Backup and maintain multiple WordPress installs effortlessly with WP Remote

WordPress is an awesome CMS used by a massive community of developers to create sites like the one you see here. But what happens if you develop numerous sites that you have to maintain yourself? You could check up on each one manually, making sure plugins, themes and backups are up to date, but that takes much more time and effort than it should.

WP Remote, created by humanmade, helps WordPress users keep track of all of these things in one simple, elegant dashboard. I know, bringing in yet another tool sounds like it would add to the clutter, but these guys help you set sites on auto-pilot.

My favorite aspect of the tool is the actual backup feature, which allows you to monitor and backup your site at the push of a button. Sadly, this isn’t a feature that’s fully built into the CMS, but WP Remote works better than most backup plugins with less setup time. In the future, the team is hoping to add automatic backups, like a time machine for your WordPress install.

The best part of the tool is that it’s entirely free (backup storage included). On the announcement blog post, the creators detailed their decision not to charge for WP Remote. It’s their contribution to the WP community after building an entire business out of it. From the creators:

Since starting work on WP Remote, we have often deliberated about potential monetization. To pour time into a free-to-use product can seem like a waste of resources to some, especially when it’s at the expense of paying client work. Also, we were worried of potentially devaluing our work on WP Remote by making it 100% free.

In the end it boiled down to wanting to give something back to the WordPress community as a whole. WordPress really is a great piece of software and returning the favour by trying to participate in WordPress core fixes and bug reports can often be a difficult game to play – while we make an effort to submit patches etc. for WordPress core, for a business that is 90% WordPress development it only seems right we try to put back into the pot.

➤  WP Remote

It’s important to note that you should be careful about testing certain plugins and themes before automatically updating. Sometimes things break unexpectedly, so you may need to play with things manually if you’ve had problems in the past.