When our websites go offline, I receive a text, letting me know that I need to do something about it.
This text saves me thousands of dollars every year.
I’ll tell you how I set this up shortly, but first, let me tell you about one of the most important things about running an online business….
Uptime. You have to make sure that it’s always online.
Servers go down due to heavy loads, so quality hosting is incredibly important. But it’s not always as simple as that.
Just this week, one of my site was hit with a DDoS attack, which meant that it was taken down for a considerable amount of time.
For those of you who don’t know, a DDoS attack is when your website’s access routes are hit with a bots attempting to try as many different passwords as possible.
Our site was hit with 195,000 hits in just a few minutes, from IP addresses from all over the world, and although we’ve put systems in place to prevent this from happening again, our website was still down for a considerable amount of time.
And this is where ManageWP comes in.
No matter how safe and secure your server is, there will come a time where it’s going to go down unexpectedly. And you need to ask yourself, what systems do you have in place when it does?
Your website isn’t making money when it’s offline.
Do you have customers who log in to your website, who will be annoyed when it’s not there?
How many sales are you going to lose out on?
How important is it to you to get back online quickly?
When our DDoS attack occurred, we knew about it, and could deal with it right away – even though I’m not always on my site.
How?
Because I use a service called ManageWP, which lets me know as soon as it’s down. This ultimately minimises downtime and loss of income, as I can deal with it straight away.
ManageWP is a service for managing WordPress sites, which, among other things, will notify me through text whenever one of my sites is down.
That means that I don’t have to be tied to my computer at all times, but I also don’t have to be worried about uptime of my websites.
If I get a text, I go and find a computer, or I talk to Michael, and one of us will sort it out.
If you run an online business, this is an absolutely essential tool – no excuses. You simple can’t have down time on your website. Even if your site only goes down once every six months, you need to use this.
Sometimes when I’m away, I will go a couple of days without viewing my website, and without a service like this, I wouldn’t know if my site was even online.
And that’s just one of the features I like about ManageWP; it does a whole lot more too.
WordPress Management
If you run multiple WordPress sites like we do, then you can use this service to manage all of them at once.
Updating Every Site At Once
For example, in our dashboard, it tells us if we ever have anything that needs updating, and if we do, we can update it from there. It will also notify us via email if we want it to.
It’s important to keep everything up to date for security and performance reasons.
How I Manage Comments For All Sites, In One Place
We can also keep track of, and reply to recent comments, on all of our sites, in one place.
Publish Content Across Multiple Sites
You can write posts, publish drafts, and post content to multiple sites, all from within the ManageWP dashboard.
Traffic Alerts
Do you sometimes get a bit slack when it comes to checking your Google Analytics traffic? What if someone refers a few thousand people to your website – how long will it go unnoticed for?
With ManageWP, we have alerts set up for whenever there’s a spike in traffic, so that we can take advantage of these great opportunities.
Whether one of our posts has gone viral, or we’ve being hit by bots, we will know immediately.
Automated Backups For Peace of Mind
You back up your sites regularly, right?
Because you should do. We’ve actually had to use a backup before, but fortunately for us, we backup regularly.
We use ManageWP to schedule regular backups, to keep our content safe and secure. When it’s finished backing up, we have it download the backup and store it in our Amazon S3 account; that way our bases are covered.
You can also sync you backups with Dropbox, FTP Email, and more.
Site Cloning and Deployment
On ExpertPhotography, we’re bringing out a done-for-you blogging service where we build websites for photographers, and this feature is going to be huge help.
It allows us to create “template” websites with pre-installed themes and plugins, which can be used again and again for new sites. Then take advantage of our website cloning tool to quickly and effortlessly deploy these sites in a production environment.
It takes 95% of the work behind setting up a website and does it for you.
I honestly believe that ManageWP is worth the $4+ a month fee for the uptime notification alone, but features like this put it over the top.
SEO and Analytics
ManageWP include powerful SEO analysis tools without the extra costs. You can use this information to know where you stand, and use it to improve your search engine rankings.
There’s also powerful keyword research and ranking tools built right in so that you can know which words your sites rank well for, and identify the other areas where you can improve.
You can also integrate your Google Analytics right there into the dashboard so that all of the vital information that you need is right there where you want it, without having to browsing through loads of separate Analytics accounts.
Increased Security
ManageWP use state-of-the-art encryption and security standards that go above and beyond what WordPress offers, to ensure that your sites are protected to a high standard.
You can also integrate with Securi.net so that all of your sites are free of malware and other harmful viruses. With these tools, you can easily check the health of your sites, and if there are any problems, you can quickly fix them.
Great, Flexible Price
It’s actually remarkably cheap to manage your websites, with all of these amazing features. If you have five sites or less, and you want to professional plan, you’ll only pay $12 a month.
And the more sites you run, the less you’ll pay per site each month.
And of course, there’s a free trial too.
14 Day Free Trial
This is a service we use every day in our business, and believe that you should too.
Try it for yourself, for free, and see what you think. You’ll have access to all of the paid features for 14 days, and then after that, if you choose not to upgrade, you’ll still have access to basic features.
Start taking proper care of your websites by clicking on this link today.