In this video we'll look at a few different options for managing more than one WordPress Web site from
a single location using these proven free and inexpensive services.
You can save yourself a lot of time making updates monitoring your sites and keeping up with security.
By the end of this lesson you'll be able to make an educated choice about how and when to take advantage
of Web site management services.
When you do you'll be monitoring all your web sites closely without lifting a finger and you'll be able
to make widespread updates to WordPress core files plug ins and themes all from one dashboard here at
WBM you dev dot org.
I've got a nice blog post that was released actually three days ago according to the current date right
now and it's about choosing a WordPress management dashboard.
They do a nice review and a guide of several of these management platforms or management services giving
them a rating and talking about exactly what each one does well and what each one could improve on.
Most of these have a free level of service that you can use and see if you like it plug in a few sites
and you can continue to use it for free as long as you like with most of these.
And some of them have some premium add ons that you might want to take advantage of.
Eventually I use managed W.P. and their Orion service which is right over here.
This is their home page.
It's managed W.P. dot com and here's what it looks like.
Once I sign in my dashboard at managed W.P. shows me all the sites that are managed by this one single
service and I've got a sample account set up where I'll be showing you a few things in detail about
some sites I have set up to be managed by managed W.P. Orion.
I encourage you to read this post at WP you dev dot org as well as do your own research on what the
different companies offer and what you can get to start out with this blog post has a great overview
down here that talks about whether it's an external management or internal self-hosted option which
a few of these are and about whether you're a developer or an agency if you're going to have a lot of
different Web sites that you manage these three are probably the best for that.
But I'd encourage you to do your own research and see what available options are out there.
We've talked about WGME you dev before as having a paid membership service which gives you access to
lots of premium plug ins.
They have themes as well and a huge community of Wordpress experts I find it's real valuable for me
to be a member and one of the things they offer is this thing called the hub.
And at tracking level through their management plug in of all the different Web sites that are signed
up for their service and use the plugins and so from here instead of WBM udev once I'm logged in I can
go to any Web site and I can look at some different things like what plug ins that I have and need updating
I can have theme updates security performance and up time monitoring as well and ex-CEO as well as backups
happening or not.
I find that manage W.P. overlaps a bit of the services that my hub at WGME udev offers.
And so I just kind of take the best and what I like most from each of the services let's go through
some of the features of my managed W.P. Orion dashboard.
I'm on the dashboard here where it shows me three different sites right down here.
I can open or close this filter's list where if I had a whole lot of sites I could look at them and
look at which ones don't need an update.
Which ones are have updates available.
Which ones have secure sockets layer available and enabled et cetera.
So under this managed plug ins tab you can see that I'm managing plug ins for two Web sites and it'll
show me of all the plug ins that managed W.P. is tracking on all my web sites.
Which ones are active on which web sites so I could select any of the plug ins by checking boxes here
and then either activate deactivate deactivate and delete or even update plug ins if it's necessary.
So I'll just hit this back button to go back to the dashboard screen over here on the left hand side
I can down here I can hide those filters and then appear if you click over view you can see that this
is an overview of all of the sites tracked by managed W.P. Orion.
I've got a total of six plug ins and three themes and I could select all and update or click this update
all button on all of my web sites all at once.
It is a great timesaver if you're sure about compatibility issues and it's a very small update after
I update.
Of course I would go and check the Web sites to make sure everything's working right.
So suppose I got a notification that a certain plug in was having a security issue and it was recommended
that you update their plug in right away if I was using that plug in on more than one site which is
pretty likely in my business.
I would be able to check the box over here and just update that plug in on every one of my web sites
using managed W.P. Orion.
Now how does this work if I'm logged in at the Wordpress dashboard at one of my web sites.
Skateboard coach dot com if I go up here and look at the Web sites list instead of this grid list I
could go over here and look at them in an unordered list here.
The skateboard coach app is one of the Web sites that manage W.P. is managing for me.
And now over here it does tell me that I have to plug ins ready to be updated so click the updates button
here.
Now how does manage WP Orion know that there are two plugins available for an update inside of my skateboard
coach app.
I've downloaded the free managed WP Werker plug in and activated it and connected it to my managed W.P.
account.
This is all free to start out with and all the services I'm outlining here are within their free version.
So here it is the managed WP worker.
I have it activated over here at Wordpress dark.
I went over to the search under plug ins and I typed managed W.P..
Here it is here.
The managed WP worker plug in.
They keep it updated and it's compatible with the latest version of wordpress.
It is just a great plug in that lets manage WP go and log in as you and make changes on your behalf
inside your Wordpress Web sites.
If you're managing multiple Web sites in your business one of the great advantages is that you can log
in to your WP admin or your Wordpress dashboard directly from the managed WP dashboard.
That means you don't have to remember usernames and passwords or be forced to use the same username
and password for all of your client site accounts that manage W.P..
Well remember all those usernames and passwords for you if I just hit W.P. admin right here that will
log me directly to the scape or coach dot com app and I'm logged in as the administrator.
It's actually a more secure way to log into your website dashboard because you don't even have to visit
the WP log in page and type in your username and password at all.
So let's take a look at managed W.P. in action very quickly.
You can see that I have to plug in updates on my skateboard coach app website.
It tells me that I'm using Word Press 4.6 which says there's no updates available for the WP or the
word press corps and I do have three theme updates.
Now if I click these two I just select them there and click Update.
This is my progress bar up here and it should very quickly update those plugins for me.
Now that it's finished I can see it gives me that nice message.
All the plug ins are up to date.
Let's go over to the Wordpress dashboard at scape or coach dot com and just refresh the page and take
a look at what it tells us like that the plugins are all updated There's no message here.
The only thing I have are three themes that I need to update.
Great.
These three themes again as in the last video instead of just go into them individually and deleting
each theme because I'm not using these I'll go ahead and delete them out of my wordpress installation.
I can do that a lot faster by going to manage W.P. dashboard and going over to the themes page here.
Now if I check each of these themes that allow me to update it right here but if I go back to the themes
page for this Web site that I'm managing I can see that I have one active theme and three inactive themes.
Here's where I want to I can just check each of these themes and go down and delete all of them.
W.P. manage O'Brien will take care of that for me in one big group.
And it just makes it faster and easier.
Back in the Wordpress dashboard for the skate board coach app you can see I've updated the Wordpress
updates page and no more themes are there to update.
I could just go to appearance and themes and let's see what themes I have just the one current activated
theme is in my wordpress installation now that everything's updated on that Web site.
Let's just go through a few more things that manage WPA O'Bryan can do it can manage your users of which
the managed W.P. worker plug in is one and you can manage security where you can run a security check
on each of your web sites whenever you want.
You can also manage performance and speed using their performance.
Check right here these four and the fifth the backups feature are all part of their premium add ons.
It has different pricing and it's really very inexpensive.
You go to their Web site and click the pricing page.
All the things that are right here are free forever on an unlimited number of Web sites.
But if you go down here if you do per Web site or bundle them into over 25 Web sites you can see that
all these features are pretty affordable.
The managed W.P. service can do periodic backups and store them offsite separate from your server backups.
It can monitor up time and send you a text message or an email if one of your sites goes down.
It can monitor SBO provide a client report so that weekly or monthly You can give a traffic and security
and speed and performance report to your client as a part of your website care and maintenance plan
which will be going over and future videos and you can white label the service and the client reports.
So they don't know that you're using this service and it looks like it's just coming from your business.
Another couple of tools are down here.
Your own system info for each of your web sites at the server maintenance mode where if you're doing
some maintenance on the site behind the scenes and you want to hide that you can do it and take care
of it with manage W.P. and the history of course of all your activity here and a way to roll back.
But in each one is the code snippets area we've looked at different ways to do code snippets where if
you need to add a piece of code to the functions dot ph P file you should use a child theme or a code
snippets plugin so that you're not altering the theme itself but an interesting thing that you can do
here is if you look at your web sites and then select each of the Web sites that you have you can add
a code snippet to all of your web sites at the same time.
This can be really useful for adding a personal message from your business.
Right on the Wordpress dashboard for your client.
It's a really powerful code snippets plug in.
Plus if you do something wrong and it breaks the site for any reason you can always remove the code
snippet here using your managed W.P. service.
In this lesson I showed you what you can do to save time increase security and manage a group of web
sites easily using a WordPress Web site management service.
This can really make your business and your client relationships better by providing an easy to administer
value added service for web site care and maintenance plans you can sell to clients.
You'll learn how to create recurring revenue for your business this way later in the chapter in the
next video we'll go over the levels of security provided by different types of web site hosting companies
and how best to engage with them.
I'll show you how to make sure you take advantage of all your hosting company provides and set your
websites up to be as protected as possible from getting hacked or going down