MantleWP

The situation

WordPress agencies and freelancers running care plans live with a recurring problem: clients pay a monthly fee for "maintenance" without ever seeing the work behind it. The fix in theory is monthly reports. The fix in practice is the agency owner spending three to five hours every month copying screenshots from Wordfence, ManageWP, and a half-dozen other tools into a Google Doc that no client ever reads carefully. The reports look thin, the agency stops sending them, and six months later the client cancels because they "weren't sure what they were paying for".

MantleWP exists to make those reports automatic, branded, and actually useful — so the agency stays profitable and the client stays confident.

The brief

A standalone SaaS, MaxtDesign-built and MaxtDesign-operated, that an agency can sign up for in minutes and use to ship branded care-plan reports across an unlimited number of client sites. The reports had to be visually credible, white-labeled to the agency's brand, and produced without manual report-building. AI executive summaries at the top of each report had to translate the technical content into language a non-technical client would act on.

Architecture decisions

We built MantleWP as three connected pieces. A Next.js dashboard runs on Vercel and gives the agency operator one place to manage every site, schedule reports, and customise branding. A purpose-built WordPress connector plugin installs on each managed site and streams health-check, security, plugin-update, uptime, and Core Web Vitals data back to the central API. A server-side PDF render engine compiles that data into branded reports, with Anthropic's Claude generating the executive summary section from the structured data.

The plugin runs read-mostly to keep the security surface small — it pulls health data and pushes it; it never accepts arbitrary instructions back from the API. PDFs render server-side with Puppeteer so the output looks identical regardless of what device the client opens it on. AI summary generation was deliberately gated behind a per-section budget so a single misbehaving site can't blow up the agency's monthly inference cost.

Outcomes

First report ships in under fifteen minutes after the agency signs up — install the plugin, paste the connector key, hit "Generate". Recurring reports schedule themselves and email or Slack to the client on whatever cadence the agency picks. The white-label setup covers logo, colour palette, font stack, and the "from" name on the email — clients see the agency's brand, not ours.

The platform is now MaxtDesign's flagship SaaS and the basis for several agency-tier deployments.

What we'd evolve

The version one report is good but text-dense. A v2 with embedded charts (uptime trend, plugin-update cadence, traffic delta when site work shipped) is the obvious next step. The connector plugin will eventually need a multi-tenant version for agencies with their own white-label resellers — currently it's one connector per site, which is right for the typical agency but breaks at the resold-care-plan scale.