xCloud offers two free tools to speed up WordPress deployments. Blueprints let you save a theme and plugin combo (like Ollie with Ollie Menu Designer and Image Optimizer) and reuse it for new sites. Snapshots capture an entire site's setup, content, and settings, then deploy it anywhere, making them ideal when you need an exact copy.
Chapters
xCloud has two different tools to accelerate the setting up of websites, and I want to tell you about in this video. One is called Blueprints and the other is called Site Snapshots, and they seem similar at first blush, but they're quite different. And I'm going to walk you through how to create them, how to use them, and how to manage them. Let's get started. I'm looking here at my dashboard. I have one site on this server. Called Topher's Site, oddly enough. And we're going to first add a new site and we're going to use a blueprint, but we're going to create a new one in the process. So I'm going to click New Site here in the top right, and I'm going to choose Install New WordPress Site, and, um, I'm going to use default options, and I'm going to do a demo site because I don't want to use a domain name on this. I'm going to give it a site title and I'm not going to do tags. Leave the domain name, not multi-site, not indexing, uh, caching, mail delivery, et cetera. And right here at the bottom, we have blueprints. And now there are 3 that come with your account. One is for Elementor sites, one is for Gutenberg sites, and one is for WooCommerce sites. Um, if you view all right now, you'll still just see the 3 because Um, that's all there are. But as you can see here, we can create a new blueprint. So what we're going to do here is set up, um, a template for a site. We're going to add, uh, we're going to choose a theme. We're going to add some plugins so that each time we spin up a new site, we can simply get started from a familiar setup. I'm going to click Create Blueprint. So here we can choose a theme. You can click one of these or you can search over here. I like Ollie, so I choose that. And you can choose to have it activated or not. So we're going to go to plugins, and I like the Ollie Menu Designer, of course. Um, I also like for image optimization, and I Um, let's choose a Kismet, and you can choose as many plugins as you want. Um, custom items, so you can, uh, add your own plugin. So like if something you wrote that you want in your blueprint, you can upload it in a variety of ways. Um, and you can even set up a post-deployment script to go with it. So I'm going to click create, and I forgot to give it a name. I'll show you how to fix that in just a few minutes. Um, so I'm gonna set up a new site using Blueprint 4. Now we have a site set up, and you may have heard my email ding telling me that it was there. So, um, let's do a magic login, and now we're logged in. Let's make this a little bigger, and I'm going to go to plugins, and you'll see that we have Ollie, uh, Simo, and Akismet, in addition to the default plugins that come with it. And our theme is Ollie. So now, uh, I'm going to go back and I'm going to click Create New Site again. I'm not actually going to do it, but what I want to show you is that at the bottom here, I go to View All, there's my blueprint. And so I can do this over and over again, which is great for agencies who are creating multiple sites that are basically the same. But I want to show you— I, I mentioned I forgot to name it. What I want to show you is that if you go to settings, reload this, right here is all my blueprints. I'm going to edit blueprint and give it the name Ollie. And there we are. So you can manage all of your blueprints here. So, like, if you never create Elementor sites, you can go in and delete this one. You can clone them. So if you need one that's just a slight variant, like if I wanted to add something to my Ollie one, you can clone it. So that's under, as I mentioned, Settings, My Blueprints. So to reiterate, a blueprint is just a predefined collection of plugins, a theme, et cetera. You don't get to configure those things. You, you saw me make one. I didn't go in and set up my settings for SEMO. Um, if I had one with Woo, like is here, I haven't set up any of my store stuff or anything like that. If I want that, that's where site snapshots come in. So let me show you those. I'm going to go to my server here. And I have Topher's site here. And, uh, you know what, I'm going to go ahead and pull that up so you can see it. We'll do a magic login. So I have, uh, you know what, I'm going to update the plugins on this real quick because I want my site snapshot to have the latest. A site snapshot is similar to a blueprint in that it has plugins and a theme chosen, but it also has It's literally a complete snapshot of a site. So it has your content, it has any settings, any license keys, all that stuff. We go into products, you'll see I have a whole bunch. If you just install Woo and don't do the, the installation part of it, the setup, then you won't have any products. These are the default products in Woo, but if you had your own store set up, you could have a default set of products of your own products, not the the WooCommerce ones. So let me show you how this works. Um, I'm here at the panel for this site, and under Actions, I can take snapshot, and we'll give it a name. It's kind of a poor name, but it gets the job done. All right, so it's creating it. You can see the action right here. Um, but I want to show you where this is managed. I'm I am in the admin panel for cyberknight360.com, and on the left are my site snapshots related to this site. Uh, so on any site that has snapshots taken of it, you can go in and view them. We can edit it, we can delete it, and if we go, let's see, I'm going to go to the server admin panel, add a new site, and install WordPress. Now, before we went to the bottom, we chose a blueprint, but now at the top we're going to choose a snapshot. So there's a demo site from a different server. Keep that in mind. And here's Topher Site Snapshot. I'm not going to do another install of WordPress because it will, it will look exactly like the one you just saw a few minutes ago. But in addition to managing them on the, the site dashboard. You can also go to settings and see all your site snapshots across all servers. So you can make a snapshot on one server and use it on another. They're very portable. And of course you can delete, edit, etc. from here. Um, if you have many, you can search, you can search by status, etc. So I want to reiterate the difference between the two. A blueprint is simply a choice of plugins and themes, etc. A snapshot is actually a complete WordPress site installed, set up, settings in place, license keys in place, everything ready. So you get to choose which you need. If you're cloning sites over and over again, you might want a snapshot because it's going to have everything all set up. If you build similar sites regularly, you may want a blueprint because it's just your toolbox. They're both here all the time. They're free. They're, I mean, they're part of your plan. They're available to everyone and they save you a ton of time. I use them all the time. Use them. They're great. Snapshots and blueprints. They're different tools. They're both awesome.
