How to Manage Your WordPress Blogs from One Dashboard

If you are like me, efficiency and effectiveness are everything. I’ve got so many things I need to do, and even though I outsource, I need to do some things myself.

I am a website owner. Not only one or two websites, I own many. Most of them are running on WordPress. While it’s not overwhelming yet managing them all, I do need a tool to help me out; a dashboard or a control panel to manage all the WordPress-based sites I have.

My search was actually over about a year ago, as I have discovered a tool that everything I need in a dashboard: ManageWP.

It’s not one of a kind, though – I was also considering WP Remote and InfiniteWP, but I choose ManageWP in the end. More on this later – but first things first…

Why do I need a dashboard?

Let’s just say you run 5 WP-powered blogs. On daily basis, you work on your blogs – writing/schedule posts, responding to comments, fixing things, backup your files and database regularly (you DO backup your blogs, don’t you?).

It’s really time-consuming to go back and forth from one blog to another. Initially, you need to login to a blog; then you move on to the next one; and the next one; and so on.

I’m sure you have been in this situation: You are checking on your scheduled post with pretty image on it… and there you go – it’s published on your blog number 1, but for some reasons, you can’t see the thumbnail on the homepage! You forgot to set featured image. You are now working on things on your blog number 5.

Then what next? That’s right, you need to go back to blog number 1 to fix the minor problem. Login. Choose “Posts”; choose “Edit” – and then you update the post with the featured image setup.

And that’s just one minor issue. I can assure you, there WILL be something “broken” somehow today, so going back and forth is a common thing to do if you manage multiple blogs like me.

Now times that 5 blogs you have with 10: How about managing 50 blogs? It’s impossible for you to go back and forth managing those 50 blogs using the same sequence of login-edit-update over, and over, and over again, don’t you think?

THAT’s why you need a dashboard. From that one, single dashboard (more like a mission control) you can update posts, add/remove plugins, activate/deactivate themes, backup files and database, track stats, mass-delete spam comments (have you tried to remove 600 spam comments from your WP Admin Panel? It’s frustrating!), and so on.

Your login info is stored by the dashboard tool and all you need is a single credential to access all of your blogs. No more login-edit-update sequence. Just click a blog you want to update, do your thing, and there you go. Move on the next issue via a couple of click only.

WP blogs ownership simplified. Period.

I got it – now, tell me again about ManageWP…

Now let’s get back to why I use ManageWP and not, say, InfiniteWP or WP Remote.

First off, I like ManageWP layout design. Just admit it, it’s kinda suck to stare at one poorly-designed dashboard all day. Eye sores. Dizzy. Appalled. ManageWp saves me from those symptoms 🙂

Okay – if you need reasons why you should choose ManageWP, here is a recap:

• Manage all of your tasks in one place.
• Virtually eliminate the need for you to login to each and every of your blogs regularly.
• Monitor your blogs’ traffic and uptime.
• Monitor your blogs’ SEO performance.
• Automatically backup your files and database – and have them secured in any places you want: Your web hosting, sent to you via email, or store it in the cloud using 3rd party cloud storage service, like Dropbox.
• Create new WP-powered site quickly with a few clicks of your mouse – with all the plugins and themes in place – woo!
• And this is the biggest upside, really: You can do all of the above from your mobile devices using ManageWP app for iOS.

What about pricing? Well, it’s F-R-E-E forever! There’s some limitations, though… but in my opinions, for an average WP user, the free plan is pretty much all you need. Just in case you are wondering, the “PRO” plan lets you give more power to your dashboard, such as SEO performance monitoring, uptime monitoring, and so on.

Takeaway

Well, the choice of tools is yours, really. But one thing for sure, using a WP dashboard tool is probably the best thing I can do for the sake of my work-life-balance 🙂

I, of course, recommend you to try ManageWP (I am a long-time user) – but I would suggest you to try each tool you are interested in and then decide from there.

So, how about you? Are you managing your blogs from a dashboard? Why or why not? Please share your opinion by leaving a comment on this post.

Photo credit: istargazer via photopin cc