I host over 25 websites that are built on WordPress. Few of them are mine and few are customers’. They are spread over few hosting accounts. With the frequent updates to WordPress core, plugins, and themes, I spend few hours every week to log into all these sites and update them manually. It was a tedious and time consuming process until I discovered InfiniteWP, a self-hosted WP management platform for managing all the WordPress sites at one place.
There are few managed solutions to manage WP sites at one place, but they come with a price tag, like iControlWP and ManageWP. They charge around $35-40 for a 5-site pack. InfiniteWP is a free alternative to them and offers most of the features those commercial products have. As it is a self-hosted solution, you will have full control over your data.
Install it in a sub-directory of one of your sites. Install the client plugin on all your WP sites. Once you activate it, it will show an activation key, which you can use to add the site to your InfiniteWP control panel. You also need to setup a cron job to be run at every 20 minutes, so that you can get periodic notifications about updates directly in your Inbox. They have an extensive documentation at: http://infinitewp.com/docs/
InfiniteWP offers the following features right from the dashboard:
- One-click updation of Core, Plugins, and Themes.
- Installation of plugin or theme into multiple WP sites at once
- Activation, Deactivation, and Deletion of plugins and themes
- Copying of themes and plugins from one site to another
- Site-wise or all-at-once backups, restoration, and download
- One-click login into the site without needing the password and login credentials
- Site specific options to view site, backup, new post, site detail editing, etc.
- Periodical notification of updates through e-mail
InfiniteWP offers few premium services like scheduled backups, backup to cloud services, cloning of sites, publishing posts and pages to several sites at once, etc. through addons, which can be purchased and installed from the InfiniteWP dashbaord itself. These addons cost $49 to $99 and are worth the money you are spending.
Watch the below video demonstration to see InfiniteWP in action: