WordPress Site Management Made Easy

How I do my WordPress site management? This is a question I am often asked and I thought it was time that I write a post about it. I have been building and managing WordPress sites for a very long time. Over the years, there are a few things that have always been present in my workflow.

The following are the tools, services and processes I use for effective, easy WordPress site management. This is not an exhaustive list and it might not be how you do things, or have an alternative way to do the same thing. That is one of the biggest strengths of WordPress and open source.

Plugins & Themes

When it comes to managing multiple sites, you should ensure that all plugins and active themes are up to date at all times. If you have more than 2 sites, doing this manually can be tedious. There are various tools you can use for this.

I have been using ManageWP for many years. I like the pricing model. Plugin and theme updates for unlimited sites are free. If you need add-ons like backups, uptime monitoring, advanced security checks, you can pay a few dollars per site per month. They also have a cool mascot, Manny.

My process for running updates is simple, never ever update a site when a plugin or theme has a major version update. Over the years I have learned that things always get missed in the first release so it’s best to wait for first minor release before updating. These updates should be tested on a staging site, which most decent hosting companies provide.

You should also be active in your local WordPress community and slack channels. Interact with other WordPress users and business owners. This way you can collaborate and discuss any possible conflicts that might arise during updates.

Backups

Backups are something that a lot of people take for granted or just assume their web hosting company is handling it. I have fallen prey to this trap before and lost a few sites over the years. It’s best to follow the 3-2-1 backup strategy. That is 3 copies, on 2 forms of media with 1 off site. The two forms of media has evolved over the years as all media is either hard drive, solid state or cloud.

For me my 3 backups look like this:

Server backup daily (hourly if it’s e-commerce)
Cloud solution (I actually do two, I use manageWP as well as dropbox)
My synology NAS makes a backup of both my server and my entire dropbox account

The biggest mistake you can make in your backup strategy is never testing your backups. It is a good idea to check your backups are actually usable at least quarterly. Otherwise you have a false sense of security and it’s the same as not having a backup at all.

Security

For security I keep it simple. I have a 2FA plugin and I use Patchstack for security on all of my sites. I use their real time protection module which costs $5 a month per site as of Nov 2024. This gives me peace of mind with active blocking and patching. I love what Oliver and the team are doing over there.

Monitoring

Some of my sites don’t need monitoring as they are personal projects. However, when I’m building sites for clients in my little agency, I setup two levels of monitoring. I monitor each site for uptime as well as each server for resource usage. I keep this simple as well. I use the uptime monitoring that is available from ManageWP as well as a backup service from Uptime Robot. My servers are configured for resource monitoring and alerts.

Hosting

Over the years my hosting has changed from self hosted, to shared hosting, to managed hosting. These days I am back to managing my own hosting. I’m using VPS’s from Digital Ocean, Vultr and Viettel IDC. This is all managed with the fantastic RunCloud Control Panel.

I like using RunCloud as it makes setup, configuration and maintenance very easy. They include autoSSL with let’s encrypt, easy DNS updates via the Cloudflare API, backups, monitoring and alerts as well as automatic deployments via git.

Transactional emails

Making sure your transaction emails are getting through to your users is essential. This is why I always opt to use a 3rd party transactional email provider. This ensures better delivery and reduces load on my servers as they don’t have to handle email.

All of my servers follow the same simple configuration:

Mailgun for the email provider
WP SMTP mail for the email plugin

Email hosting

Under no circumstances should you host email on the same server as your website. I wouldn’t even use the ‘free’ mailbox’s you get from your hosting provider. You want to have a separation of utility so that if one service goes down, you don’t loose all. Email is very important so having that go down with your website is never a good thing.

Depending on your budget you have a few of options, all of which I use.

Zohomail – Zohomail is great as it is affordable, easy to setup, and use and works really well for small business. Starting at just $1 per mailbox it’s hard to say no.
Microsoft 365 – This is a full business suite of email and other tools. This starts at $8/12 a month depending on where in the world you are. But for that you also get access to all of the Microsoft office tools and 2TB of cloud storage. Not a bad deal if you ask me.
Google Workspace – This is Googles business offering and if you are in the google ecosystem this would be who I’d recommend. The prices are similar to Microsoft’s starting at $6/12 a month

Even though I am using all 3 of the above services, I will be migrating all of my smaller email needs from Google Workspace to Zohomail in the coming months.

Domain names & DNS

When it comes to domains and DNS this is another service that you should be keeping separate from your hosting and email. You want to be able to quickly move your service and you can only do that if your DNS is independent of your hosting provider.

For this reason I follow the same system that I have for 15+ years. I buy my domains with a registrar Namecheap and use their DNS management tools. For any of my active projects or client sites, I recommend using the free Cloudflare plan that includes DNS management.