Download: WP Remote

Keeping even one Wordpress website up to date can time consuming, but if you oversee more than one it can become a little tricky.

WP Remote is a useful plugin that can be installed on your sites so that you can monitor them from a single location once you have signed up on the WP Remote website.

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Installation is a two-step process as you will need to register with WP Remote as well as install the plugin in Wordpress.

The Wordpress plugin is best installed through the Wordpress settings page. Log in to the Dashboard of your website and click Plugins on the left-hand side. Click on Add New and then search for wpremote. The correct plugin is made by Human Made Limited. Click on the Install Now link. Wordpress will download and install the plugin. When it has finished, click on the Activate Plugin link.

The final step is to get the API key from the WP Remote website. Go to https://wpremote.com/ and click on the Sign up button. Enter the username you want to use, your email address and a password. Assuming that your username is accepted, the next page will show the summary page of WP Remote.

Click on the green button to add a web site. Enter the name and address of your site and click on Add. Click on the Settings link in the website summary to reveal the API key. Copy and paste this from this page into the Wordpress settings page. Click on the Save API Key button. WP Remote is now ready to use.

We think the summary page on the WP Remote website is very well designed and can fit in details for a lot of sites. A clear colour-coding system makes it very clear which sites need attention.

The only disadvantage that we could see is that it doesn't seem possible to view the same site in more than one account on the WP Remote website. This would be very useful if several volunteers are working on a site.

Some updates can be installed from the WP Remote site but one of the best tools for us is the site backup option. With one click you can download the contents of your web site as a zip file.

Crucially, this also includes the database file used by Wordpress. This won't be included if you simply download the files from the website using a tool such as Filezilla. As it's the database that includes the actual content of your site, this is a critical part of a backup.

WP Remote used to offer online storage for the backups but this is not longer the case. It's not really a big problem as you'd want them close to hand in the event of a problem anyway.