I am a great fan of automation, I love it then a software does a job more efficiently than a human being. I am always in search for stuff like that.
And I recently came across ManageWP, a website that lets you control your WordPress blogs from a single Dashboard. Before you point fingers at me asking how the hell this becomes an automation tool, please read to read on.
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You must agree with the fact that keeping your WordPress core files, themes, plugins updates is very important. And now suppose if you have multiple blogs to take care of.
This is what you are going to do on a normal day.
Log into site 1,
Update the WordPress vision of your blog if there is any.
Update all the plugins which have the updates available.
Update the themes which have the updates available,
Look at the traffic (if you have jetpack installed and have enabled Site Stats).
And there are many other things you would be doing inside the dashboard of your site 1.
Now you will do the same things to site 2, site 3, site 4, and so on. You get the point.
You don’t have to be a genius to calculate the amount of time you are going to spend doing all the ‘behind the stage’ job only to struggle to make time to actually create content and distribute.
So, here are you two options. Either hire someone, a human being, to do all this for you, or use a software to all that stuff yourself but much efficiently.
(That’s why I said software does the job more efficiently than a human being)
All your blogs at one place
ManageWP, makes life very easy for people who run multiple blogs. In fact you can manage as much as 5 blogs for Free, which turned out to be great for me as I currently run 5 blogs and I love managing them from a single place.
It’s not that the blogs suck all my time, but it is nice to see you can save hours every month that cab ne used for better things.
[shadow style=”vertical”][note]Pro Tip: If you create websites for your clients, you can charge them a monthly/yearly recurring fee for maintaining their sites and use ManageWP to automate it.[/note][/shadow]
I love the fact that it updates everything, clean and optimize your every blog in one click.
Scheduled Backups, Alerts, and Notifications
Apart from updating and cleaning junk files, you can do more things like scheduling backups of your blog (and save them to Dropbox and Google Drive) you can use it and get rid of one of these backup plugins you are using to back up your blog, monitor traffic and uptime of your site.
You can also set email notifications for downtimes and a certain traffic increase or decrease which his quite handy to take quick action on the blog.
But it’s not only limited to updating, cleaning, backups and notifications as you can do much more.
Like, writing new posts right from ManageWP dashboard and publish them on any of your blog, something which can also be done using Windows Live Writer, which is a desktop application for publishing posts to blogs.
Interesting Features and Doing everything from a single window
You can find interesting features in the sidebar of individual blogs, for example, you can check the performance of your sites, find broken links etc.
You can go to the dashboard of individual site and it opens right there inside an iframe.
You cannot do everything inside an iframe, as it makes the site respond very slowly, you can also mange existing posts and pages from your blog by opening the Admin Dashboard of your blogs in another browser tab without actually logging into the blogs.
Account Safety and Security
I was a bit worried about this initially because if my ManageWP account gets hacked as the hacker will get access to all my blogs.
But I found that you can limit access to certain IP address and set up two faction authentication, which will save your account from any attacks.
And for the convenience of the users, the login page is managewp.com/wp-login.php, which is quite familiar to all the bloggers.
How to link your blogs to ManageWP.
Go to ManageWP.com and put in your email address (the one you want to use for logging into the ManageWP account).
Once you are in the Dashboard area, you can click on Add Websites and type in your site URL, username, and password.
You can also install and activate their plugin called ManageWP Worker and leave the password area in the form blank to add your site to ManageWP.
A quick recap why ManageWP is an Amazing Tool
It saves a lot of time you spend on updating, optimizing and maintaining your sites.
Log into all your sites at once.
Free to use for managing 5 sites.
Scheduled backups,
Scheduled Backups to Dropbox and Google Drive
More security to your sites.
Get notified for storage activities on your sites (such as traffic spikes).
Manage your sites through a mobile app, iOS only. (Too bad they don’t have an Android App)
ManageWP is free to use for 5 sites and charges a nominal fee of $0.70/site/month (at the time of writing).
It also offers professional and business plans with more features, you can check out their plans on the site.
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Fun Fact:Â This post had 13 errors after the final typos, Grammarly fixed it.
