WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world.
Many sites worldwide use it for good reasons: It extensibility means that you can build more than just a website; its open-source nature means you own your site, and it tends to rank pretty well in search engines. Your only limit when it comes to WordPress is your imagination.
However, like a lot of other forms of websites, it does need some care to manage to make sure it’s safe and secure.
This can be a bit intimidating for a new user, but with a bit of planning, you can have a management strategy for your WordPress websites that works and is scalable for your business.
In this article I’ll share the questions I ask myself to manage WordPress in a scalable fashion.
Which Version Of WordPress Is Right For You?
The first question to ask is before your WordPress website is even built and how your project is structured.
If you are running multiple instances of WordPress where each one is relatively similar, WordPress multisite may be suitable.
This is where you run one instance of WordPress but have multiple websites running off one database, and one copy of every plugin and theme. It means scheduled tasks, such as plugin updates and backups, only need to run on one codebase.
WordPress multisite is great for larger sites that are all relatively similar – so subdomains for each department, or different languages or locales are perfect for multisite.
If you have, for example, a site and a blog subdomain, both running on WordPress, then I’d recommend looking at this approach. You can even have a WooCommerce solution in one of those subdomains.
If you’re an SEO agency running multiple WordPress sites, I recommend managing each instance separately.
The bespoke nature of client work could mean that the amount of plugins and themes installed and available for every user will be massive.
There could be client confidentiality issues. Every client could potentially see each other’s themes and plugins.
Also, there are potential security implications with one point of failure. If one site is compromised, then all the other sites in the network could be at risk.
Furthermore, not all hosts support WordPress multisite, so you really should speak to your host. It also requires a bit more technical knowledge to implement.
Should you wish to investigate multisite, then WordPress has a guide on how to install WordPress multisite network. However, for the rest of this guide, I assume you’re using the vanilla version of WordPress.
Begin With Tools You May Not Know You Have (But Don’t Rely On Them)
WordPress and your host may have some tools available to you that you can use to automate some of the management.
Speak to your host and find out if they offer backups, how often, and where they are stored (backups hosted on the same server as the WordPress sites are next to useless!).
If they do, go through the process of restoring the backup of a staging server and document that process. Some hosts also put their backups behind a paywall, so you don’t want to rely on them.
WordPress has the ability to enable auto-updates. Before enabling this, run through a test update of all plugins and themes on a staging server and review.
If themes have been edited without the creation of a child theme, then theme edits will be overwritten. Likewise, if changes were made to the plugins, then there could be errors.
If things haven’t been updated for a while, jumping from a very old version of the site to the latest may fail. Running through these changes on a staging server and testing thoroughly before deploying to live will minimize potential issues.
If both those tests are completed fine, they should be safe to auto-update. Even if there is a problem and the site triggers a fatal error, the update will usually roll back to a working version of the site.