Guide, WordPress

How To Manage Multiple WordPress Sites

Being a successful blogger may seem like a dream job to a mass amount of people, yet it is registered in the list of risky occupations. This is because the job isn’t over as soon as they suppose it is right after developing their website.

Well, that’s just the beginning, so learn how to manage multiple WordPress sites without failing yourself and your dreams!

Therefore, calling out bloggers and service providers who hold multiple websites to maintain or would like to host others’ sites smilingly. Managing multiple WordPress sites will be super comfortable after this read!

Dear service providers, your clients may sound sad, and it is justified after all they have done for their site. But, it won’t be saddening anymore if they keep up with the maintenance! Just creating a WordPress website isn’t enough to create a spark in your business. Your client has to care and pay enough attention towards site maintenance.

This is where managed hosting companies come into the play; they are here to serve the site owners. They help to keep your business ablaze and ensure everything gets updated, fixed, and secure.

It all lies in the hands of the professionals now, whether you would like to deliver qualitative maintenance over new clients knocking for your help. There’s nothing to be paranoid – if you hold the right tools to support your business to take good care of your clients’ sites. Then you will never have to compromise with quality over new work!

In this article, we’ll share some tips on how to manage multiple WordPress sites and resources, as well as guide you on how to scale website management effectively using the right tools to increase your client intake.

Choosing the Right Hosting Providers

Choosing the right hosting providers is the foundation for an excellent maintenance service!

A non-optimized, shared, and a cheap host will never be a good option for your clients and your own business as well! You’ll face a lot of issues and limitations that will only negatively affect the results because a hosted website changes drastically, so you won’t be able to reach your goals and deliverables on time.

As a professional, you should provide your clients with the best of the best options from where they can choose according to their preferences. This is why it is necessary for you always to assess their current hosting provider and consider how it will impact on the outcome while you take care of what you need to do to make it happen.

This is important! Let’s break it down bits by bits. So, how would you choose the best web hosting provider to manage multiple WordPress sites?

Understand the different hosting options available – It’s always wise to make an educated discussion at this point, so you have the best option available.

Excellent customer support – No matter what happens, the internet never sleeps. That is why you need to test the response of the customer support before committing to a long term contract of any hosting.

Choose a host with a fabulous uptime track record – Ensure the hosting provider you are choosing takes every precaution to give you the maximum uptime.

Cost should not always be your first priority– Here, are 2 things to be noted:

1. No extended downtime

2. If your website generates only a small amount of traffic, a shared web hosting will do. Still, if you’re selling products or generate a large amount of traffic, a dedicated hosting provider is a necessity.

Ability to scale – Your web hosting provider should be able to upgrade and scale to accommodate your traffic growth as your business grows with time your website will tend to generate more traffic.

Bonus tips for not screwing up later to manage multiple WordPress sites

Few questions that Kinsta advised you to do to lead your research

WordPress Sites Migration

Site migrations are slightly twisted, yet a common scenario as around 60% of people make the mistake of choosing their first provider just by its decent looks. There will be times when you have to migrate your clients’ sites to your preferred host for a better future as you don’t want it to turn into a 90 Day Fiancé to only separate badly.

We know times like these may seem like you’re in the middle of an ocean, but thanks to several plugins which can make your lives a lot easier! Some of the best migration plugins you should consider to manage multiple WordPress sites are listed below:

Duplicator
Migrate Guru
WP Migrate DB
All-in-One WP Migration
UpdraftPlus
BackupBuddy
Super Backup & Clone
VaultPress
Backup Guard

Wondering how you will know it’s time to Migrate?

Well, for you we listed down 6 red flags:

You need more Downtime than usual
Your site’s loading speed is low
Customer Service is not much helpful
You require more space than your current provider can offer
Your current host is too expensive
Server security is Sub-Par

Disclaimer: These plugins won’t be a life savior if you have no clue what you’re doing, and who knows what if you end up losing all your content and data. Which is why we suggest the site owners not to try this all by themselves; it is wise to let the migration experts take care of everything for you as migrating larger and multiple sites on your own is a tough task that might fail if everything doesn’t work correctly during the migration process. You should also double-check with your current hosting provider what they allow.

Now, if you’re wondering where you will find a reliable source, then try Kinsta without any hesitation! It doesn’t ring a bell if you have any more or less than 40 sites to handle, all will be managed and migrated smoothly by their professional migration team. Therefore, we recommend taking advantage of Kinsta to grab their free migration packages.

Migrations at Kinsta to manage multiple WordPress sites

Kinsta offers different types of migrations based on the plan you prefer, type of WordPress website, and the number of websites you need to migrate.

An example would be their Premium option; it includes sites that change continuously, such as eCommerce sites, membership sites, etc. or those that use a reverse proxy. There is a scope for free migration as well, which is based on your plan; they also provide unlimited free migrations from selected hosting providers, like:

Then, if you need a higher number of plugins that your plan doesn’t cover, you can buy additional migrations in bulk at a discounted price. With this being said, it’s time to cover some maintenance work.

Keeping Your Clients' Sites Backed Up

Updating your site is as exciting as a new toy. It’s fun to get ahold of the new features, but what if something goes wrong after an update? What if you incur a loss of data? This is why it is said that “prevention is better than cure,” and to prevent such troubleshooting occurrences, it is essential to keep your site backed up regularly.

I’ll give you 9 reasons why is it so necessary:

1. Simplifying the Process of Migrating Web Hosts:

It is not a big deal to migrate from one web host to another for ameliorating your website. The whole process is a little tricky as it involves cautiously moving all of the site’s files from one server to the other.

You could copy the files manually or take the help of dedicated tools, even asking your new provider to help you out will get the job done. Having a backup would mean that you can switch your site at a moment’s notice, which makes the whole process a lot easier than you can imagine.

2. Make it Easier to Create a Test Version of your Site:

When you’re completely ready to make a significant change in your website without running into a problem, you should consider using a testing environment. This way, you can keep it away from affecting your live website, if something goes wrong during or after the update.

3. Ensure an Uninterrupted Revenue Stream:

An hour’s lost income can be a significant blow to any business, let alone a day’s. If you make dollars from your website, then it should always be accessible. Having the backup stored will get your site back online in a blink of an eye and that those dollars shall be quickly deposited, and then you can take your time to find out what went wrong.

4. Strong Security Practices:

Backing up your site is itself a million-dollar trick. Backing up your data is the cornerstone of an excellent digital security service.

5. Guard your site against Human Error:

A significant part of your website may come to a stop anytime. At that moment, you shall have two options to escape:

6. Prevent Loss of Data:

One of the main reasons to maintain a backup system is to ensure that your data stays safe and sound even when you delete your entire libraries of content mistakenly.

7. Handling Compatibility Issues after a New Installation:

WordPress users tend to rely a lot on add-ons, and each time they install a new add-on, you’re basically introducing a new element that might not play well with your site’s ecosystem. No, we are not suggesting you to avoid plugins and themes. Just ensure they have a good review and a rating, along with frequent updates made by the developer.

Also, to make sure you can pull yourself back if you run into a compatibility issue, you need to back up your website before you activate a new theme or a plugin.

8. Resolve Malware Infections:

Your website can be vulnerable to any kind of malware. WordPress users tend to receive threats often from bots looking out for vulnerabilities to put all your efforts and hard work in vain. Therefore, having a backup in hand will help you get your website to be clean much faster.

9. Provide Protection against Hackers:

If there is a possibility of hacking, there are three ways you can proceed:

By restoring a backup, you will retrieve your website much quickly; then, you can update your credentials to keep the attackers away for one more time. You have two options when it comes to create and log backups for websites. We would like to roll back on Kinsta to help you with both the options listed below:

1. Choose a hosting company that completes automated backups – Kinsta offers five different types of backups that free you from relying on plugins or third-party tools:

If you still believe you need to use backup plugins, Kinsta only allows incremental backups as they backup without losing disk space and site performance.

The best WordPress backup plugins and decide the one that works for your business – If your host doesn’t allow automated backups, you’ll need to install and configure a backup plugin.

Few suggestions would be:

Duplicator
WP Time Capsule
BackupBuddy
UpdraftPlus
BackUpWordPress
BackWPup
WP BackItUp

Keep your Clients' Sites Updated

Your themes, plugins, and as well as WordPress updated is essential.

The 3 main reasons are:

Most updates include security patches; your clients' sites will be more secure if you have it installed.
Updating their theme or plugins allows them to have access to the latest features.
A few updates ensure compatibility with the newest release of themes and plugins, so updating it would make sure your website stop facing further issues.

The Staging Site Creation

Site creation allows you to test a plugin or a theme with their core updates, in a safe environment before publishing them live on your client's website.
Includes one-click staging sites in all of its hosting plans available on MyKinsta Dashboard.
Hop on this opportunity by clicking on "Change Environment" from the drop-down menu at the top right corner and choose "Staging Environment." If the staging environment doesn't exist already, then click on the "Create a Staging Environment" button to avail the option.

Remove Unused Themes and Plugins

The main reason why you should delete those unused WordPress themes and plugins installed on your blog is that those unused junk can slow down your site, and your readers will only be annoyed by it and eventually shall bounce back. Unused Themes and plugins are of no good; they only take up the disk space and increase the size of your backup file.

Do you want a bird’s eye view of what needs to be done to help you decide on how to act? Your wish has been fulfilled. MyKinsta has access to the list of all the plugins installed in each of your sites. You will find a “Plugins” tab where you can see a list of all installed plugins, with their status (active inactive), their current version number, and if there is an update available!

Keep your clients' website well secured

To safeguard your client’s website and of other security breaches, it’s essential to keep your clients’ sites not only well managed but also secured. It is important to secure your blog, and this can be done in a number of ways to keep hackers and vulnerabilities away from affecting your hard work

Surely, you can implement the right security stack, such as security plugins, advanced techniques for hardening your WordPress site and securing your servers. But, to make your lives a lot easier, we have an extensive guide on securing client sites, here are the very vital basics:

Now, we would like to talk about the security which Kinsta provides.

Kinsta Security to manage multiple WordPress sites:

If your clients seem to trust your services to take care of their business sites, you definitely won’t feel right if you wake up one morning only to see one of your sites has been cracked open. Therefore, Kinsta has offered a few security features on all of its hosting plans:

Detects DDoS attacks, monitor uptime, and automatically bans IPs that attempt to break in if logged in more than 6 times in a minute.
Only encrypted SFTP and SSH connections are supported when websites are accessed.
Hardware firewalls and additional security measures are kept to prevent access.
It hides both WordPress and PHP version your clients are using from frontend requests. Their open_basedir restrictions also doesn't allow the execution of PHP that are prone to malicious scripts.
Kinsta uses Linux containers (LXC) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to provide isolation to each separate WordPress sites, through a strong security than any other competitors you will find in the market.
Good news: If something terrible ever occurs, Kinsta security specialists will fix your website with zero charges! They offer a security guarantee with all their plans.

Improving Your Clients' Sites Performance

While paying attention to the performance of your clients’ sites, we cannot put enough emphasis on “Speed.” The need for speed and high performance will determine what people shall expect to see on a website.
A few benefits are listed down:

A fast website has a higher search engine ranking to boost their SEO.
A fast website means fewer visitors will bounce back before the first page loads.
Speed and performance optimizations are perfect cross-sell or upsell services, which are often well-appreciated on top of "standard" maintenance services.

Critical Areas for Speeding up Client Sites

The main areas where you should focus your resources to make performance improvements are:

Database – By optimizing the database tables, WordPress will be able to read easily.

Revisions – To help reduce the amount of unwanted content in your clients’ database, optimizing the revisions to further improvise the performance.

Assets – You need to ensure the queue scripts and the style sheets to be done correctly in all the themes and plugins on your website.

Images – By avoiding images that are larger than necessary before uploading or using an image optimization plugin will consider using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver them.

Cache – Caching makes WordPress websites become faster, and it reduces the load on the webserver.

You don’t need to worry about setting up caching plugins if you use Kinsta, as it uses four different types of cache.

Troubleshooting Issues to manage multiple WordPress sites

Your clients’ sites may face problems with broken links, image loading, plugin, or theme conflicts. Thus, we have compiled a list with all the resources for the most common issues a website experiences to help you identify and fix them faster:

Fix 404 errors with pages.
Fix broken links.
You need to fix the HTTP errors first for uploading an image into the Media Library.
If images don't load, use the Fix Media Library plugin to fix the database entries.
Troubleshoot and repair WordPress Database issues
Fix the SSH "Connection Refused" error
Best practices for WordPress Redirects
HTTP status code list

Conclusion

You can never succeed if you take your growth as a burden for business. Actually, it should be like a magnet attracted to help you push your horizon farther ahead while keeping the quality in check to manage multiple WordPress sites.

When managing your clients’ websites, there are plenty of things you need to take care and be held accountable for, so there won’t be sustainable growth if the quality of your work is at stake, you need to be qualitative and responsible for your business.

It is a time and resource-consuming task, but if you can get it streamlined effectively, you shall glide swiftly through substantial positive effects.

Remember, running a car with flat tires is of no good no matter how well you optimized it, your websites won’t be any faster if it’s hosted on a sluggish server. A large portion of your site’s performance depends on the quality of your client’s hosting!

We have tried our best to craft an easy guide with tips and tools, with the best practices to help you achieve without compromising on the quality of your service.
Happy managing!

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Yousuf Hossain

I am an entrepreneur who always invests time closely with people to successfully bring their business online. My main mission with this blog is to help people with offering them free guides and tutorials related to website design and marketing so that people can grow their online businesses following my guidance and path!