Easily and Effectively Manage Multiple WordPress Sites With WP Umbrella

WP Umbrella gives you everything you need to easily manage and monitor multiple WordPress sites from a single location.

• Single Dashboard To Manage All Sites
• Themes and Plugin Management
• Performance & Uptime Monitoring
• PHP Error Monitoring
• Health Checks & Security Monitoring
• Elegant Client Reports
• Reliable Backups for Complete Peace of Mind
• White Labeling

WP Umbrella Account Setup

1. Start a 14-day Free Trial or get a discount for a paid plan.
2. Click the ‘Skip Onboarding’ link.
3. WP Umbrella Dashboard > Click ‘Add Website.’
4. Enter the website details and click ‘Add Website.’

If you get a message about Cloudflare, please refer to my note below and then use WP Umbrella’s ‘Re-sync’ button to finish the connection to your website.

Note: If you’re using Cloudflare, you may see a message stating that WP Umbrella can’t communicate with your website. This can be easily remedied by whitelisting WP Umbrella from your Cloudflare account.

WP Umbrella WordPress Plugin

Next, we must install the WP Umbrella WordPress plugin on each website we want to manage.

1. WordPress Dashboard > Plugins > Click ‘Add New’.
2. Enter ‘wp umbrella’ in the search box.
3. Click ‘Install Now’ next to the WP Umbrella plugin.
4. Click ‘Activate’.

At this point, WP Umbrella will display a message regarding configuring the plugin settings.

5. Click the ‘Go to the settings’ link.
6. Your API Key > Copy the API key from your WP Umbrella dashboard, paste it here, and click ‘Save.’

Note: You will see an option to enable error monitoring. Consider this setting if you are a website professional (or someone who generally wants access to this information). This is one of the features that made me choose WP Umbrella for MyListing Website Care.

WP Umbrella Dashboard

At this point, we should have some websites in our WP Umbrella dashboard that successfully connect to the service (i.e., synching), and it’s time to take advantage of all the bells and whistles.

2FA (Two-Factor Authentication)

Account Settings >Profile > Two-Factor Authentication

1. Click the radio button next to the ‘Email’ option for 2FA.
2. Click ‘Update two-factor authentication.’
3. Log completely out of WP Umbrella. (Note: You may also need to clear your WP Umbrella cookie from your browser.).

In the future, any time you log into WP Umbrella, you will be emailed a code to enter to gain access.

Important: Before you do anything else, I recommend configuring 2FA to secure your account further. Why? Simple. Should someone compromise your WP Umbrella account, they would automatically be granted access to the WordPress Dashboard of every website connected to WP Umbrella. This is not a security risk unique to WP Umbrella but rather a security risk you take with any solution you log into. I’m a massive proponent of securing every online account you have with 2FA.

Integrations

Google Analytics v4

WP Umbrella Dashboard > Account Settings > Integrations > Google Analytics

In this section, you will use the ‘Sign In With Google’ button to authenticate with each Google account needed to show analytics for a particular website. If you manage Google Analytics for your clients under your account, you need to authenticate that account.

Note: WP Umbrella works with Google Analytics v4 (GA4).

White Labeling

For those unfamiliar with ‘White Labeling,’ this is simply the process of telling a solution to use your brand colors, brand domain, whether to hide or not hide certain aspects of the solution for your particular audience, and so on.

WordPress Plugin

Account Settings > White Label > WordPress Plugin

I hide the WP Umbrella plugin from the WordPress Dashboard because there is no reason for my clients to see it. You also run the risk of the client deactivating (or removing) the plugin, which would not only cause you more work but also hinder your ability to provide the best service possible.

If you keep the plugin visible, several settings will be available to brand it further.

• Plugin Name
• Plugin Description
• Author Name
• Author URL
• Logo
• Catchphrase
• Additional Text
• Support Email
• Company Details

Maintenance Reports

Account Settings > White Label > Maintenance Reports

1. Color > Set to your accent or brand color.
2. Logo > Add your logo.
3. Email From > Click the ‘Use a custom domain’ link. (Note: Continue onto the next section for further instructions.).

Email Sending

Account Settings > White Label > Email Sending Domain

1.  Click ‘Add Sending Domain’.
2. Enter your domain name.
3. Click ‘Add Domain’.
4. Enter the provided DNS records wherever you manage your DNS. (Note: I highly recommend using Cloudflare for your DNS management.).
5. Click ‘Verify Domain’ and resolve all issues until the domain is correctly verified from the WP Umbrella side. (Note: Make sure to look at my notes below.).
6. Click ‘Save’.

Note: One of the records is an SPF record, and it is critical that you DO NOT add multiple SPF records for your domain, or there will be issues. Instead, you want to append to the existing SPF record if one already exists. Please refer to this guide for configuring a single SPF record with multiple entities.

Uptime / Performance

Something important to note here is that you can monitor a website’s uptime and performance without installing the WP Umbrella plugin by simply adding the website to the WP Umbrella dashboard. But if you’re being billed for that website anyway, you might as well get all the perks of installing the WP Umbrella plugin.

The dashboard’s ‘Uptime / Performance’ area will quickly show you the Google PageSpeed Insights score for your website’s non-mobile version and a history of its online time (i.e., ‘Uptime’).

Note: The following areas are accessed by going into the individual websites within the WP Umbrella dashboard.

Uptime

Uptime / Performance > Settings

1. Ping Interval > 10 min
2. Region > Choose the area that best reflects your primary audience’s location. (Note: If you have a global audience, you might ignore this setting, but then again, maybe there is a part of the world where most of your global audience is located.).
3. Click ‘Update Settings’.

Issues (PHP)

As the WP Umbrella dashboard states, PHP errors are recorded in real time, so this area will likely be blank and, hopefully, forever. 🤞

The critical takeaway is to check this area of WP Umbrell should you experience any issues with your websites, as there may be some clues as to what’s happening.

Updates

From this area of the WP Umbrella dashboard, you can see which themes/plugins have updates available, view the changes included in the update (i.e., changelog), and apply any updates with the click of a button.

1. Click ‘Update’ next to the theme or plugin you wish to update.
2. Check the box for clearing the cache.
3. Click the corresponding update button.

Note: We could get into the geeky details about when or when not to clear your cache. If you’re a website professional, you’ll likely know what to do here, but my recommended instructions are laid out above for everyone.

Backups

We see that none of the sites are backed up via WP Umbrella, which is to be expected since we just added some websites to our dashboard.

1. For one of your websites, click the ‘No Backup’ button to open the dashboard for this individual website.
2. Click ‘Save & Continue.’

At this point, WP Umbrella will kick off the initial backup of your website. This is a full backup, so it may take a bit to complete. While that’s running, we want to set up our backup schedule.

Backup Scheduling

One of WP Umbrella’s strengths over the competition is its ability to perform more frequent backups without incurring additional costs. For example, ManageWP charges $4.60 per month for 1-hour backups. Bringing a WooCommerce website configured for 1-hour backups on ManageWP to WP Umbrella immediately saves you money.

Since our websites are WooCommerce-based, I recommend setting the backup frequency to ‘Hourly (1h),’ so you have the most granular restore option should something go wrong. There might be a concern about performance here, but since the backups are incremental (i.e., only the changes are backed up), there should be no performance implications.

3. Set the backup frequency to ‘Hourly (1hr)’.
4. OPTIONAL—Choose when you want your backups to run (i.e., ‘Running Time’). (Note: I recommend considering when your website will be less active. If you serve a global audience, anything you choose here is likely fine, but it’s up to you.)
5. Click ‘Save & Finish’.

Manual Backup

It is critical to have scheduled backups that run successfully. But what if you’re about to make a change to your website and would like to take a manual backup first? No problem! WP Umbrella allows you to perform up to three manual backups, which are stored for up to 14 days.

1. WP Umbrella Dashboard > Click the ‘Backup’ button for your website.
2. Click ‘Create Manual Backup’.
3. Click ‘Make a backup.’

Security

This area gives you some excellent information about a particular website, which I’ve listed below.

• WordPress Version
• PHP Version
• Update Status
• SSL Status
• Search Engine Indexability Status
• PHP Version Status
• Key WordPress Core File Status (wp_debug, wp_debug_display, wp_debug_log, etc.)

Reports

General Settings

WP Umbrella Dashboard > Reports > General Settings

Fill out the information for your client (or for yourself, take the time to make the reports personalized, then click ‘Save and Continue’ to move onto the ‘Report Content’ settings.

Report Content

This is where you configure what your clients will see within their reports and the order in which they see that content. You can even preview the report before it goes out.

• Welcome Message (Customizable)
• Overview
• Analytics
• Performance & Uptime
• Updates
• Backup
• Security Check
• Custom Work (Customizable)
• Closing Message (Customizable)

Analytics

This is where we will add Google Analytics to our client reports.

1. Check the box to enable this for the report.
2. Click the Edit link.
3. From the dropdown, select the desired Google Analytics property.
4. Click ‘Save’.

Schedule and Send

This is where we tell WP Umbrella how often to send out reports to clients. Since clients do not have the option to opt in/out, I recommend that you either a.) ask your clients if they want to see reports or b.) put something in your FAQs that says reports are available upon request.

1. Configure the desired schedule.
2. Click ‘Send Test’ to ensure report deliverability.
3. Click ‘Save and Schedule’ or ‘Save and Finish’ to revisit this later.
4. Click ‘Schedule Report’ to confirm.

Settings

General

This particular section offers little. The main thing is that this is where you would go to change the website (e.g., project) name as it appears in your WP Umbrella dashboard.

Notifications

This is where we define who will receive notifications about potential issues with a particular website, uptime alerts, etc.

• Email Notifications
• Slack Notifications