MainWP Tutorial - Manage Unlimited WordPress Sites From One Dashboard

in this tutorial I'm going to show you have main WP works it is a management platform it's just a plugin actually but it turns your WordPress site into a management platform like manage WP which you may have heard of main WP is your own self hosted version of that and allows you to manage multiple sites of your own or of clients or of a combination of that and manage them all from one dashboard and I'm gonna show you set that up for free it's a free plugin there are some paid extensions to it that you may or may not need but the plugin itself is free everything I'm going to show you in this tutorial is free and you can be managing your sites which allows you to do plug-in updates to all your sites at once it allows you to push code out to all your sites at once as you install new plugins all at once theme updates and all kinds of security related things and the great thing is it's a huge time saver because all this stuff is pushed out from your main platform out to all your sites and I'm gonna show you how to build that right now hey what's up guys welcome back to another video it's Bjorn from WP Learning Lab where we help you get better at WordPress so you can earn more for yourself for your clients and for your business if it's your first time here and you like WordPress tips and tricks and getting better at it and serving your clients better then start now by clicking subscribe look like the Bell notification icon so you don't miss anything and make sure you sign up for the private WP learning lab Facebook group where we can hang out ask questions help each other get better at WordPress there's a link in the description down below so make sure you check that out and with that out of the way let's head on the screen capture I haven't using main WP for a number of years now before main WP I used manage WP or WP manage I always get mixed up what order that is but I use them for quite a while and the more clients you have on there the more you pay you do get bulk discounts for having more and more but essentially the more you have on there the more you pay cuz you pay for their services per membership whereas with main WP I use some of their paid extensions which you don't need in this tutorial I'm going to show you how to use all the free ones not all of them but use free ones to set up your management and that's pretty much all you need but they do have paid ones and I got them a couple years ago on a Black Friday sale for one price one price for lifetime no yearly update for support and stuff like that so one price for lifetime and it's just ended up being a lot for me to go with main WP and the services they provide are just as good so I'm going to show you this tutorial is how to set up your main WP dashboard and add a site to it and start managing sites and you can have unlimited sites on here I'm just going to quickly before I do that go to the main WP extensions and also have a an affiliate link down the description down below so if you do end up deciding to buy main WP if you purchase through that link it doesn't make it more expensive for you but main WP sends me a few dollars for the referral which helps to keep the lights on helps you making these tutorials for you but as you can see when you scroll down most of these options are free anyway the advanced uptime monitor it connects with a service called uptime robot I have another tutorial for that car just popped up above where you can check that out it allows you to check your site every five minutes to see if it's up and with the free version uptime monitor uptime robot I mean I think you can just you can check up to five websites with that service for free every five minutes so I mean that might work out for you just perfectly another one I use quite often you could go here and read through these we're gonna read through all of them for you so nobody can read so another one I use quite often is a broken link checker it is a paid one there our link checker plugins you can use as well but for SEO purposes it's always good to have a handle on broken links because links break all the time if there's a if your clients have websites that they're using and they're active with them there's gonna be broken links and for SEO reasons you want to make sure those links are redirected and this will help you detect the broken links before they become a problem if you do want to have clients you can send them reports a lot of people use this as just their own manager system because like I for example there's a time when I had two hundred websites and I was trying to manage all of them and I didn't want to log in to everyone and update everything it's so manual it's such a pain but if you have clients you can have reports add-on that sends your clients reports that shows them the value you bring to them the things that you've updated this month the security concerns you've addressed this month or in the previous month and they're less likely to either try to renegotiate with you or cancel altogether another feature another add-on I like a lot is the clone feature which allows you to instantly cone a website so you've built a great website or so you have a template website that you want to start all your class Safa has all your favorite plugins on it all your favorite settings this clone tool allows you to just go boom there's the other website cloned done clean and lock is free it's one that I use it allows you to basically hide your WP main site I always put my WP main on a different site usually a subdomain in the example that I'm doing for you here I added a subdomain to my testing site but I always have on a subdomain I always have it as its own install you can add it is the plugin you can add to any website if you want but I said just keep it separate keep it clean and this helps me hide it essentially when someone goes to the website they're not gonna see its WP main dashboard or anything they'll just be redirected to somewhere else some of my other favorite ones I theme security unfortunately it's a paid one but it's great because it allows you to set your security settings in item security once and then every time you install is the ithemes security somewhere else you can just migrate all the settings over to there with one click super simple there's a great backup plug-in on here security you can integrate the malware scanner for free right here which is pretty awesome there's a staging site option as well spinner I don't use those stupid articles updraftplus is a great backup plugin and the add ons free and you can again instantly just have updraft plus migrate all the settings to all the website sites under your control and just with one click and you it doesn't matter if you have five websites or a thousand websites on main WP one-click it's dispersed all of them super super simple another one I use quite often is this one here the vulnerability checker just because it's always good to just scan things and when you have a plugin that you can add two main WP and it does the checking for you and for all the websites at the same time this makes life super simple so that's enough about this again go to this website check out the extensions so you can read through all of them there's quite a lot of them that are really really useful back into the dashboard here this is the subdomain I created is called support dot WP dash PhD com if you want to make this on the southern Maine where you want to create a subdomain I've linked a tutorial and card up above that shows you how to create a subdomain website click on that check it out this can be in a sub you can put it in the subdirectory so I could have put this into a URL it looks like this and have that be a separate WordPress install where I host my dashboard or you can have a completely separate com we're currently a separate URL for it my point is if you want to do a subdomain click the card above next go to plugins click on add new search for main WP for different plugins the main one is WP main dashboard that's the one you install on your central site WP main child is what you would install on a client's site and then you connect the two we're gonna install the main dashboard here there's two other plugins for free there's a basic reporting plug-in and a key maker which allows you to a bulk manage settings across all the sites which is really handy but we're just going to install this one and then on a second site install this one so let's install the dashboard plug-in by clicking install now and then activate this will bring up a wizard that we walk through to set up all the settings which are going to walk through right now as well these are the steps you see at the top a lot of plugins these days have an onboarding process like this instead of just making you go to their settings page and then walk through a list of settings this is much easier anyhow you can skip it by clicking on right now or let's go to actually do it that's what we're gonna do so you can install this in two different places a web host which we currently have this is in in motion hosting and it's on a hosting account you can also install this locally using I like one called flywheel but out using Mac OS you can choose Lynda clinics or Windows but there's a cool app called flywheel ISO you install this locally you can use also use map or xampp depending what what operating system you have but you can actually use WP main to manage sites from your local server so your local computer so if you're concerned about the main WP site being hacked and then someone getting access to all of the sites that you manage there it's super simple to have it on your local host and have a match from there much harder to hack I'm gonna choose web host click continue one of the great features anything like the dimension in that last comment is that when you have sites under management it takes just one click to log into that site so if you main WP dashboard is hacked the person who gets into that dashboard has one-click access without entering passwords usernames login addresses anything just one click access into the dashboards of all the managed sites it's a security concern that's why the local host option is a very viable option that's also why I like to have main WP on its own install because I can lock that down a lot more than I could a website has a blog and public facing stuff I can make the entire subdomain non-public facing and just have a secret login address somewhere and make it much harder to hack can access so here we have a check to make sure we have current PHP SSLC URL and my sequel and all these passed these are more likely all pass for you if you're using it up to date host nothing to do there except for click continue our hosting setup what type of hosting is this dashboard site on shared VPS are dedicated minds on shared hosting how many child sites are you planning to manage less than 50 more than 50 it must be more options when you choose this one they're running more than 50 sites some shared hosting can be intensive so they're recommending if you have more than 50 you choose VPS or a dedicated but I'm gonna be doing more than 50 in this example in fact just one click on continue' is all settings you can change later as well and this isn't actually a setting that really is on the site itself it's just advisory to you so if you you're thinking of doing 150 if you have more than 50 you look in the dedicated hosting or you can go with manage WP which is hosted in the cloud third-party app you don't have to worry about how many sites you have on there next question you want to hide your main WP network in my case I do want to hide it because I just have this one site dedicated to just main WP so I'm going to hide main WP so that search engines and competitors can't find it in ackers for that matter admin to IV child to trusted updates automatically is just chosen yes and trusted updates means that when there was updates available for main WP child if they're trusted those updates are pushed out immediately so in the backend when you set up websites then we set the settings sorry you can choose which plugins you trust and which ones you don't so trusted plugins would be updated immediately as soon as updates are available without your intervention then when wouldn't want to do this is if there's a plugin that you've had a bad experience with in the past or multiple where when you update that specific plugin it causes problems on the site you might want to do that one manually the ones that never seem to have any problems like a kismet never has any problems SEO Yoast I've never seen any problems with those updates those ones could be trusted updates for example and they automatically receive updates and they're automatically done so in this question the WP child is the extension that you put on other websites to connect to your dashboard I'm just gonna keep that as trusted I click on continue do you want to receive important email notifications from your dashboard I always choose yes because why would you not want to see important messages usually things that are important are things like hey something broke you should come check this out and you want to know those things so I always have yes and an email address here you can add multiple if you want to click on add new to add multiple email addresses click on continue once you have that set up are you planning using main WP for backups this example I'm going to choose yes you might have certain clients that are at hosting accounts like WP engine that automates backups every day multiple times a day maybe you don't want to keep backups for them which you can set individually on a per site basis but overall you might have a client that needs backup service so I'm gonna keep this as yes and I didn't want to handle backups there's three options I like the updraft plus the other ones are great as well I've Drive plus is a newer one more features and there's a free add-on that we saw earlier in the extensions page for main WP and this will install that free add-on right now so let's click on continue and carry on so since we chose to do backups and we chose up to F Plus this is saying that we should get a free account at main WP to be able to access that plugin we actually don't need that we can click here to download the plug-in and install it and we get a free account later or not at all if you don't want to I don't know why you wouldn't the free account gives you access to free extensions that you download there and then you can install on your site I'm just gonna click on click here Donal you download it and then carry on and we got an error which is awesome so we're gonna have to create that account anyway and get that plugin later I'm gonna click on continue to carry on WP cron trigger the WP cron is basically a way to automate processes on your WordPress site and the WP cron itself run every time there's a visitor to your website if there are no visitors to your site like as main WP site will not have visitors because we don't want it to it's going to be hidden in this example so the WP cry won't be triggered almost ever and that means that certain things aren't going to run in the background things like should I go check these sites to see oh there's plugin updates should I back up these sites should I do something w main won't get that trigger to decide whether it should do something at that point that's why this is asking if I want to authorize uptime robot which allows you to again monitor up time we saw the extension earlier though with a free account it will come to your site every five minutes to see if it's still up and that visit every five minutes will trigger the WP cron so you have this site hidden from everybody but still WP cron running as long as you authorize uptime robot and again in a different tutorial link to in the description down below we create an uptime robot account I'm not going to go through that here but when you have the account you can authorize it on this step click on continue now we're going to clean up our dashboard this is saying if we install our dashboard on a brand new dedicated site if you put this plug-in on an existing site you don't want to clean up much stuff because basically it's going to remove these things from your site so in our dashboard I'm gonna remove post media pages comments or keep tools dashboard appearance taken appearance to tools users and dashboard I will keep you can change these later by going to WP or main WP settings and then tools so if we hide the tools and we can't go to tools so I always keep that one unchecked use WP main sidebar navigation yes or no again if you're installing this on an existing site choose no because this will replace the sidebar on your site which you don't want so this is a dedicated site so I'm going to keep it at yes so make sure you choose these options based on whether this is a dedicated site for you or add it to a different site click on continue when you're ready and now we're ready to add a new site which you can do by clicking add new right here first I want to go to the dashboard to show you something else though so this is the new site and there's a tour here we're not going to go through the tour but we're gonna add a new site in just a moment first I want to show you something else when we go over to WP main and to settings a lot of those settings that we just set a moment ago you can find on this page so all those settings we walk through in that wizard you can change later so don't worry about choosing the wrong thing right now especially if you have on a dedicated website then there's really nothing wrong you can do and you always change them later so here we have some messages to work on w mate is almost ready please connect your first site which we'll do in a minute you've not said I'll become a child plug-ins for auto-updates this is highly recommended so I'm going to turn that on here it says we highly recommend the new WordPress install free to be from a dashboard which we've done in this case it's an awkward warning I guess this is the first time they can present this warning but we just set up the whole thing and if you put it on a different site it's now saying put it on its own site whatever better to have that earlier in the process but we didn't we are going to dismiss all these notices and now we're going to connect our first site by clicking on connect your first site I'm gonna put this on to a site called go time summits calm it is HTTP hold on a second here there HTTPS pretty sure it is yeah it is go put on that site the administer username which is the username to log into that site just gotta look that up there's a username psych friendly name this is what you'll see in your back-end for the site friendly name so I'm just gonna capitalize this as easier to read go times summits you can add to a group so if you have a large number of clients you could have groups for specific industries or groups for clients who you have clients on multiple sites maybe you have your own sites and client sites so a group of however you feel is necessary but you can add groups and it makes it a lot easier to manage your stuff the child unique security ID is not required anymore but I like to use it just because I like to use it I like to think it adds a little more security even though I don't actually think it does it's kind of a placebo but I'll show you had to get that security ID in just a second for verify a certificate if the web so you're adding has an SSL keep this as yes SSL version you can auto detect it or you can pick one I usually leave it as auto-detect I use all these defaults actually force IP for the fault is yes we keep it as yes for the HTTP username and password if the site has a HTTP authentication before you can see the login form this would be where you add that login information most sites don't so don't worry about that I'm going to get this unique security ID by installing the plugin on this go time summit site this is the going to be the client example in this case I'm going to go plugins and add new we're going to install the main WP child plug-in so to search search for main WP may WP child is the one we want install now activate so here's a message saying we need to sell this to our dashboard now in all caps and bold meaning this is important and that's what we're gonna do if you don't do this now and like I said a moment ago you don't need the security ID anymore he used to be always required but not anymore which means if somebody else somehow knew you just added this child plugin to this site they could add to their main WP main dashboard because all I have to do is add in to the URL and they're done so that's why it's saying now or if you're not ready yet deactivate the plug-in until you already we're gonna do it right now I'm going to go to settings and then main WP child and I'm going to check right here require unique security ID and then Save Changes I'm going to copy this ID you're going to paste it right here click on add new site here a message saying adding this item in WP to doing some work and we should get a success message no a success message but it shows up here as our site is at it now when you ever you want to sync data you gosh you just sync it by clicking on this link if you have have a bunch of sites you can check the box click on sync click on apply and sync all of them that just goes out and checks if any updates are required this is showing a 1 which means there's one update available if we go back to the site here we can see we have one update available right here this quickly going through the other options on the main WP child you don't really have to set anything else but just so you're aware of what there is there's a restore option which means you can restore from a backup if you have auto backups this is great to be able to restore right in the site as well you can do it through the dashboard we'll get into that just a minute server information gives you basic info about the server you only really need that information for troubleshooting or if you need support help from nwp server information comes in useful as does connection details for troubleshooting when there's problems most of the time all you do is install the child plug in get the security code or not if you don't want to and then use that to add the site and now we have this site in here and we have our dashboard on the left here with all kinds of options lots and lots of options and in this dashboard one of the most used places you're gonna find you're often using is the updates tap overview as well but updates is where the work is actually done so the first thing you do is to check the date to see when the last update was this gives 19 minutes ago so it's fairly recent if it was a while ago like a couple days for whatever reason if you have uptime robot installed that shouldn't go that long it should be every five minutes said this is synced but if it has been a long time then you click on sync with child sites and it goes out and it checks to see if there's any updates available and then it lists them down here and lists the number of updates in this case we only have one as one theme update then you click on update all in our case I believe let's double check and the child sites the Divi theme update which is a manual update yes I think it is let's just try this see if we can click on just update all since there's only one let's see if I can update the Divi theme I don't think I can but I'm pretty sure it's a manual update for the Divi theme and it failed yeah it's a manual update if you have update that has failed or didn't go through it would just stay here so if you had ten updates for example and one of them failed this would change from a ten to a one if you click on 'theme update available it shows you what that update is and then click on update and shows you which side it's on and what the version numbers are you can also click on ignore which I don't think that's really that useful because you always want to update themes and plugins even if you can't update them remotely in the case of Divi you want to be able to update stuff so you'd always want to I think always no updates are needed and not ignore them if we want to have that that trusted plugin thing I talked about earlier you go to plugins and then we head over to auto updates and this will allow us to add trusted or untrusted plugins to a list and if the plugins are trusted those are the ones that are updated automatically by main WP so you don't ever have to touch them a kismet often gets updates and it's never caused a problem ever on any of my site not to say you can't in the future I'm just saying it hasn't yet so I would add that to a list of trusted plugins that are Auto updated which means I don't have to just drop everything and do these updates before the psych attacked it allows me a little more peace of mind and if there is a problem we check that notification thing earlier where we're emailing messages and that will tell us if there's a problem or not something really awesome as well I am just going to log out of this site and we're going to use the one click login to log back in so if you go to sites over here and then manage sites and then hover over the site information and they click on open WP admin it logs us right into the dashboard of that website and this is what's talked about earlier with the security vulnerability if someone does hack your site that has main WP on it they have one-click access to all the sites that you manage which could be a big security risk that's why having it on its own domain or even as a local high site on your on your hard drive makes it more secure if you go over to the overview tab it gives you basically a snapshot of all the stuff going on with the sites that you manage with the updates here you can add more boxes as you can see you can drag drop boxes here you can add different things to this dashboard if you scroll down you can see the connection statuses of the sites recent posts published recent pages published security issues other extensions you can add for free and then you can get more extensions paid and then helpful links with more information one of the things I didn't mention that main to BP does that I never use it for is you can post to all the sites that you manage maybe not your client sites unless that's what they hired you for but either way any of the sites under your management you can post to remotely right from here you can go to whatever site you want click on create new post and you can publish it right from here you can drip posts out so you could publish a whole bunch and have made WP drip them out you can publish the same post to all your sites you can publish different posts to each site another cool feature if we head over to plugins and then click on manage plugins we can search for plugins on all manage sites and selectively activating deactivate or delete them through this little panel and a great example of this is something happened to recently see if I can find the article it was about a clone plug-in SEO hack on the wordfence blog maybe they'll turn it up hey oh this one right here no not this one by the way this is a good example if you for example had duplicator or SEO Yoast which a lot of websites have an SEO stays over nur ability as CEOs might not be the best example it's a duplicator which is a plug-in used to move a website but you don't have to have installed after you move the site but sometimes you just forget to or you don't really care but maybe you should care because now it's vulnerable to a hack and you can go into this panel here and search for a duplicator in this case this one side doesn't have it so let's say duplicate that is a plugin on this site we put in the keyword check the site click on show plugins it goes out and checks which sites have that plug-in shows a list here and then you can check the box beside the site so if you if you this is where you can selectively activate the activates so all the sites are listed here we'll have the plug-in check the box beside the ones who want to take an action on that you can choose the action like deactivate they click on confirm if we go show you how this works if we go to here this is our child say we go to plugins we have the duplicate page plug-in right here and it's active now we've checked this box we've chosen to activate click on confirm now if everything went well it has now deactivated this plugin let's refresh this page and now this plugin is deactivated and that's how fast it was and it's not doesn't take much longer to do this over a whole ton of websites you may have experienced this before or you may not have but let's say you have a list of things you want to do today and you're excited you're pumped to do these things and all of a sudden you get a notification saying hey the plug-in that is on every single site you manage is hacked so you better go update it or deactivate it or delete it whatever the case may be and now you have to go and not do that list you're pumped about and instead log into every site that you manage there's a lot of them it takes a lot of time or if you go with your made WP and just do what I just did and do it really quickly and this is free right everything I've shown you so far with main WP is totally free so why would you not do this if you have just two websites that you manage and they're both yours this just saves you time it saves you time and time is a very very valuable resource if we head over the themes go to manage themes same idea but you can search for themes by keyword usually themes don't have major vulnerabilities that would cause us to get deactivating delete them but it's an option in the dashboard and both of these themes and plugins have an install tab in this install tab you can choose a plugin just like you would in the regular repository this is Steve let's go back to plugins and go to their install so let's say we wanted all of sites we managed to have WP super cache installed click that circle install this plugin check the sites you want installed on we can activate the plug-in after installation and overwrite existing plugin if it's already installed which is important for some cases you killed them both check - stalling for the repository click on complete installation installation is successful on one site we go back over here refresh the plug-in page and we're going to have WP super cache installed and activated obviously you have to configure as few settings which might take some time if you have a bunch of sites or does it well depending what you have going on with main WP there is an extension it's a paid one but it's a major major time saver it is called if I can find it there this box settings manager it allows you from inside your main WP dashboard to push out WP core settings and settings for almost any wordpress plugin and theme I try to highlight that but it clicked on it here almost any wordpress plugin and theme for sure the popular ones WP super cache is a highly used plugin and you can have the settings you set the settings in the middle if you dashboard and yet send them out to as many sites under management as you have super fast that one is not free like it says third $39 but it's well worth the time if you have find that you're spending a lot of time doing this that is well worth it and everything I've shown you here so far is totally free so I encourage you to check it out man WP is one of the big competitors of main WP it's a bigger competitors a bigger company they released a free tier recently which does a lot of cool stuff I haven't tried it out yet but it might be just as valuable as main WP as far as free things go like I said open tutorial for that VX I haven't actually tried it but I will try it out make a tutorial for it because it's always great to have these free resources that help you run your business faster better and smarter this is just scratching the surface from a WP what I showed you here if you want more on main WP let me know in the comments down below what you want to know specifically and I'll look into making a tutorial for you so that's how we do it I hope this video helps you if you haven't done so yet make sure you subscribe them the bell icon so you don't miss anything check out the private Facebook group in the link in the description down below and next up check out one of these videos that popped up on the right hand side so you get even better WordPress and until next time keep crushing it and I will see you in the next video

Channel: WordPress Tutorials - WPLearningLab

Views: 6,861

Keywords: mainwp tutorial, mainwp, mainwp code snippets extension, mainwp dashboard plugin, manage wordpress websites, mainwp client reports extension, mainwp child, manage multiple wordpress sites, managewp tutorial, mainwp review, managewp vs mainwp, managewp clone, mainwp google analytics extension, managewp plugin, managewp review, managewp orion, managewp staging, managewp worker, wordpress management system, xyzwp, wplearninglab, bjorn

Id: KAaAxUiTA_c

Length: 31min 9sec (1869 seconds)

Published: Fri May 04 2018