Run Your WordPress Business Like a Pro with WPMU DEV
Hey, web developer! How many sites do you think you can easily set up and manage on your own or as part of a small agency? With WPMU DEV we reckon it’s absolutely loads of them… and here’s how.
In this post, we are going to show you how to easily resell white-label hosting, create epic sites in minutes, automate site management tasks (for hundreds of them), run it all seamlessly under your own brand, and even set up subscriptions that take care of themselves.
Ready to live the dream? Lock yourself in!
In this article, you will learn how to easily manage unlimited WordPress sites using one-click plugin configurations, automated updates, hands-free backups, and 24/7 site monitoring, plus add white label hosting reselling with built-in client billing, set up instantly optimized client sites, and more — saving you time and helping your WordPress business grow faster, easier, and more profitably.
We’ll cover the following areas to help you speed up your workflow and increase revenue:
- Your WordPress Business Setup is All Set Up
- Save Time with Simple and Speedy Site Creation
- Save Time Hosting and Managing Client Sites
- Quickly Update Core, Plugins, And Themes for All Client Sites from One Place
- Automatically Update All Your Clients’ Core, Plugins, and Themes
- Manage All Plugins Easily with My Plugins
- Delegate, Collaborate, and Make Your Team Work Great
- Provide 24/7 Site Monitoring and Instant Automated Downtime Reports with Uptime
- Automate Hosting Backups
- Generate Monthly Recurring Revenue with Hosting Reselling and Automated Client Billing
We’ll also touch on some of the things we plan to introduce in the near future to improve your WordPress business automation ;)
Let’s begin with…
Your WordPress Business Setup is All Set Up
Whether you manage one or a thousand WordPress client sites, WPMU DEV has your business needs fully covered right from the get-go.
Everything you need to run your WordPress business is included with your membership and already set up and ready to use as soon as you join (not a member yet? Try us free!).
So, in your Member’s dashboard, you can easily go from this…
To this, in just a few clicks, for every site you manage…
Everything takes place from The Hub, which is your central management console and WordPress business HQ. The Hub lets you manage unlimited clients sites…from hosting, site setup and configuration, to updating core, plugins, and themes, optimizing site performance, managing security, SEO, running backups, site monitoring, client reports, and more…even accessing our 24-7 support.
As you will see in a moment, almost everything in The Hub can be set up with a few clicks and configured to run automatically.
Additionally, as a member, you are instantly given white label hosting reseller status and access to our client billing and management systems (also white label, of course)…all for free!
We’ll touch on these areas (and more) in just a moment. The takeaway here is that everything you need to run your WordPress business is included with WPMU DEV, already set up, and ready to use.
Let’s show you now how to save time and make money easier, faster, and better than you ever imagined with your WordPress business.
It’s as easy as 1-2-3:
- Save Time with Simple and Speedy Site Creation
- Save Time Hosting and Managing Client Sites
- Generate Monthly Recurring Income with Hosting Reselling and Client Billing
Save Time with Simple and Speedy Site Creation
The Hub lets you easily manage client websites hosted on 3rd-party hosts (using our Dashboard plugin) or hosted with WPMU DEV using various options.
If you are hosting sites with us, you’ll find a number of simple and speedy ways to set up your sites.
You can migrate an existing client site with no hosting downtime using our migration options, or…
Spin Brand New Sites Loaded with Cool Features and Benefits
When you create a brand new site in The Hub using WPMU DEV’s managed WordPress hosting, your site is automatically set up and configured on its own isolated, compartmentalized, and fully secured server with a whole range of next level cool features added like:
- One-click Online Staging
- Web Application Firewall
- Fast-CGI Static Server Cache
- Automated Hosting Backups
- Self-Healing Architecture
- Daily Malware Scanning
- A Suite of Robust Premium Plugins
- Plus easy SFTP/SSH access, phpMyAdmin, and so much more…
And all of this is done automatically for you in seconds when you click the “Create Site” button.
Setting up blazing fast hosting for your clients’ sites is just the beginning.
Now…what about actually building websites for your clients? Does WPMU DEV help make this process quicker and easier too?
Do we ever!
Let’s say that your client needs a hosted website – pronto!
The quickest way to do this is by automatically having one ready to go.
You can speed up your site-building process using our Templates feature or by Cloning a site.
Let’s take a brief look at these methods.
Select from Amazing Templates or Create Your Own for Free
To help speed up your site development process, we offer a growing library of free professional site templates to suit a whole range of applications, from blogs, to small businesses and marketing agencies, professional services, non-profit sites, eCommerce, and more.
You can choose a premade template from our growing library or take one of your existing sites and save it as a custom template for future use. Learn more about using templates.
Clone WordPress Sites for Quick and Automatic Site Creation
Another way to speed up your site development is to instantly clone an existing site or template.
Cloning eliminates the need to build a website from scratch. Simply choose which website you want to clone, and your new site is ready.
Check out our documentation section to learn more about creating and cloning site templates and cloning websites.
Now that you know you can save time spinning and setting up a new website, let’s take things one step further…
Optimize Essential Plugins Faster with Configs
Imagine that you have just spent a lot of time working on a client’s site. You’ve tweaked and optimized it to make it ultra fast and super secure.
Now…do you have to go and do this all over again for the next site you manage? And the next? And the next one too?
No! Not with our web developer-friendly tools.
As a WPMU DEV member, not only do you automatically get access to our entire suite of professional plugins (speed optimization, security, SEO, white-labeling, marketing, analytics, and more), but with our one-click Plugin Configs, you can easily re-apply your already built setups to all other WordPress sites that you manage.
Configs take out all of the painstaking manual tweaking and adjustments required to set up individual client sites.
You can instantly apply preset or custom configs to your preferred WPMU DEV plugins (and Uptime monitoring – see further below) on unlimited sites – all in a few clicks.
Learn more about Configs and check out the brief video below.
Keep in mind that if you use a premade template, you’ll be all set and configs won’t even be necessary! It’ll all be set up for you already.
Speaking of speeding and setting things up…
Set Up & Manage Email and DNS with No Fuss, No Mess, No Stress
“My clients are always super organized with their logins and passwords!”
…said no website developer ever!
Time is money and a great way to save time (and money) is to be organized when managing important client site details for services like domain registrars, DNS records, email logins, etc.
With WPMU DEV, you can set up and manage all this under one roof. From registering and managing domains, to setting up client emails, and managing their DNS.
An often overlooked time-saving benefit of managing DNS yourself is that you can:
- Temporarily set up client sites that you are working on using your own domain name (e.g. client1.yourbusiness.com), and then…
- Easily transfer the site over to your client’s domain once they have signed off and paid for it.
Learn more about setting up emails on WPMU DEV’s managed WordPress hosting and configuring DNS.
Now that we’ve looked at ways to save time creating new client sites, let’s show you how to…
Save Time Hosting and Managing Client Sites
Whether you choose to host sites with WPMU DEV, host sites elsewhere, or work with a combination of both is completely up to you.
- Are your clients happy with their existing host and only want you to manage their sites? No problem.
- Want to easily migrate existing client sites over to WPMU DEV’s world-class hosting platform? No problem.
- Want to resell blazing-fast managed WordPress hosting as part of your WordPress services? No problem.
The Hub makes it easy for you to manage all of your sites with many time-saving features, like:
Quickly Update Core, Plugins, And Themes for All Client Sites from One Place
Let’s say you manage a dozen or more WordPress client sites.
Just imagine how much time you would have to spend manually logging into each individual site to check and update that site’s core, plugins, and themes.
The Hub lets you view, manage, and update all your client sites from one screen with a few clicks.
Once your sites are set up in The Hub, you don’t even need to log into each site’s admin area…you can do it all from The Hub.
If your business involves managing multiple sites, updates are serious business (even for one site). With several sites to maintain, this can turn very quickly into a life-sucking time-consuming chore (yawn!).
When it comes to site maintenance and updates, The Hub is your friend indeed in times of need.
- Need to update a plugin, theme, or WordPress core version? One-click…done!
- Need to ignore core, plugin or theme updates that might cause problems on some or all of your sites? One-click…done!
- Need to disable plugins and themes on WordPress multisite installations? One-click…done!
Automatically Update All Your Clients’ Core, Plugins, and Themes
Want to update all your clients’ sites automatically at a convenient time that suits you?
The Hub not only lets you update WordPress core, plugins, and themes for single or multiple sites and update individual elements or all of them with one-click, but you can also automate the entire process to suit a specific time for your business (e.g. during working hours when you are available to receive notifications about any potential issues with your client sites).
FREE EBOOK
Your step-by-step roadmap to a profitable web dev business. From landing more clients to scaling like crazy.
FREE EBOOK
Plan, build, and launch your next WP site without a hitch. Our checklist makes the process easy and repeatable.
Kick things up a notch with Automate, the tool that gives you safe, scheduled, backed up, secure, and automatically-accessed updates.
Automate lets you run automated or manual core, plugin, and theme updates for all your sites and run scheduled backups too.
This tool also includes advanced features to ensure that updates won’t break your sites. For example, before updating anything, Automate will make a complete backup of your site(s), run error checks and take pre- and post-update snapshots of the sites, compare these to make sure that everything goes smoothly, and even send you email reports with uptime and error checks with screenshots if any differences are detected.
You can easily set up Automate from your Hub in just a few clicks by going to Plugins & Themes > Automate.
Here you can choose to update all plugins and themes automatically or manually, giving you complete control of your update processes.
With Automate, you can also choose update times, whether to backup your entire site before each update, set up email alerts, allow clients to receive update reports, and more.
You can also easily tweak sites for specific updates.
So, use Automate to provide a world-class updating service to all your managed client sites with complete “set it and forget it” automation.
For more on Automate, be sure to read our documentation.
Speaking of plugins, here’s another time-saving feature for your WordPress business…
Manage All Plugins Easily with My Plugins
Your clients are all individuals with individual website needs. Managing different sites with all different kinds of plugins installed on them can get pretty daunting.
Even if you have hundreds of WordPress plugins installed across many different sites, you can manage them all (free and premium) from one convenient place, right from The Hub > My Plugins page.
The My Plugins page lets you search, filter, favorite, bulk install (including uploading from Zip files or URLs) and manage plugin installations for all your sites.
While you can’t use features of The Hub like Automate or Ignore Updates for third-party plugins, the My Plugins section saves you time keeping all your plugins organized and readily accessible.
Check out our documentation section to learn more about My Plugins or watch the video below to see how easy, convenient, and time-saving this feature really is:
Delegate, Collaborate, and Make Your Team Work Great
WPMU DEV’s platform supports unlimited business expansion, so you can grow your WordPress business as big as you like…and we’ll grow with you.
Our Team feature lets you easily give multiple users (including non-WPMU DEV members) and additional team members controlled access to the Hub.
You can grant or restrict access to any or all of The Hub features and even create custom roles.
Note: Team members will not have access to your WPMU DEV membership details (or any other features of your account, like live-chat support) but can use all the Hub features on the sites they have permission to access.
An even better way to save time than delegating and collaborating is automating, so let’s turn back to a few more site management time-saving features of The Hub that you can automate in your WordPress business.
Provide 24/7 Site Monitoring and Instant Automated Downtime Reports with Uptime
Your clients pay you to make sure their sites are up and running 24/7 without errors, issues, or problems.
But you also need to sleep (and have your life too!), so the last thing you want is a business that takes up all your time and then have clients calling you in the middle of the night because their site’s not working as it should.
So, what about the times when you’re not around to check on all your managed sites?
No problem! Meet Uptime.
Uptime continually and automatically monitors and tracks your sites’ uptime and performance and helps you address any issues before they become problems. It sends you (and your client, if you wish) instant downtime updates with details like uptime, downtime, response time, and alerts so you can get sites back online quickly with the help of our 24/7 live support.
You can also use configs with Uptime to implement your favorite site monitoring settings across all existing and new sites with just a few clicks.
To learn more about setting up and using Uptime to automatically eliminate your site babysitting chores, see this article.
Automate Hosting Backups
Half of your peace of mind comes from knowing that all your managed sites are up and running problem-free.
The other half is making sure that you have set up automated hosting backups.
No doubt you’ve made sure that your clients know that site backups are an important part of their business continuity plan.
As it happens, website and hosting backups is also an important part of our plan to help you with your WordPress business.
If you manage third-party hosted sites, use our Snapshot Pro plugin to create additional backups and provide extra security and protection for their businesses.
Snapshot lets you schedule safe and secure incremental backups and automatically upload these to remote storage destinations (e.g. Amazon S3, Google Drive, Dropbox), receive instant email alerts and notifications, and even white label the plugin as part of your services.
If you host sites with WPMU DEV hosting backups are taken care of automatically. There’s literally nothing you need to do.
We have you completely covered with one-click restores, nightly incremental backups, automated incremental hosting backups before critical events (e.g. WordPress updates), a complete backup of your sites created every 15 days, and even 30 days of remote & off-site backups in the unlikely event that our data center gets swallowed up by a sinkhole.
If you want even more peace of mind, you can create manual or cloud backups at any time. And since our hosted sites and backups reside on completely different architectures, you have the ultimate peace of mind knowing that there is always something to fall back to in case unexpected disasters strike.
Our automated hosting backups are reliable (100% guaranteed), redundant, and use the latest in advanced server-based technology with almost no server load, so it’s fast (nearly instantaneous) and extremely space-efficient.
Also, we do not charge additional fees for your hosting backups or their storage.
All this hands-free backup automation not only gives your clients complete peace of mind, it also gives you a license to print money. Simply include it as part of your services, set it up, and let us take care of it for you.
Speaking of ka-ching, let’s now turn to ways we can help you save time and make more money with your WordPress business.
Generate Monthly Recurring Revenue with Hosting Reselling and Automated Client Billing
If you provide WordPress services, reselling hosting is a no-brainer way to generate additional revenue for your business…especially if you can brand it as your own!
Your WPMU DEV membership includes The Hub Client, which turns you into an instant white label hosting reseller and free (and fee-free) client billing management and automation.
Resell White Label Hosting
With our white label hosting, you can resell hosting bundled as part of your services, or separately. It’s completely up to you.
The Hub Client can be set up on your own domain and fully customized to match your brand name, logo, colors, etc.
From The Hub Client, you can also sell and charge subscriptions for automated updates, performance optimization, security, SEO, backups, analytics, uptime monitoring, weekly reports and hosting.
You can also provide on-the-spot live chat support to clients directly from your Hub site by integrating HubSpot, LiveChat or Tawk.to live chat widgets, and create, brand, and customize multiple Hub Client site installs…all from one WPMU DEV account.
Learn more about The Hub Client.
Automate Client Billing
Client billing lets you sell anything you want, not just WordPress services (got merch yet?).
You can use client billing to generate customized PDF invoices, create and manage automated client subscriptions, charge clients and send email reminders, process refunds, track monthly recurring revenue, and more…all from one dashboard in The Hub’s Client Billing section.
Your client billing payment processing currently integrates with Stripe (more payment options coming soon), giving your clients a secure one-click checkout experience with seamless payment deposits into your account…and “0” transaction fees!
There’s a TON of features that our Client Billing gives you to help you run your business more efficiently, including white-label and custom invoicing, email notifications, monitoring active subscriptions, etc.
Check out our article on fee free client billing to learn how to start automating your incoming revenue today. Also, for more insights on the benefits of reselling WordPress services, check out our epic story on how Bob builds a website for a car wash client.
Don’t Wait to Automate…Start Growing Your WordPress Business Today
No matter what kind of WordPress business you run…whether you’re a solo freelance website developer or a growing WordPress agency, WPMU DEV’s got your back.
The Hub saves you time managing all your clients’ sites and our white label hosting reselling and client billing helps you make more money. Already, you can quickly and easily set up, configure, manage, and bill your clients automatically, and generate monthly recurring payments from clients with minimum effort.
And There’s Still More to Come for WPMU DEV members…
Down the road, we’ll be including a self-service client portal where you will be able to sell your products, services, and add-ons directly, your clients will be able to view a pricing table for different products & services (e.g. hosting, domains, etc.) based on your defined pricing plans, and all purchased items will be automatically deployed to their portal with no additional effort required from you.
If you’re not a WPMU DEV member yet, try us free and check out everything we offer for yourself. Put all of our time-saving site management tools, award-winning plugins, white-label hosting, client billing automation, and 24/7 support to work for you, and start focusing on growing your WordPress business faster, easier, and more profitably!
Martin Aranovitch Martin Aranovitch is a blog editor and writer at WPMU DEV. He has been teaching businesses how to use WordPress effectively almost since the platform began. When he is not writing articles and tutorials, he’s bushwalking in the mountains or playing triangle. Connect with Martin on Facebook and his WordPress client training manual and free content management course websites.