How to Efficiently Manage Multiple WordPress Sites using ManageWP
Managing multiple WordPress sites can be frustrating and time consuming. Unless you are hosted with a managed WordPress hosting provider like WPEngine, keeping all of your WordPress site up to date becomes your responsibility. Sometimes, one missed WordPress update is all it takes for hackers to potentially ruin all of our hard work. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a single dashboard that lets you easily update plugins, write new posts, monitor for traffic and downtime, check your analytics, do SEO analysis on posts, create backups, and much more without logging into each site individually? If you like the sound of it, then you will really love this article. In this article, we will show you how to efficiently manage multiple WordPress sites using ManageWP.
What is ManageWP?
ManageWP is a tool that allows you to easily manage multiple WordPress sites efficiently. It is an ultimate dashboard that lets you control all of your sites from a single location. You can easily upgrade all of your WordPress sites with one click. You can see which plugins on which sites need to be updated, and update all of them without ever logging into to the site. You can publish posts to your sites from a single dashboard rather than individually logging into them. It also allows you to moderate comments across your site from a single dashboard (which a lot of bloggers would love).
You are probably thinking, that this much power on a single dashboard can be a high security risk. Well, it is not because the team at ManageWP have made security their #1 priority. All data is encrypted to the highest security standards. They have also integrated with Sucuri (same service that we use) to monitor all sites for security risks. Last but not least, they have two-factor authentication which only allows someone to login if they have your phone and your password at the same time.
How to Use ManageWP
Before you start, we want you to know that ManageWP offers a free 30 days trial with all the features. After that you can either purchase a subscription or continue to use their basic package (for up to five sites) completely free of charge.
First thing you need to is signup with ManageWP by clicking on the Get Started button. No payment information is required. Once you have signed up, lets go ahead and add your first website to your new ManageWP account.
Just hit the “Add your first website” button on the dashboard and enter your site’s URL along with the WordPress administrator account username:
There are a few extra options available to you but let’s not worry about them for the time being. As you are adding your new site, you will be prompted to install the ManageWP worker plugin which will sit on your site and communicate with your ManageWP account. You will be taken to your site’s WordPress dashboard in order to install and activate the worker plugin.
Once you have installed and activated the plugin just click back to your ManageWP account and hit “Add Site” again. Your new ManageWP account is now officially up and running.
From this point on, you can go in and do everything like you would on your WordPress dashboard. The user interface for ManageWP is very intuitive and easy to work with. We will go through and briefly mention all the features that we like in ManageWP.
Our Favorite ManageWP Features
ManageWP has a lot of features that it offers, and there is not enough room in the article for us to cover all of them. We will only mention some of our favorite features.
One Click Updates
There are probably a lot of same plugins that you use on every single WordPress installation. We know that we use a lot of the same plugins such as SEO by Yoast and Gravity Forms and various others. These plugins are very popular, and when it updates on one site, we have to login to each site and update them manually.
Fortunately this no longer has to be the case when using ManageWP. Just use the one click update feature to update all themes, plugins and even WordPress core installations. If you have any outdated plugins or themes on your site, then it will show up on the ManageWP dashboard like so:
Just hit the “Update All” button and ManageWP takes care of the rest! You can also update items selectively if you want to.
Scheduled Backups
Backing up your sites should be a huge priority but there are two problems:
- Free solutions are typically only available site by site, which is a real pain when it comes to managing your backups and making sure that everything is in order.
- Standalone premium solutions typically cost an arm and a leg.
ManageWP has built-in scheduled backup functionality, with the ability to save backup files to everywhere from Amazon S3 to email to FTP. The process is pretty intuitive. Just click on the “Backups” link in the sidebar, hit “Create a new backup task”, then fill in the details:
You can also integrate other backup destinations such as Dropbox and Google Drive. Just follow the onscreen instructions. Fair notice: we are using VaultPress to handle our backups.
SEO Features
Everyone we talk with is always trying to optimize their site for SEO. Yes, we are guilty of that as well. Google and other search engines provide an opportunity that one would be foolish to ignore (see how we increased our organic search traffic).
With that in mind, keeping track of your analytics, ranking data, and other SEO data can be a real pain. ManageWP makes it easy for you to see everything on one screen. You can hook up your Google Analytics account with ManageWP by granting access via the Settings screen.
Follow the simple two-click process and you can access Google Analytics data directly from your ManageWP dashboard.
You can also access rank tracking data by clicking on “SEO” in the sidebar. Select the sites and the keywords that you want to track, and ManageWP will figure out which keywords apply to which sites automatically. Those keywords will then be added to the tracking queue.
You’ll also notice a huge selection of SEO data available to you, such as PageRank, Alexa rank, and so on.
Mobile WordPress Site Management
ManageWP also launched their iOS app which allows you to manage your WordPress sites from anywhere with an internet connection:
Almost all of the features mentioned above are available to you via the iOS app. They also utilize push notifications so that you can be instantly alerted of website downtime and traffic spikes.
Conclusion
Above we have given you a sneak peek at just a few of the things that are possible with ManageWP which allows you to efficiently manage multiple WordPress sites. We didn’t cover bunch of other features that they have such as site cloning, code snippets, bulk user management, etc.
ManageWP is totally free to try for 30 days, and totally free to use for up to five sites thereafter. If you have more than one website, just the free feature is good enough to handle the basics (such as updates). It is a huge time saver, and you can easily save yourself a few hours every month.
Just head on over to the ManageWP site and get started now! And if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.
