How To Manage Multiple WordPress Sites for FREE with MainWP

so do you struggle hard to maintain manage and update WordPress websites especially if you have quite a few if you got one or two it's pretty simple and straightforward when you get 5 10 15 20 it does take a lot more time and can be quite time-consuming especially if you have to update the same thing over and over again what about backups what about your storing new plugins and those kinds of things all these things take time if you have to do it on multiple WordPress websites well I may have a solution that's going to make your life considerably easier quicker and ultimately stress-free today we're going to be taking a look at main WP it's a completely free plugin for WordPress we're going to tie that into some other services and again we're going to be using the free options of these so we can do things like uptime monitoring backup services and things along those lines so if you're interested in saving yourself time ease in the whole process of updating your WordPress websites managing security and all those kinds of good things stick around I'm gonna take you through everything right now well - paal see this is wptouch the channel where I have to get more from WordPress if you like what we do around here please consider subscribing and hit that Bell icon below to become partner WP crew be notified every time new content is added okay so let's go through the whole process I've broken this down into easy steps each of those steps is outlined in a timestamp in the description below so if you want to jump through to any point jump back go over anything again all those options are available for your day so let's take a look at the first stage which is go to the process of installing everything so the first thing we're going to take a look at is how we go through the process of setting up main WP now there's a couple of ways you can do this and they're optional as part of the set up process so we'll take a look at that in a moment when we move on but the real thing behind it is there's two ways in which you can set things up you can set it up on your local computer so you could set up and use it like with local by flywheel or xampp or anything that allows you to set up your local computer as a sort of server or you can just use a normal hosting account and that's the method that we're going to take a look at today the reason I'm choosing this is because it gives me the ability to be anywhere I can be at a client's I could be on holidays I think it'd be anyway and I can access this directly from my server directly from my hosting account if I set it up but I only want to operate from my own local setup then obviously that's a different option so this is entirely up to you which way you'd want to go about it but we have those two options during the setup process so let's just jump over now install main WP and set things up and then we move on to the next stage so the first thing we need to do is go ahead and set everything up inside our clean copy of WordPress now you can use this in multiple different ways but what I've done and what I would generally tend to recommend doing is either set up a subdomain or have a domain that's dedicated just to working with main WP just keeps everything clutter free you don't install plug-ins to do other things and you have a nice clean simple interface just for dealing with managing your websites and that's what we're going to be doing so what I'm going to do is come into the plugins section I've searched for main WP and you can see there are a couple of different options we've got the main WP child which we'll be taking a look at in a few moments when we look at linking this through to another site and the main WP dashboard this is the plug-in that we're going to be using to actually do the whole maintenance and management of our WordPress sites so we're gonna do is click on Install Now let that download all the files once that's completed we'll go ahead and activate it and then we can see how we can start setting things that were configuring things to do what we need so that's downloaded all we're going to do is click on the activate option let them activate and will then have a new section that allows you to go through and follow through a very simple wizard that takes us to the whole process of setting these things up if you don't want to you can skip straight out of this or you can do it all manually however I would recommend if you're new to this to go to the process of letting this guide you through the stages of setting everything up so you can see we can click on let's go or we can go back to the WP admin or we can say not right now if we say let's go we're gonna go through this wizard and we've got ten different stages we can go through but the time we finished we should have everything set up the way we want now the first thing area is what type of server setup is this you can set this up to be on a web host is what we are going to do or you could set it up on a local host set up for this example I'm going to show you the web host version of it so we'll choose that we'll click on continue done then takes us over to the system check and this is going to go through and make sure that your system whether that's the local host system or on a web server all meet the requirements that we need so you can see a minimum version of PHP that you've got SSL extensions enabled and other things on there as well so making sure that you have all those all meeting those minimum requirements if not you're going to need to contact your hosting company or look at an alternative that's going to meet these requirements so we've met everything on there we've passed all that so the next thing is we can install the main WP child to it click on continue now this isn't allowing us to go through and say that we want to install this on our other site so you can see it gives us a breakdown of what actually goes on said main de l'épée requires the main WP child plug-in to be installed and activated on the WordPress site that you want to connect your main to Rapide dashboard in other words any of those sites that you want to connect and managed through main WP has to have that plug-in installed now we don't need to worry about that right now we can take a look at adding that and I'll show you that manually afterwards so you can see exactly how to do it so we'll say main WP child is installed so we say ok on that one and then the next thing is it says we can now connect our first child site if we want to so this is going to ask us a couple of different questions and provide them we have a site that has this information set up on it the plug-in is installed we can fill out the details on here and we can match everything up and then we can move on with our first site installed now I'm not gonna worry about that I'm gonna just continue past this and it's going to take us on to the next stage so we can click on continue and you can see it says whatever hosting is the main WP dashboard site on and I was what is this version not the child version what it is it on a shared hosting environment a virtual private server VPS or dedicated server so we're not a shared hosting environment for this example but obviously you need to choose whatever is applicable to your specific circumstances if you say shared hosting how many child's sites are you planning to manage in other words how many sites we want control of is really less than or more than 50 websites so again meeting your requirements choose either less time or more than for me this is just a demo site so I'm gonna say less than 50 sites I don't click on continue' obviously you can if you want to you can skip any of these stages or you can jump back at any point if you want to go back and make changes to anything you put in there hit continue that's going to go through the optimization so this is just gonna go through and tweak things to make sure that we get the best user experience when working with main WP so this is just saying this allows the main BB dashboard to automatically update the main WP child plug-in wherever or whenever a new version is available so this is something you altima t want to say yes to because whenever there's an update of the both the main WP software and the child theme plug-in say the child plug-in you want to make sure that's always up-to-date to avoid any kind of problems with security so we say continue and we've got the notification so what do you want to do with notifications you can see do you want to receive important email notifications from your dashboard it's up to you but I would recommend that you do because obviously if something goes wrong especially if you do it uptime monitoring and backups and all those kinds of things you can want to be notified if there's a problem especially if you're working with clients so it's obviously worthwhile making sure you have that enabled if you want to have this go through to multiple email addresses if you work in an office and you've got multiple points of contact that we'll be dealing with making sure that the websites are all up-to-date and operating in the optimal levels you can add additional emails in here it's also worth noting that these are not sales emails these are specific just to your main WP dashboard and the websites and the services you have associated with it so it's highly recommended you say yes you want to use that but obviously it's entirely up to you how you want to proceed so we'll click on continue next thing to do is go through into the backups so as are you planning to use the main WP for backups now we'll take a look at backups in its own section inside this video and like I say this timestamps in the sections below so if you want to jump through to any of the given points by all means use those and jump around as you need to so if you are going to use this for backups you need to enable the option and we can link this through to other different services like SWS and all those kinds of things we could set it up with various different kind of third-party plugins to deal with backups so we'll say yes we are and you can see says backup systems can be changed later at any time and we can click and you can see we have a couple of options all of these are using free extensions however that doesn't mean that the service you gotta use is necessarily free most of these will have a free option but if you want to utilize more of their services for more storage more sites and so on then they may incur additional charges which worth bearing that in mind when you choose whatever backup option you want but like say none of this is written in stone you can come back at any point and change these inside the main WP dashboard itself so for now I'm going to just disable that we're gonna say continue because we'll add that in and later independently so the next action is the Delta P cron now if you don't know what a cron job is which might sound a little bit weird and be confusing all it really means is you can set things up on your server to automatically run at given times so you may say that you want to run a specific function at 12 p.m. every single day or you may say you want to do a nother function every minute of every day that's what a cron job does it's something to set up on the server to automatically run different things different scripts different actions and things along those lines so you can see we've got the main WP relies on a built in WordPress file called WP cron PHP which like its name suggests is part of the normal install of WordPress this is used to trigger scheduled events so saying however since we suggest that you install your main liquid dashboard on a fresh dedicated site it's not really gonna get any traffic so this may not do what you wanted to do it may not trigger these actions so I say this you can use a scheduled tasks such as automate updates may not be triggered in a timely manner so if that is going to be the case they say what you should do is set up cron jobs to regularly trigger these different actions you want so you can see says click here to authorize uptime robot and that will then set things up and automatically do what you needed to do in the background not being reliant upon users actually going on and visiting your website to trigger those actions know as this is a demonstration site I'm not going to worry about that because I could say I'm not too bothered by these actions being triggered because we're just showing you how to use this particular tool however if you click on to authorize uptime robot if you don't have an account you can set one up inside there let me do a quick search for uptime robot you can see we've got free web site monitoring i'll start monitoring in x-number seconds it gives you 50 monitors checked every five minutes totally free so if you're not running tons and tons of monitoring actions you don't have hundreds of sites on there then you could probably get away with you to the completely free option all you need to do is sign up and authorize that as part of the process so we come back into the wizard as long as you've signed up for an account if we click on click to authorize depsite robot a new window will pop up asking you to authorize it or create a new account then you can go to the process of creating that account and linking it through to your WP at your main WP so as I say continue and then we've got the finished option so it says your main dashboard and main delta p dashboard is ready we're ready to start managing our sites let's just click on that to jump over to the actual main dashboard itself and there we go there's our main WP dashboard we're going to take a look at how we can start to use this and I'm going to go through the key things are you go to do I take a look on the left hand side because sites and posts and themes and plugins and extensions or manner of really useful things so in this video for the rest of it I'm going to show you how these different tools and functions work so you can start utilizing main WP to manage your WordPress websites so the next thing we didn't look at are the options to expand what you can do with main WP and there are quite a few different options available some of these are free some of these are things you'd have to pay for but depends on what you want to do whether you want to use the paid ones like I say throughout this video we're just going to concentrate on free options that still give you a ton of functionality so let's take a look at what's available to us and how we can go about installing these and start using them as part of our main WP setup now before we take a look at all the built-in tools there are more things we can access where we want to work with main WP there are free extensions that spawned some of the things we can do and it also paid extensions now I'm not going to cover any of the paid extensions in this video you can take a look at those and if you think there's something you need to have as part of your setup then by all means go ahead purchase that and set things up let's just jump over to the extensions section and take a look at some of the things we have available so if we open that up you can see we can browse all of our main data P extensions now to access these and install them you need to set up a free account at main WP and again like I say this is a completely free account whether you use in paid subscription or paid extensions or free extensions you just have to have that to install them into main WP it's a pretty simple and painless a fee you simply select what you want click install job done so I'm gonna add my login details I'm gonna verify my login just to make sure things okay and see my login info is valid now if I browse all the main ducky extensions I can just browse everything that's available to me so once I'm logged in if I want to I can simply come over and click on install extensions and this will open up my account with anything that I purchased or any of the free options that I've gone to the purchase process and this is something you've to bear in mind even though there are a ton of free extensions you still have to go to the purchase process because that kind of associates those particular extensions with your account now once you've verified your account you'll see that the message disappears on the top of the right hand side and now we click on install extensions that will open up a pop-up that lists all the extensions that are available both free and paid for options and then anything you purchased like I said whether they're the free versions or whether they are paid for will be listed and available to you to install so you can see under administrative I've got the main WP custom dashboard extension and the main WP advanced uptime monitoring option let's just choose the main directly advanced uptime monitoring option click install and then I'm going to go through install the extension and do everything I need so I don't need to even bother doing anything I can just choose what I want hit that option to say install and then it's installed so as we can see now it's now been installed successfully so if I want to add any more or if I want to purchase any I can grab those from here so we can close that down if I want to take a look at more information about any of those I can take a look quite easily they will come back to activate in this license a little later on I'll show you how to do that if you want to take a look at all the extensions that are available we can just simply hop over to the main WP comm website under there you've got main WP extensions then click on that let's go take a sue and you can see they're all organized down into the various different types of extension that they are going to look it's just the free ones we can click on that and we can take a look at just the free option so you can see you things like della Pugh vivid back up for mein Delta P so if you using that as your backup tool of choice then you have a free plugin you can link through to main WP account no basis third party what this means is that it's not developed by main WP it's developed generally by the developers of the particular tool that you use in for example WP vivid in this example and you can see there's a lot of different options like advanced uptime monitoring like we've just installed backup WordPress backup or back WP pup or whatever is called clean and lock custom dashboard Securi updraft plus and so on so you can see there's a lot of third-party plug is a lot of free plugins a lot of plugins develop my main WP a ton a free one so I recommend take a look today and seeing things that you think are going to be useful for you and also whatever you choose to use as your backup option if that's what you got to do you'll tend to find it probably going to be a plugin they developed either by main WP or by the third-party developer to actually allow you to link the two things together okay so once you've done that when you've got your plug-in installed you need to jump up to your account and from there you can grab the API key so what you need to do is come in click on API keys and that's going to give you a list of all the different purchases like I say free or paid for and give you the API keys that you need so I'll do is jump back over here and you can see and put in the API license key I'm going to put in the email address that's associated with this account then we're going to hit activate license and that should go to the process of activating it and we can see now the extends extension license is activated successfully so we now have that new additional functionality built in to main WP so we go to the advanced uptime monitor you'll see we have the plug-in installed and we can now link this through to our uptime robot now have time robot again offers a free plan which you can take a look at it's what I use myself it's a great way mother monitor the uptime of any site that you're running and then get notified if there's a problem with that site if there's any downtime and so on so when you have a mission-critical site like an e-commerce site or something that you really don't want to have any downtime and if there is downtime you want to be notified immediately then uptime robot is something that you can utilize to do that so we'll take a look at that a little later on how we can link that through and show you how that works but for now this is basically how we go about installing the extensions the free versions are paid for once and how that whole process basically works so main WP wouldn't be a lot of use to us if we couldn't connect it to our sites and thankfully main WP makes this very very simple we can use a free plugin that just links your website through to your main WP account and in this stage we're going to take a look at doing just that so when you're ready to connected your site it's very very easy all we need to do is go to the site where you want to connect through to your main WP account come in to the plugins section I'm going to add a new plug-in so we're gonna do is add new and choose main WP search for that and the first option is main WP child so we gonna say install now let's now go to the process installing we'll activate it and then we'll go through and link this through to our main account so there we go that's downloaded install let's activate that once you've activated we can go through and set everything up so once we've activated it we get a big notice at the top telling us we need to install this or connect this through to our main WP dashboard now there are a couple of ways in which you can do this but the easiest way is to make sure that we have a unique security ID which we can generate as part of this process that means that no one else can accidentally add our site to their main directory account and potentially cause problems now the chances of this are pretty slim but it's an extra step that I would recommend you take so you can see if you wanted to find out how to do it you can just click on this link to take you through and show you or we can just go through the main to repeat child settings let's click on that go through to the settings once we're inside there we've got four different tabs what we're interested right now is Rick quite unique security ID go check that I hit Save Changes that will then refresh the page and give us this unique security ID for this specific site we're going to copy that I'm going to go back over to our dashboard so wanted to inside the dashboard for main WP we're going to come to the top and say new site they click on there we can now go through the process of adding this site in so the first thing they want to know is what's the URL to the site we want to add so go ahead fill out the site URL the administrator username and add a site title in for this and then the final thing we need to do is simply add in that unique key so you can see we are underneath the optional settings unique security ID we will drop that inside there and then we can take a look at grouping these sites together so if we are dealing with personal sites so we're dealing with WooCommerce sites or client sites or however you want to organize things you can do that inside main WP now you can do it when you add a new site in or you can do it retrospectively both methods are very very simple so you can see if we click there's nothing actually added there we'll take a look at the grouping how you do that a little later and so and dedicate your stage as part of this tutorial so for now we're going to leave that as it is we take a look underneath then we've got Advanced Options and as the name suggests most of these are optional so if you use it an SSL certificate which realistically you should be on every site you use you can say you want to verify that certificate is valid then you can say what SSL version is it and again I would recommend unless you know what you're doing just leave it as auto detect if you want to you've got HTTP username and password and you can force I pee v4 optional options and if I'm honest just leave them as they are just leave everything as is on the hit test connection and provided an owner data we put in is all relevant and we've got that plug-in in store for the child theme or the child site everything then should go through and connect successfully so you can see it tells us everything is perfectly fine we'll hit close on there our site is now ready we can hit add site and that will go to the process of adding our site you can see it tells us it's successfully added that to our dashboard and now if we come back over to our overview we'll find inside there we can see if we've got any updates relevant to that particular site or any other sites we've gone there if you want to make sure that everything is up-to-date we can hit the sync dashboard with child sites so you click on that let that run through any sites that we have will be listed underneath it'll synchronize with those sites and tell us if there's anything that needs to be updated or any problems so with that in place code our sites we're gonna say manage sites and you can see there's our site so they're a foodie blog there's the link to it any updates are available what type of updates they are whether the WordPress core files or plugins or themes the last time this was synchronized the PHP version is being used so if you run in multiple different sites possibly on different servers you may have differing versions of PHP well you can find it exactly what version is on there and if you're using this with last posts you can find out the last date that something was posted to it add notes and if you're using any kind of uptime monitoring like that at time robot we can see exactly the app time section inside they we've also got options at the end I click on the three little dots and you can see there we can sync our data from there as well so this gives us a sort of bird's eye overview of exactly what's going on with our sites so with that side of things all done we've now got the process of linking our site through into our main WP dashboard if you want to add more or more sites the process is exactly the same so all you need to do is repeat that on all the sites you want to link in and you aren't done so now that we've seen how to add sites how do we go about the process of actually organizing these so it's great to have one or two sites in it but when you start to have 30 40 50 sites and you have sites for yourself via clients and all kinds of different things we like to group these together is gonna be a godsend and in this step we're gonna take a look at doing just that so now we've installed our plugins we've gone through and I added a site in that's great when we have one or two sites but how about organizing things well like I said the previous stage grouping things together is very very easy if we expand the site's option you can see we have an option inside there this has groups click on that and that'll take us through into the group settings now currently we have no groups added in so we're gonna do is add our first group and I will see how it is so with a site let's say we're gonna create a new group from this we're gonna call this client sites we'll say save group now we've now added that in if we want to we can rename it or we can edit it we click on edit you can see we can go through and link what sites we want to inside that particular section so we click on that we can just say save selection and we've now added that particular site or group of sites into our client sites grouping so now that we've seen how to use a group on how we can link that through to a site we've already created let's gonna add another site in and link it through at that point where we grouped this in directly inside that stage so I do is come back in I've already gone ahead installed all the data that I need to actually link that site through now then the group said should we can click on there and you can see client sites is now available we can click on that come down it's a test connection just to make sure everything is working correctly there we go and I say add site that's now gone through and added that and also link it through into our groups so we come into a group section you can see there's our client sites we can do is we can just edit group and you can see there's our two sites linked directly inside there so it's very easy to do it either after you've added the site or doing the process of adding sites and like I say this is one of those things that the more sites you have the more useful this becomes when you want to organize everything in a much more logical fashion than just having everything lumped into one simple a large amount so managing updates rolling out changes and things along those lines that's one of the key reasons why we'd use a tool like main WP so this step we're gonna take a look at what we have available and how we can use that to just streamline the whole process of updating themes plugins installing plugins uses a whole ton of other things so this is where you're gonna find you spend a lot of your time inside your main tool repeat dashboard so let's take a look at how we can use all the tools that are available to us right now so then we have a couple of sites linked through towards the update section and you can see that we now have a couple of updates that we can perform as part of main WP and this is probably what most of the work you're going to do is go to entail it's going to be updating WordPress core files plug-in themes and translations so as you can see looking at the update section on the overview we've got two updates we could hit the update everything which would update every plug-in theme called translation across the entire board which is something that I would recommend not doing because if there's something goes wrong then all of your sites could be affected so it's much better to make sure you only do this one at the time on a site by site basis and potentially on a plug-in theme translation or WordPress update basis now you can disable this inside the settings and I would recommend that you do that so before we move on let's take a look at how you can disable that update everything option so you don't accidentally hit that and then update everything and end up with a ton of sites that all have a problem you come over to the settings option I simply click on the screen options that'll open up another window where we can fine tune and tweak how the interface is displayed the first opportunity has hide the update everything button I'm gonna check that just to remove that you can still use update everything in a slightly different context so for example you may have a plug-in that you used on multiple sites that you know is safe to update then you could hit update on all of the sites but it doesn't operate across every sight and every plug-in and every theme and all those kinds of things then we can go through and say how do we want to lay the widgets out so if you were using a much larger screen you could set things to display in three columns or leave it as two if you're on a smaller screen you'll also hide any unwanted widgets so if you're not monitoring your sites for example you could disable the monitors option recent pages recent posts and so on so you can tweak this to get exactly what you want it's also got the user snap button the bottom which we can enable or disable so you can see the user snap button will show in the main BB header up to you will say save settings and you see that now get rid of that large button that allows us to update everything however like I say you can see we still have an update all if we want to use that and we can use that on a plug-in theme translation core files update or we can use it on a website basis so we'll take a look at that in a little moment so now we can see all the different things that are going on we can see recent pages recent posts on our sites which site is associated with the connection status you can see we currently have two sites that are connected zero that are disconnected we also have security issues and we'll come back to that in a little bit but that's quite useful it'll take a look at your sites and see common security issues and you can correct those directly inside main WP and pretty much all of them all Bob one if I'm not mistaken you can undo if you find you have an adverse effect in your site goes offline or has a problem the only one you can't is the readme file this part of WordPress and I can't imagine that deleting that is gonna have any real problem because WordPress itself doesn't actually use it okay so we can see this is our basic overview if we join the updates section inside there we now get a much cleaner streamlined interface that shows us WordPress updates plugins themes translations any abandoned plugins that have updates and abandon themes that have updates so you may have a plug-in that you know has a problem when you don't want to update it or theme or so on which isn't recommended but there may be times where that is something you you are gonna come across well what you can do is you can ignore those if you want to or you can have them set up as abandoned it's up to you so let's take a look we've got broken down on the section underneath we can see we've got plugins the number of updates whether they trust it and we can click to expand those out or we can find out what version what website what we're running well the latest version is and we can ignore it or we can update it so currently under the jet site that I've got part of main WP you can see we run in jet test is the site the version of element was 2.8 for the latest is 2.85 well we can say this update that now that's gonna say the disable update confirmations cover the settings will ask fine would you say yes so that's gonna go through an update and you see it's now telling us is updating please wait so that's gonna go through the process of downloading check the update is being completed providing everything is okay it's gonna come back and tell us that that's been done if we want to we can then jump over to the WordPress admin for that specific site just to check things out we do the same thing then for jet engines we expand that open again you can see it shows us what website what version we're running what the latest version is tells us whether it's trusted or not so we'll say update now on there as well and we say yes we're happy with that so that's going to go to the process now of updating everything and we we have everything up to date so we'll sync our dashboard without child themes you can see we now have two sites listed inside there because you've added the second site in close that down and you can now see that refresh is all the data at the top we have no updates across the entire board so it's very very easy to go to the process of updating and seeing exactly what's due to be updated what site it's on what version we're running and all those kinds of good things now alongside the updates option inside this just updates panel we can if you want to come to the left-hand side and we've got each of those P sections things like plugins themes and so on broken down with additional option so let's just say the plugins as an example stick to open that up and you can see we can manage plugins from here so we can click go in there and we can manage any of the plugins on any of the sites so we come to this you can see we've got sites and groups so this again is where the grouping option comes in very handy we can click on groups and we can choose all of the clients sites without having to go to the sites option and choose them one by one so once you've started group things together it just makes the whole process of selecting things quickly and easy and doing bulk actions or just doing repetitive things very very quick and easy like I say when you got a couple of sites it's not really a big deal but when you have 20 30 50 a hundred sites it just makes life considerably easier you can also come in and you can filter things if you want to type in you can filter and search against the various different sites you have you've also got you can select the status so you can choose active or inactive so this is plug-in needs to be an active in order for it to be activated or deleted so you can do things like activate deactivate plugins and so on and the same with themes and so on so it's very easy to go through and choose things let's choose a group will choose client sites once we do that we can now choose bulk actions and things to do so you can see what we can do is with this with the plugins we can click on the air wing say active so this is going to filter through and find all the client sites with the active plugins once you set your filters new searches and all those kinds of things just hit show plugins and that's going go through them and show you all the plugins that are installed on any of those sites any of those groups of sites and so on so you can see we currently have two sites set up underneath the group of client sites tells us all the plugins and the versions we're running inside there and you can see they're all selectable so we can easily come through and choose if we want Elementor Pro for example we can choose all the elemental pros on all our sites inside the client sites grouping and then we can do bulk actions so we can come in today we can see we've got bulk actions we can deactivate and we can ignore updates so it's quite useful to do this kind of thing if you've got a lot of sites and you want to disable a plug-in or you want to stop it from being updated or any of those kinds of things you can use this option to finally go through and grab every one of those plugins every one of those themes and do something to it so it's quite useful to do things like that and again you can do things like select all select none so select almost like everything and we say install the selected sites so we can do various different things so it's a very powerful way of being able to go through and select sites filter sites and then do things to it baseball plugins and themes and also with users so you do the same kind of thing under the user section you can see you've got groups we can switch client sites we can select a role so you say administrators and then you can do things like search options and so on and so forth so it's very very useful if you want to pull out information and data and then do things to that data based upon the search criteria that you apply to it so that's basically how we can go through and manage the updates and how we can manage all those kinds of things so now that we've seen how we can add sites and manage sites and manage plugins all those kinds of things what about backing up our sites now you may be reliant upon your hosting company doing incremental backups for you and that's perfectly fine however it's always good to have a certain level of redundancy so let's just say for example that your site goes down or one of your client sites go down and there's a problem with your hosting company and you need to move quickly well this is where having your own dedicated backup set up is really gonna pay dividends so if you want to use things like Dropbox or Google Drive and all those kinds of things we have access to doing that and there are a ton of different plugins and services that we can tap into both free versions and paid for plans today we're going to be using WP vivid now I've already covered this in its own dedicated video so if you want to learn more about this plug-in and the kinds of things you can do and how to set it up I'd recommend taking a look at that I'll drop a link in the description below so you can check that out today I will show you the bare bones of how to do this and how we link this through to our main WP dashboard so instead of us having to log into our website we can do it all inside main WP again like I say this is a free option and there are other options available which I'd recommend you take a look at so let's jump into main WP again and let's take a look at how we Center this whole backup process now another very useful feature when you're working with main WP is the ability to link it through to various different third-party services and plugins the later backup just software backup your plugins backup your database on all those kinds of things for this example we're going to be using WP vivid I've already covered how to use W vivid in its own dedicated video if you'd like to check that out the link is in the description below so you can take a look at how the plug-in works and how you can set it up an example I've used in there is how to link it through the Dropbox that's exactly what going to do this time so it's already been set up in pretty much exactly the same way so what I've done is I've come out of the main WP dashboard back into our normal copy of WordPress where main WP is installed - and then we're going to install the WP vivid backup for main WP plugin this is a third-party plug-in and that's the reason why we do it we install it in a slightly different way so we'll just install it like we normally would any other plug-in as part of WordPress not through the main WP dashboard so once that's installed and activated we should then be able to link the two programs together and start working so let's activate this what's not activated we should be able to go in and start setting exam ok so we're going to come back at the main WP once we're inside there we can now go through and take a look at the extensions and you can see there's our BB vivid backup main WP we can click to open that up and inside there we've got a couple of options we've got the backup dashboard the schedule the remote and the settings now after we hit the sync dashboard with child sites you'll see we now get the information about any of the sites that we have as part of main WP using the main WP child and also have the WP vivid stuff we installed and set up that was a mouthful so you can see we have the foodie blog which is the only one that I've set it up on we can view the site name we can view the URL we can view a report that will cover any of the backups or anything else we've done as part of WP vivid backup we can check the latest version or we run in the status general and we can backup now if you want to use in the default settings if we jump over into the schedule you can see what we can do inside this we can choose when we want to shared your backups if we want to switch over to buy a WP food backup Pro if we purchased that then you can switch over to that and hit save however we can also do things like enable the backup schedule what the schedule is going to be what we want to backup whether the database and files all files excluding database or just the database and then we want to send the backups to do you want to keep them as part of the local storage or do we want to send them to the remote storage in this example Dropbox remote will show us the remote storage options and information and the settings allow us to configure any of the settings we want so we've got things like number of backups to be retained calculate the size of the files and folders name your folder and so on and in the advanced sections you can see we've got more options in there now this isn't really a case of going over what you can do with WP Vivid backup because this just basically mimics the settings you have inside there with a couple of extra things that'll work inside main WP let's go back to the dashboard let's click on backup now and one that does is that'll take us over to what looks very similar to the plug-in itself when you've got that installed in any site we can choose the type of backup we want to do where this database and files WordPress files or database only and whether we want to store this locally or whether you want to send it to our remote storage location we're going to choose remote storage you can see Dropbox is the only option we have at the moment but if you had alternative options you could choose those this backup could only be deleted manually others we can't remotely delete it from here so we say we're okay with that then the backup schedule and any backups we may have created previously will be listed at the bottom so we head back up now providing everything is in place that's level two the process of backing that site up and sending all those files to the relevant storage location on Dropbox as you can see it gives us information about the database size the file size overall total size and so on which will be updated once the entire process is completed and we've also got the ability to cancel as if we've done something by mistake we want to cancel out of it and a log to see exactly what we've done so we're gonna let that run through and complete the backup once that's done I'll show you how that's gone and uploaded everything into the relevant location in Dropbox and we've got our backup set up but all control inside the main WP dashboard and there we go that's the backup completed if I bring in my Dropbox folder you can see there's the backup already uploaded now depend upon the size of the file that you work and where than the speed of your server and a million other different things that will kind of dictate the speed in which this whole process works but if you said it was an automated backup then you don't have to worry you can let this run overnight or an off-peak time where you have less traffic which means your server should be such a little bit quicker and the whole process should be done when you wake up at the mornings so that's pretty much all there is to running the backup side of things now there are other options available WP vivid backup is not the only option we have there are other ones there so again like I say try this out with your preferred option see how you get on with it but the whole process is pretty painless now another area that main WP makes incredibly easy is rolling out Mass updates now there's various different kinds of updates you may want to do they do plugins they can be themes they could be user details plus there's also the ability to easily add new posts or pages throughout all of your sites or pick and choose which sites you want to roll that out to so if you had something like a privacy policy that was the same across all of your company web sites and you didn't want to log into each one then this is a rate of doing that very very simply so let's take a look at all those different options now inside the main WP dashboard now another thing you may want to do across multiple sites is roll out the same update now a lot of our plugins I'm talking about content updates so let's just say you run multiple sites as a business and your privacy policy has to be updated this is the same across all those sites said about to login to each individual site you could use main WP and roll that out to every single site so what you could do is you can come into the posts or pages so for this example we'll use pages expand that out you can see we've got two options we can manage pages or we can add a new page to click on manage pages you will see we've got the same kind of filtering as we had earlier on we can choose groups or sites let's just choose groups we'll say all client sites the status then we can go through and say published but click on that and you can choose multiple different statuses if you want to you could search based upon a keyword your title and body a date range the maximum pages to return and then we can hit show pages so this will then go to the sites as part of that group or find that all the different pages we have inside there we could then come in if we want to and you see we can edit trash view all go to the WP admin for that specific site straight to that page so we can do now is we can select any of these entries or we can come and use the bulk actions to move to trash restore or delete permanently so we can manage the content directly from main WP across all the sites or we can roll out a new content to all the sites we choose so instead of manage pages let's say add new and from there you can see we now get the normal WordPress editor plus the filtering options on the right-hand side and some other options for how we want to deal with this particular content so we can do is we could create a new page or we could call this let's just say privacy doesn't really matter what I'm going to call it it's just an example so we say privacy what sites we want to go onto well we'll say we want to put this onto all of our clients sites do you want to set a featured image do we want allow discussions and so on so all the normal things you'd expect to see as part of a normal WordPress post or page come down now we're gonna say we can set this to a draft or pending review so this will have to be confirmed by the site owner before it can actually go live so we'll say pending review you see then we've got the visibility options and publish options so you see immediately or schedule so it's up to you how you want to deal with that side of things so we'll say immediately any custom fields won't apply at the slug and so on so some basic parameters so you can easily drop in some content so we can just say privacy policy test it doesn't really matter what I going to do now once we've done that we say publish and this will then roll that out to all the sites that meet that criteria so you can see it says foodie blog has had a new page created and so is the jet test page so incredible you just publish a new page to two sites in one second well we don't to brag on Twitter about that I will close that down so now if we come over to one of those sites we can take a look at that post and how I saw that page and how it's been added in so jumped over into the pages section now of one of our sites as link to main WP and you can see there's our page privacy last modified 25 seconds ago and is set to be pending so we view that page we could easily come in and edit it and you can see there's all the details if we setup anything like a featured image and so on all of that data would be inside there so now every site this link through has this page added into it set as pending or draft whatever you set up as and then you can confirm and publish that page from there so that's a very quick and easy way of being able to roll out the same content across multiple different sites we're not just limited to only dealing with pages and posts we can do the same thing with themes and plugins and users and so on so we come to the theme section you can see we've got in store if we click on install this will give us the same thing again so it'll show us all the different kinds of themes witnessed or we can search for themes or we can upload our own dedicated zip file so if you've purchased a theme that you want to use or one that's not on the WordPress WordPress repository then you can easily grab that and upload it so it's up to you how you deal with it and then all you've got on the right-hand side is the same way of filtering and choosing what sites that are part of your main WP account you want to link these through to and upload that particular theme to your plug-in so you can see again we've got sites groups filters all those kinds of things installation options to overwrite existing version if that's already on the site itself so you can see you can use this option to do themes we've also got plugins we can do the same thing on so we can say install plugins we want to do that we also have the option for auto-updates so we choose order updates either from the top or from the left-hand side you can see we come into that section we can choose what we want to want to update so you can see it says main tiffy auto updates feature is a tool for your dashboard to automatically update plugins or themes or whatever you choose that you trust to be updated without breaking your child sites now personally I would not recommend doing this it's there if you want to use it but anything that automatically updates can have the potential for having a problem and then it just B creates a bit of a headache so I would recommend not to do that you see it says plug-in status to search again we can choose active and inactive or active or inactive we can search options from there we can choose from trusted not trusted ignored and so on and then we can show the plug-in so we can use keywords and so on so like I say this isn't something I would recommend you do but the option is they should you have a need to use it and you want to quickly just have automatic updates running in the background if you do decide to go to the root of doing this I will highly recommend you have the backup option set up to automatically backup and also have the uptime monitoring so if anything happens to your site you'll get notified very very quickly that there's a problem you can then come in and deal with it restore from a backup if you need to and get yourself back up and running in double-quick time so like say just a little bit of a warning should you decide to go the route of using these auto updates on anything like plugins or themes now the last thing any of us want for ourselves or our clients websites is downtime but how would we know if there's a problem on our website if we have no way of monitoring it well in this step we're gonna take a look at using a free service that gives us up to 50 websites and we can link that directly through into our main to DP dashboard and be notified by email whenever there's a problem in five minute increments so if we have a problem the maximum downtime before we get notified could just be a couple of minutes so let's take a look at how we use this now how we set everything up and what we need to do to get that uptime monitoring set up and working for our sites now when it comes to monitoring your websites to make sure that everything is online and it is any problems you get alerted and uptime robot is a great option especially if you want to start off with a free plan you can do just that and once you've signed up you can access your account grab the API key and your email address you signed up once you've done that you can easily come in and start monitoring your website now you'll find once you put those details in under the settings section for the advanced uptime monitor which is the plugin I showed you right back at the beginning how to install you'll start to get some data coming through very quickly as you can see I've already got one site set up in here at the moment and it's telling me the name of the site is being monitored the URL threat the status currently and you can see it up the type which is a HTTPS and then also the times and the uptime ratio for that particular site so you can see over a period of time about a hundred percent uptime on the website and as you can see we've also got a sort of overview you can quickly see we've got one up zero down zero pending zero seemed down and zero paused so we can get an overview of all the different sites we all have listed inside here we've also got a couple of options on the right hand side we can pause monitoring if we want to we can find out some additional information we get edited and we can also delete it from there you see we've got to create monitor for all sites or create a new monitor we've also got some bulk actions so you can see we can start we can pause and we can delete so it's a very simple plug-in that links itself through to uptime robot but it doesn't need to be complex the whole point is that it monitors and lets you know if there's a problem with your website so definitely recommend take a look at that especially if you want to start off with something the costs no money and you can start to utilize that then you've also got the recent events option as you can see we've got the uptime and we've got when it was started so currently there's nothing else in there there's no errors there's no downtime the duration since you've just sort of set up which 338 hours and 19 minutes and in that period of time I've had no downtime and fingers crossed that's the way it will stay so if you're curious about setting up monitoring for your websites then check out uptime robot and their free plan to start off with I've got no affiliation I've just tested it and I quite like it so that's how we can go about with the uptime monitoring side of things very simple very straightforward but also incredibly useful now another area that could be something that could cause a problem is security now I always recommend that every single site that you set up and run for yourself or your client has some form of security plug-in active to make sure where you minimize the risk of getting your site hacked or having any problems with it but we can also tie this into some key things inside main WP so in this step we're going to take a look at the options to go through find out any security issues that are glaring problems even if we're not using a security plug-in which like I say I would highly recommend that you do use one but how we can use this to fix quite a few of those key typical problems shall we say that you may have when you install WordPress so again let's just jump over into main WP and take a look at what we have available and how we can utilize this to increase the security of our websites there's one more area that I want to go over before we wrap this video up and that's the security issues now you can currently see that I got 14 security issues detected and that's based upon all of the sites that we have installed as part of main WP so if we open those up and say see the details we'll go through and you can see we've got the different websites that we have we can see how many issues they are with each of those we could if we wanted to just click on the fix all issues but again as always I wouldn't recommend doing these kind of global updates and changes it's better to take a look and review what's being called up and then decided what you want to edit/delete so on so first of all let's start off with the foodie blog and let's click on the details and we'll go in there and go through and show us all the things that it considers to be security risks and things that we can easily update and fix directly inside main WP to alleviate these now depending upon the kinds of tools that you use for security as part of your website part of your WordPress website you may see some of these all of these or none of these different plugins like a theme security will allow you to deal with a lot of the things you can see via flags up inside here and normally on most of my sites I'd have security installed however as these a demo sites I don't have that it's a good way for me to indicate to you the kinds of things that you can see and how we can quickly and easily deal with so we currently have seven issues to deal with we've got various different things and you can see it tells us exactly what the issue is and we can fix it directly inside our main WP dashboard so the WP content plugins and so on they're all directories that could be listed now normally you wouldn't want that to be the case because you don't want nosy people and hackers to be able to see inside those folders so what we need to do is click on fix on there and after a second or two you can see that now updates and tells us that it's gotta made those changes for us so we're doing this all remotely inside the main WP dashboard now most of these things are pretty much safe to go ahead and change so I'm just gonna say fix all once that's done you can see now as I've dated they're the only thing that we can't revert or in other words and fix is this option that says the readme HTML file has been removed from the WordPress root like I said earlier in this video when I mentioned this section to be honest you shouldn't have any issue with having that be remove because it's not a file that really is going to be used for most things inside your WordPress site so don't worry too much with that but if you did need to you could simply put that back in there via FTP or via the sort of dashboard as part of your hosting and put that back into the root directory from a clean copy of WordPress just by downloading those files everything else can be reverted everything else you've sorted out inside you can be reverted by clicking on the unfix option so you go to way set in so what you need to do is go through your sites make sure all these things were addressed and you're going to give yourself a good starting point now as always just take this exactly as that a starting point for your security your WordPress security your server security your password security all these things are things that you need to take into consideration either for yourself or for your client but I say this is a good starting point but use this in conjunction with good security as part of your WordPress copy your server and everything else that goes with it well that's all I want to show you with this section it's a pretty simple straightforward section just allows you to fix and update any of those kinds of problems so that's how we can use main WP to go through the process of monitoring maintaining our website updating things and just generally speeding up the process of managing any of our WordPress websites is this something you've used yourself have you used something different what are your thoughts on being WP could you see yourself using this in the future I'd love to get your feedback on what your thought of both this video the content that's included and also if you've used this service yourself drop those comments in the comment section below let's get a conversation started as always there's tons more content on the channel and I recommend taking a look at some of the playlists and the videos you can see on screen right now they're gonna get you up to speed with some of the great things you can do with WordPress as always all the applicable links are in the description below and don't forget this time styles for every single stage throughout this entire video - rupaul see this has been WP test until next time take care

Channel: WPTuts

Views: 15,266

Keywords: how to manage multiple wordpress sites, how to manage multiple wordpress websites, wordpress plugins, wordpress tutorials, wordpress website, mainwp, mainwp dashboard, mainwp review, mainwp tutorial, wptuts, manage multiple websites, mainwp child, wordpress management tutorial, mainwp extensions, wordpress website management tutorial

Id: xHfAaZwG5uU

Length: 56min 20sec (3380 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 31 2020