I Wish I Had Found This Free Web App a Long, Long Time Ago

I just ran across one of the must useful websites for bloggers I’ve ever seen. Maybe everyone knows about it and I’m just late to the party, but it’s amazing. Oh, and it’s 100% free.

It’s called WP Remote. In short, it helps you manage multiple WordPress blogs. There are three really great things about it.

The first really great thing about WP Remote

Once you create an account and add your blogs, your WP Remote dashboard shows you if your blogs’ themes, plugins, and WordPress versions/installations are up to date. If something’s not up to date, it tells you and you can update it right there from WP Remote (except new versions of WordPress; you have to go to your blog to update those).

This is what the interface looks like once you’ve added all of your blogs [click for the large version]:

You can see how the third blog from the bottom on the left side has a yellow orb next to it, along with little icons. Those three icons are theme, plugin, and WordPress icons, respectively, showing that those are the things that need to be updated. Pretty neat, huh?

A few months ago I went through a horrible experience where one of my blogs somehow got a virus or got hacked or something, and it spread to several of my blogs. When you don’t update your plugins and upgrade to the newest version of WordPress, your blog is more susceptible to hacks and viruses. It was one of my old, ignored blogs that first got the virus or whatever it was, and it then spread to my newer ones. If I’d been keeping everything up to date, that never would have happened.

The second really great thing about WP Remote

WP Remote makes it really easy to backup your blog. With just one button click, your .sql database (which contains your blog posts and all comments and pages), your WordPress files, and all of your media uploads (photos, images, audio, etc.) are backed up to the cloud on WP Remote. The backup is stored as a zip file which you can download to your computer (you can also easy delete older backups).

This is what your backups look like in the WP Remote dashboard:

So going back to the time when my blogs got viruses… I wasn’t using WP Remote at the time, and while I was able to make backups of my most important blogs, I wasn’t able to on some of the smaller ones. It wasn’t a huge deal once I got it fixed, but my life would have been so much easier if I’d been backing up regularly.

Oh, and note how it says in the image above that automatic daily backups are coming soon. That will be awesome.

The third really great thing about WP Remote

If you’re a web designer or someone who creates and monitors WordPress blogs for clients (or other people), this is a fantastic, easy, and cheap way to offer continued support.

Start using it!

If you’ve got multiple WordPress blogs, there’s no reason not to use this. It’s totally free. It’s totally awesome. It will save you a lot of time and effort both in the short term and in the long run.

So how do you start? You first need to go to the WP Remote site and sign up for an account. You then download and install the WP Remote plugin (free) on each blog you want to monitor. And that’s it. You’re good to go. Another neat thing is that you can arrange your blogs into groups, so you could have a “My Main Blogs” group, a “My Clients’ Blogs” group, and an “Old Blogs I’m Ignoring” group.

Of course, just having WP Remote set up doesn’t do you any good if you don’t use it regularly. I’d recommend checking it once a week. When you check, update anything that needs updating and back up each blog.

• Have you heard of WP Remote?
• Have you ever used it?
• Do you see how WP Remote could be valuable to you?
• Any questions?