We recently moved our sites to Liquid Web and with their managed hosting, you also get iThemes Sync Pro. To be honest, I’ve known about it for quite some time, really, ever since it’s been around. But guess what? Now that I have started using it, I don’t know how I survived without it.
Whether you have a few sites or dozens, the time it saves you is what makes it such a great plugin. When you have set up your hosting and you activate the iThemes Sync plugin, you will be walked through a few easy steps to set up your account. It’s also the place the dashboard will be for managing your sites.
iThemes Sync Pro: Manage All Your WordPress Sites and Online Stores
It’s simple to set up. Just install the plugin and connect your site by logging into it. Once you do that, the wheels start to move.
Notifications
In your settings, you will likely want to set notifications. This will give you a daily email of available updates and the option for uptime notifications as well.
This is what your email will look like:
Home Dashboard
Here you get an overview of updates needed, uptime and access to more options for each site, which we will revisit in this post. You can also refresh this page at any time and add more sites that come with your specific plan.
Update Details
If you click on Updates, you can see the specific plugins and themes that need to be updated, which you can do in a single click. As always, you should make sure you have a backup in place before randomly updating stuff. If you have that taken care of, cool. If not, you can easily use and integrate BackupBuddy from iThemes.
Install Plugins and Themes
You can also install plugins and themes via iThemes or WordPress.org, or upload them. And if you use WP101 videos for your clients, you can also easily access that account and add them to clients’ sites.
Again, as with the updates, make sure you have a backup in place before installing any new plugins.
Uptime
You can also see the uptime report, including Last Response Time, the amount of time that has passed since a downtime.
Whitelabeling Reports
As you can see, I have not created any reports, but this is a great feature if you are managing client websites and want to send them a report on their site. Or perhaps you want to send one to a team member or someone else.
You can create the general options here:
And some more options for the report emails:
Site Details in Sync
Now if we were to go back to our homepage and click on the gear icon for a single site, we can see the shortcuts we have:
And if you toggle any single site on, you will get these options for this page.:
Site Overview
Now if we were to click on any single site, you would have all of these options starting with the overview. One thing to know is that you can drag and drop any of the modules on the page:
(note: these are taken from a demo site recently installed on my account)
We can click on each top menu item to get more detailed information about an individual site. As you will see from each screen shot, to save you time, a lot of the options you have within your WordPress dashboard are conveniently located here. Please note that I did not include BackupBuddy or Security in these shots as I don’t have those specific iThemes plugins installed. But if you are missing those parts for any site, I would suggest you check those particular plugins out.
Plugins
Here you can easily activate, deactivate, delete or update any plugins:
Users
You can log in from this dashboard, editing other users, and deleting them as well:
Logs
You can keep track of all update logs here:
Themes
Similar options as your plugins:
Posts and Pages
There are shortcuts to add a new post or page, and edit and view them as well. You can delete post revisions here and duplicate a post or page:
Comments
If you are dealing with a few sites and comments on all of them, it’s nice That you can approve, mark as spam or even trash any comments easily from here:
Analytics
You can hook up to your site’s Analytics via Sync:
Search Console
And if you use Google Search Console, which I suggest you do, you can add the account here to pull your data in for viewing:
Social
You can create and send a tweet from the site here. If you don’t have something else in place for scheduling shares, or even if you do, this is nice to have here as you might think of a share you need to do while in your Sync dashboard:
Optmize
This is incredibly handy for cleaning up a site in a single click:
WP Settings
And lastly, if there is anything you want to update in a site’s WordPress settings, you can do that here:
So that is iThemes Sync Pro. I can honestly say that since I started using it, even though it was on just our handful of sites, it has saved me a lot of time. I can only imagine how helpful it would be if you manage a dozen sites, or several dozen. Check it out if you find yourself spending too much time going from site to site to site.
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