is essential. Solid Security Pro offers advanced protection, from login security to patching vulnerable software, ensuring your site stays protected at every level.

Solid Security Pro is an all-in-one WordPress security plugin that safeguards your site against brute-force attacks, malware, and unauthorized access. Whether managing a personal blog or a business website, security vulnerabilities can put your data and users at risk.

The plugin makes it easy to:
✔ Set up strong passwords
✔ Block repeated failed login attempts
✔ Protect against vulnerable software exploits
✔ Secure entry points with modern authentication methods

If you’re looking for basic security, SolidWP also offers Solid Security Basic, a free version available in the WordPress plugin repository. While it provides essential security features, Solid Security Pro unlocks advanced protections, making it a more substantial choice for businesses and high-traffic sites.

If you ever need to secure your site, there are steps and tips for recovering from a WordPress hack and preventing future attacks.

An easy-to-understand Setup Wizard helps you install SolidWP Security

• Two-Factor Authentication (2FA): This technology enhances login security by requiring both a password and a second factor for identity verification, significantly reducing the risk of compromised accounts.
• Brute Force Protection: Block automated tools and bad users from attempting to break into your site by guessing passwords through repeated login attempts. This proactive measure prevents attackers from gaining access to your valuable data.
• Patchstack Virtual Patching: Stay ahead of security vulnerabilities with virtual patching for outdated or vulnerable software. This feature protects your site, even if a plugin or theme still needs to be updated.
• Passkeys and Biometric Logins: For a more secure and convenient login experience, use strong passwords and modern biometric login methods like fingerprint or facial recognition.
• Malware Scanning: Regularly scan your site’s core files for malware and other harmful software. This will allow you to address security issues before they lead to bigger problems.
• File Change Detection: Monitor your site’s files and receive alerts whenever there are unauthorized changes—this is an important feature in preventing malicious file injections.
• User Groups and Role Management: Tailor your security profile by managing access through custom user groups, ensuring that only the appropriate individuals have the right level of access.
• IP Blocking: Instantly block suspicious IP addresses to prevent them from targeting your site with brute force attacks or other hacking attempts.
• Security Audit Logs: Track all activity on your site, including login attempts and changes to critical settings, so you can conduct thorough security audits to ensure everything is secure.

Solid Security Pro faces competition from other popular solutions, such as Wordfence Security and Sucuri Security, regarding WordPress security plugins. Both offer comprehensive protection, with Wordfence providing a free version and premium upgrades, while Sucuri offers a cloud-based firewall and malware protection.

However, Solid Security Pro integrates deeply with the rest of the SolidWP suite, giving you a unified experience for site management and security.

Moreover, Solid Security Pro’s combination of Patchstack virtual patching, two-factor authentication, and brute force attack prevention makes it one of the most effective solutions for safeguarding against the latest cyber threats.

Solid Security uses fewer resources since it won’t constantly scan the website for known vulnerabilities; instead, virtual patching from Patchstack is used when needed.

Managing multiple WordPress sites can quickly become overwhelming, but Solid Central makes it effortless. Whether you’re maintaining one site or dozens, Solid Central brings everything into one place, streamlining the process so you can focus on what matters—growing your online presence.

Solid Central is a powerful tool designed to simplify the management of multiple WordPress sites from a single dashboard. Instead of logging in and out of each site to make updates or install new plugins, Solid Central allows you to perform these tasks across all your sites at once. It’s perfect for managing agencies, developers, or anyone with multiple WordPress sites. The intuitive onboarding experience makes it easy to set up, even if you’re managing several sites.

Solid Central handles version management efficiently, helping you keep track of WordPress core updates, plugins, and themes. You’ll no longer worry about outdated software, as Solid Central ensures all your sites are running the latest versions.

• Centralized Management: Manage multiple WordPress sites from one dashboard, eliminating the need to log in separately to each site.
• Automated Updates: Easily automate plugin, theme, and WordPress core updates across all your sites, ensuring they stay up-to-date and secure.
• Install Plugins in Bulk: You can install and manage plugins across all your sites in bulk, saving you time and effort.
• Uptime Monitoring and Reporting: Monitor your sites’ uptime and receive detailed reports, ensuring that your sites stay live and any downtime is addressed quickly.
• Timeline Feature: View a timeline of recent changes across all your sites, such as updates and new installations, helping you stay informed of what’s happening.
• Software Updates: Automatically push software updates to all your sites, ensuring nothing is left behind or vulnerable due to outdated versions.

While Solid Central is a great solution for WordPress site management, other tools offer similar features, such as ManageWP and WP Umbrella. ManageWP provides free basic tools with paid add-ons for features like automated backups and uptime monitoring. WP Umbrella focuses on performance and uptime monitoring with a user-friendly interface and flexible pricing. However, Solid Central’s integration with the broader SolidWP suite—especially Solid Security Pro and Solid Backup—gives it an edge for those seeking an all-in-one site management and security solution.

Solid Backups—NextGen isn’t like the backup plugins you’re used to. In fact, it’s not a plugin at all. SolidWP has completely re-engineered how backups are handled by shifting the entire process to the cloud. This means backup tasks no longer slow down your website or consume your hosting server’s resources. Instead, you get faster, more efficient backups that ensure your data is always safe.

Traditional backup solutions rely on your hosting environment to handle backups, which can strain server resources, slow down performance, and create complications during busy times. Solid Backups—NextGen takes a different approach by offloading the entire backup process to SolidWP’s cloud infrastructure. Whether you’re performing a complete site backup or running a backup before installation of new plugins or updates, the process is quick and seamless. Your server stays free to handle visitor traffic and other tasks while backups are managed efficiently in the cloud.

With Solid Backups—NextGen, your backups are initiated from SolidWP’s cloud, offering faster performance and eliminating the need for heavy server-side processes. This saves space and ensures your backups are more reliable and consistent.

• Cloud-First Infrastructure: All backups are powered by SolidWP’s cloud, ensuring your hosting server’s resources aren’t impacted during the backup process.
• Rocket Fast Performance: Backups happen quickly and efficiently since they’re initiated offsite, leaving your hosting server free to handle visitors and other tasks.
• One-Click Restore: Restoring your site is as simple as clicking a button. Whether it’s a complete backup or a partial restore, the process is quick and easy.
• Centralized Management Dashboard: Manage all your backups from one place, saving time and giving you full control over the process.
• Automatic Versioning: Only necessary files are backed up, avoiding unnecessary resource use and lightening your backups.
• Activity Timeline: Keep track of all your backups and restores with a simple, easy-to-navigate timeline view.
• Simplified Settings: The interface is designed to be intuitive, making proper backup management easy even for the least technically inclined.

While Solid Backups—NextGen is a unique cloud-first solution, other popular WordPress backup tools may come to mind:

• UpdraftPlus: One of the most widely used WordPress backup plugins, UpdraftPlus offers scheduled regular backups and the ability to store your data in remote locations like Google Drive and Dropbox. While it’s not a cloud-first solution, it’s great for users who need a. It is an option with flexibility.
• Duplicator: Known for its ease of use in site migration and backup, Duplicator lets you create complete backups of your site, including all files and databases. However, it relies on your hosting environment to perform the backups. It’s ideal for users who frequently migrate sites but lack the cloud-first efficiency of Solid Backups—NextGen.

While these alternatives offer robust features, Solid Backups—NextGen is a cloud-first solution that minimizes server load while ensuring efficient, reliable backups. It is perfect for anyone looking for a streamlined, modern backup system.

SolidWP isn’t just about providing tools for managing and securing your WordPress site; it’s also about empowering you to grow through learning and support. That’s where Solid Academy comes in. It offers a range of premium courses designed to help you master WordPress management, security, and optimization, no matter your level of experience.

Solid Academy’s premium courses are practical and easy to follow, covering everything from WordPress setup to advanced optimization techniques. Each course is designed with real-world applications, so you can immediately implement what you learn to improve your site.

One unique feature of Solid Academy is the weekly office hours, where you can get personalized support. Here’s how it works: you submit your questions online ahead of time, and during office hours, Nathan—a WordPress expert—answers by providing solutions and showing how to implement them. It’s a hands-on approach that helps you fully understand and apply the process. This interactive element sets Solid Academy apart, giving you the support that most online courses don’t offer.

By joining Solid Academy, you gain more than just access to high-quality courses—you become part of a trusted community where you can learn, ask questions, and grow alongside other WordPress users.

Regarding pricing, SolidWP Suite offers great value, especially if you’re managing multiple WordPress sites. Here’s a breakdown of the pricing:

• SolidWP Suite, 3-in-1 plugin: For $199 per year, you get access to the entire SolidWP Suite for one site. This includes Solid Security Pro, Solid Backups—NextGen, Solid Central, and access to Solid Academy. If you have multiple sites, the license cost will increase based on the number of sites you need to manage.
• Solid Security Pro: If you’re only interested in securing your site, you can purchase Solid Security Pro as a standalone plugin for $99 per year for one site.
• Solid Backups—NextGen: Pricing for Solid Backups—NextGen is based on a monthly subscription, which includes cloud storage. The price also scales depending on how many sites you want to back up.
• Solid Central: Like the suite, this tool is licensed based on the number of sites you need to manage.
• Solid Academy: Solid Academy is part of the full SolidWP Suite and is not available for standalone purchase.

If you manage more than one aspect of your site—like security, backups, and updates—I recommend purchasing the SolidWP Suite. It bundles all the key tools together for one price, making it more cost-effective than buying each tool separately. Plus, you get access to Solid Academy’s premium courses and office hours as part of the deal.

Solid Performance offers a simple, one-click solution for improving your WordPress site’s speed through page caching. Unlike more advanced solutions like Cloudflare, which leverages a global content delivery network (CDN) to cache your site’s files across various servers worldwide, Solid Performance optimizes caching directly on your hosting server. While Cloudflare is ideal for global performance and security, Solid Performance is perfect if you’re looking for an easy, free plugin to boost Core Web Vitals and improve load times without external services or complicated setup.

I’ve enjoyed working with the Solid Suite from the SolidWP Team. They’re a great group of people; some are actively involved in Solid Academy, where they’re available for Q&A sessions when needed. I’ve found that Solid Security Pro is a must-have for anyone with a WordPress site. It offers solid protection and keeps you informed with email alerts when something happens. One standout feature is the passphrase logins, which are unique in the WordPress space. They’ve worked seamlessly with my Mac’s fingerprint reader, though I haven’t tested them with Windows Hello yet. While Solid Security Pro has a lot of features, which can feel overwhelming at first, the setup wizard makes it easy to get started.

Solid Backup, however, is still relatively new and has a few rough edges. I’m using SiteGround as my hosting provider, and the setup instructions weren’t entirely clear, but I managed to get it working. During my first backup, I received several Cron Daemon emails from SiteGround stating, “Resource temporarily unavailable,” and my monitoring tool reported brief downtime. It was not the best onboarding experience, but on the second try, everything ran smoothly. To connect Solid Backup with your provider, you can use either SFTP or SSH keys. I opted for SSH, and I appreciate that all major providers are supported.

One thing worth noting is that SolidWP’s cloud servers are based in the US, which might concern some European customers. However, I’m confident the SolidWP Team will continue to improve the tool over the coming months.

Finally, Solid Academy is one of the main reasons I recommend subscribing to the SolidWP Suite. It’s a fantastic resource filled with seminars and office hours. Even if I don’t have a specific question, I always learn something new by listening to others’ issues and solutions.

Solid Academy also offers a monthly news and plugin roundup to inform you about what’s new in WordPress. Plus, there are premium webinars almost every month, usually divided into two 2-hour sessions and covering a variety of interesting topics.

I’d love to hear from you. Was this article helpful? Share your thoughts in the comments below. If you prefer, you can also reach me by email or connect with me on Reddit at Navigatetech.