Even with both enabled, please don’t rely on them. There are often gotchas, especially with more complex solutions, that you may need to work around.
This is learned knowledge you put into your plan of action. Furthermore, hosts can go bust or change their offering, often at short notice, so it’s a good idea to have a host-independent plan.
Prepare A Plan
Before managing multiple WordPress sites, you need to have a plan. This is what you do on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
For “daily” tasks, they should be automated – these are your uptime and security monitoring, automatic backups, and updates.
Weekly tasks are more manual tasks – any updates that were missed by the daily tasks, visual checks, and testing if functionality on the site works as intended.
Every month, some time should be dedicated to analyzing Google Search Console errors, testing the loading time of key pages, and searching for broken links. You should also dedicate some time every few months to review plugins and identify ones that have been either abandoned or removed from the WordPress repository. Doing such reviews can help fend off security issues arising in the future.
For weekly and monthly tasks, pick a number of pages to look at. These are key pages – either high conversion or traffic pages or pages that have unique functionality.
If you have an ecommerce site, place a test order too.
Finally, you should put a plan in place for what happens if something goes wrong. This is typically if the site gets hacked, or if the site goes down for a considerable length of time.
Do a dummy restore of the site, to make sure it works, and have a plan for what occurs when a minor security breach (such as a vulnerability) is discovered. A well built website with up-to-date plugins and themes, on a good host, is unlikely to be hacked, but nipping security vulnerabilities in the bud can help this. Below, I share a few tools that have security monitoring linked to services like Patchstack.
Store this plan somewhere. I have a spreadsheet I use to manage my clients, containing the client name and contact, what package they are subscribed to, the key pages, as well as any gotchas associated with the client’s sites. After setting this up, you’re ready to go.
Tools You Can Use To Manage Multiple Websites On WordPress
Thankfully, to save time, there are a number of tools to help you manage multiple WordPress sites.
These will tend to allow you to update multiple sites from one dashboard, and handle things such as security and uptime monitoring.
They are largely very similar, and unless you have a particularly bad experience, you are unlikely to move them.
Here are some of the main players:
ManageWP allows free updates and monthly backups for free. Payment services are usually “addons,” which start at $1-$2 per site for each addon such as EU and U.S. server backups, uptime monitoring (which integrates with Slack), security and performance monitoring, and link monitoring. A site with all premium add-ons would cost $9/month. If you have over 25 sites, you can bundle services, with a maximum cost of $150/month, for 100 sites. For full disclosure, I use ManageWP.
MainWP also allows free updates. It’s popular in the industry but a bit more complex, as it offers 30+ extensions that handle security and uptime monitoring, as well as integration with popular plugins like WooCommerce, Yoast, and WP Rocket, so you can analyze and update all your sites in one place. You will need to set up backups separately, and it costs $199/yr for unlimited sites or $599 for a lifetime license.
InfiniteWP has a free tier which allows you to update WordPress and plugins, and backup manually that you can download. Its premium tier, however, allows scheduled backups to the cloud, malware scanning, uptime monitoring, broken link checkers, and 15+ other features. Pricing for premium is tiered, starting at $147/year for 10 sites, up to $647/yr for unlimited sites and users.
WPRemote allows you to update plugins and themes for free. It has premium tiers with backups, staging site creation, uptime monitoring, and security and vulnerability scans. Premium tiers start at $299/year for five sites at the “Basic” level to $9,999/year for 100 sites at the “Pro” level.
A Simple Plan For Managing Multiple WordPress Websites
If you are part of in-house development, or a marketing team managing multiple similar WordPress websites, then a WordPress multisite installation may be suitable for your needs.
For the vast majority of agencies, multiple WordPress installations with separate databases and potentially hosts is the way forward. Running an entire agencies clients websites through a WordPress multisite installation would become unwieldy quickly.
For both approaches, a few simple steps can be taken to help manage multiple WordPress websites:
Prepare a task list for all WordPress sites to be split into daily, weekly and monthly tasks.
To begin, run through each task with each client, to manually identify potential gotchas, and include these in your notes.
Come up with a disaster recovery plan for worst case scenarios.
Offload as many tasks as possible, such as security and uptime monitoring and backups to a third party.
Doing this will keep your website secure, up to date, and with every performant optimisation in the latest versions of WordPress on your sites as quickly as possible.
More Resources:
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