If you are in the business of creating and managing a large number of WordPress websites for your company, or for your clients or for yourself, you often struggle and complain when you have to go into the each option of the newly installed WordPress site and configure the same settings again and again.
For example, you may be following a certain protocol while creating a WordPress site. You may wish to stick to a particular permalink structure, you may not want the comments opened all the time, you may want to insert Recaptcha in the comment box, you may want to create a form on a Contact us page…there may be a number of customizations you or your clients might need and it may be very boring and also time consuming to repeat all these tasks again and again as you create new WordPress sites.
So you would finally like to think of a solution where a single command can help you cover these basic customization tasks.
When we encountered such problems, the best solution we found was ManageWP.
As we manage a number of WordPress sites, sometimes it is very agonizing to login into each one of them and undertake a simple task like updating a plugin or a theme. ManageWP offers a dashboard where you can list all your websites at one centralized platform and undertake all common tasks from a single dashboard without the need to login into each one of the WordPress sites. This includes configuring settings for all your future WordPress sites.
ManageWP is a paid service for which you have to signup on their website. You then need to download their WordPress plugin and install it once in all your WordPress sites.
In ManageWP’s dashboard, the panel in the left is a list of the sites we manage and to login, we just need to click on them and we are automatically inside the WordPress dashboard of that site. No need to enter your username and password into one of them once you set up the ManageWP plugin into your sites.
The ‘Sync Dashboard’ feature runs a script into each one of your WordPress site listed here and alerts you on the ManageWP Dashboard for any plugin or theme updates. It also warns you about cleaning your WordPress database tables and removing any spam comments. You can handle most of the WordPress updates, cleaning your database and removing spam comments by using one single button here.
Similarly, there are a host of other features in ManageWP. Like you can schedule backups and push them to your Amazon S3 or Dropbox accounts. Restoring your websites is also a piece of cake. There is uptime monitoring which you can alert you via email whenever your website goes down.
Returning back to where this discussion started, the Clone tool of ManageWP is an amazing feature. It is perhaps the best solution to quickly set up and get your WordPress sites running. For the Clone tool to work, you need to have a Master WordPress site (which you will not use for blogging but only for copying its default settings to WordPress sites). Install the ManageWP plugin into the Master WordPress site and also in the new WordPress site you need to create and get them listed on the ManageWP Dashboard
Then just visit the Clone/Migration Wizard, choose ‘Existing Website on Your Account’, select your Master Website, move to next, select the new WordPress site where the settings need to be copied and hit ‘Clone’ Relax back and ManageWP will do the rest. The Clone feature can also copy Posts and Pages and it is a handy tool to migrate sites from one server to another.
However, please be careful when using this tool. No software is 100% reliable. So always ensure that you have taken a full backup before proceeding to clone or migrate. The Clone tool is useful for migrating small websites. If you have a large website with thousands of posts, then it is not recommended.
