Mange Multiple Websites in One Place With MainWP

If you own or manage a few domains, and especially if your domains have subdomains, it can be difficult to manage all those sites at once. Luckily, there’s a plugin that can help you with that – MainWP. It’s a website manager that keeps track of all your WordPress websites and the updates that are available for them, and even allows you to see posts you’ve written. In this post I’ll explain what MainWP is, how to download it, install it and set it up.

What is MainWP?

MainWP is basically a control panel you can sync all your websites to. It allows you to see which websites need to have updates installed, which have errors on them, and even how much downtime your sites have had. I found out about it from this YouTube video, which does a pretty good job of explaining it:

How to Install MainWP: The Illustrated Version

For those of you who had a hard time following the video, here’s the illustrated version of how I set it up to manage this site as well as my other sites.

1. First I created a new subdomain specifically for it and installed WordPress on it. You’ll have to go to your web host’s provider to find out how to create a new subdomain for your website. If you have multiple websites like I do, I suggest choosing the one you use most often and creating a subdomain called mainwp.yoursite.com. Replace “yoursite” with your site name, of course.
2. Once I created the subdomain and installed WordPress on it, I went to the Plugins section, searched for MainWP, installed it and enabled it.

3. Next, I had to install and activate the WP child plugin on my other two sites:

4. Once that was done, I added those sites to my MainWP control panel that I installed on its own domain. Now I can see everything that’s going on with my websites!

As you can see, the process is kind of involved, but once you get everything set up and working properly, you won’t have to worry about going in and updating your websites manually again. As I learn more about this plug-in, I’ll be sure to post updates.

Have you ever used MainWP, or a similar program, to manage your websites? If so I’d like to hear about it. Please feel free to comment below with your experiences.