How To Manage 100+ WordPress Websites

You’re going to need a better workflow.

When I was hired at the first agency I worked at, my role was to simply keep all their websites backed up and update. If I had spare time, I could help with the actual design process but it was pretty unlikely — the monthly backups for all the sites were taking 20+ hours alone, spanning multiple work days.

It’s no wonder things were done this way. It’s how I would’ve done it too if I were to have built my process around managing only a few websites.

But, this was no longer the case. We needed a new process that could accommodate managing the backups and updates of so many sites, and allow us to streamline our build of new websites.

So, I took a three-pronged approach. In fact, it’s the same one I use today with my own company where we’re managing 100+ websites at any given time.

We needed to cut down on the number of themes and plugins used across our sites, get them on adequate servers, and get a system in place to automate the backups and updates. Here’s how we did all that.

#1. The Theme

New projects now all use the same theme, Divi. There’s quite a few reasons for this.

• It’s the most flexible WordPress theme we’ve worked with. We can make it do and look like literally anything we want.
• It’s incredibly fast loading for a theme with a visual builder.
• It’s intuitive for our clients to use, to make their own content updates.
• We can create our own design templates to cut down build times, and use them internally across pages or externally across sites.
• No required plugins. Absolutely 0. Not even the visual builder uses a plugin.
• $250 lifetime license, for unlimited websites. Beats $60 per site.

As an added bonus, we didn’t have to relearn every new theme we used. We’re able to make incredibly different looking sites in a matter of hours. We’ve used it to design sites for anything from a gun manufacturer to a nonprofit that focuses on teaching sewing.

It also allows us to roll out updates to a few sites at a time to find any issues that might break all the sites. I HIGHLY recommend this theme, and I’ve tried nearly everything (X, BeTheme, Jupiter, Avada, Bridge, etc…).

#2. Hosting

Most of our sites were strewn across a variety of shared hosts. We had things on HostGator, GoDaddy, MediaTemple, Namecheap, you name it.

All these logins and different hosts made things difficult.

We consolidated everything into a single, super-fast cloud-based host. We’re using Cloudways and it’s definitely the best host I’ve ever tried. I pay $50 per month for 3 servers, hosting an incredible amount of sites.

We have a server hosting all client sites, one for internal sites and applications, and one as a backup server.

Just by migrating, we cut the load time on most of our sites in half (usually more). Plus, they have a migration plugin that makes moving pretty much any WordPress site a breeze.

When it comes to launching new sites, they have staging domains that transfer to live with a single-click and a 2 line DNS change. It seriously couldn’t get any easier.

All of our sites are setup in the following way to cut down load times (and therefore server resources): Breeze Caching Plugin, Cloudways Caching, Cloudflare CDN, ShortPixel Image Optimization. We can get a standard Divi site down from a 5s load time to .8s with the 20 minutes it takes to setup this stack.

#3. Backup & Update Automation

On one of our servers, we setup a site that solely runs MainWP. On the first of the month, it automatically captures a backup of each of the sites we’ve connected to it. I double-check everything is there, and then push the plugin and theme updates and minimize the window while it runs.

Then, I just check in on the sites that are problematic (eCommerce, and other things that like to break) and make sure everything went as planned. If it’s broken, all I have to do is restore that backup and we’re back up and running.

If that backup fails, Cloudways also keeps daily backups for us in a rolling 30 day period. The 20+ hours of work now takes about an hour total.

So, there you have it — the inner workings of my web design portion of my business. Are you doing anything differently that you’d recommend? Leave a comment below, I’d love to check it out.