xCloud's Updates Manager lets agencies manage WordPress updates across multiple sites from one dashboard. Bulk-update plugins, themes, and core files with optional backups, filter by server or site, and track everything in an update history log. No third-party service fees.
Chapters
Keeping your WordPress website up to date is very important. Not only are there security issues that need to be taken care of, but there are new features that come out that you don't want to miss out on. Now, keeping one website up to date isn't that hard, but once you get a few more, it kind of gets tedious to do them all. And xCloud is ideal for agencies who might have more than 10, 100. 1000 websites, and at that point it becomes unscalable. You can't just update each one of them individually. It doesn't work. You'll run out of time. So xCloud provides a solution for that. Now there are third-party solutions that offer these services where you can update multiple sites at a time, but, uh, with xCloud you don't need a third-party involvement. You don't need to have another account. Many of them charge. I saw one today that was $2 per month per site, which doesn't sound like a lot until you have 1,000 websites and then it's $2,000 a month just to be able to update them. Using xCloud's built-in services means that you can just take care of it without adding in all the hassle of another account and another bill. Let me show you how it works. I'm right here on my dashboard. And so I'm going to select a site. And then on the left, we'll go to WordPress, Updates. And now right here, you can, it says it was checked an hour ago. You can hit refresh and it will check to see what's going on right now. There we go. And it says WordPress core is up to date. If it were not, I would have an update button here. And then it lists all my plugins with changelogs and the option to activate, deactivate, or update if there is one. And the same for themes. And, uh, there's a cool filtering feature here at the top. We can say updates and it shows us only the ones that need to be updated. So then you can click here and update all of them at once. Piece of cake. It's great. But what if you have 100 websites? That can be tedious. Fortunately, xCloud has a great tool for that as well. I'm going to go to Settings and then Updates Manager. And this is the Updates Manager. Now, uh, I'm going to point out that I currently have 2 servers. And a total of 6 websites. So it's not a ton, but it gives you an idea of what's going on. I haven't updated them in quite a while. And so you can see here that there are 45 plugins, uh, 18 updates available. There are 35 active plugins, so it means there are 10 that are inactive. And you can search by plugin here. If you want to. So I'll just do Akismet. There, it shows me that Akismet is installed on 5 sites and it is currently updated. But you can also filter by server. So I'm gonna do topher-server, which only has 1 site on it. And so you'll see that there are 10 plugins, all active, no updates needed, 'cause I updated this one the other day. But on my other server, oop, I chose the wrong one. There we go. This is where all the updates are because these were test servers or test sites and I didn't keep them updated. You can also search by site. So I want to see just Site 1. And you can see that there are some updates available here for available 7 plugins. So I'm going to go all servers and all sites. And so this is just plugins. Now, if I go over to themes, you'll see that I have 5 themes installed and there are no updates. These don't get a lot of updates. So Cadence is installed on Topher's server, which I've been keeping updated. So there's not a lot going on there. And then WordPress core. This is on 6 sites, obviously. They're all WordPress sites and it is updated. But you could update them, the themes, core, all from here. So let's go back to plugins and I'll show you what it's like to update them. I'm going to go down to Disable Comments, which says update available. I'm gonna check details. It tells me where it is, what versions it has on there, what it's going to go to. I could optionally deactivate it rather than update it. And then there's also a link right here to the changelog, which goes over to wordpress.org. Let me make that big for you. And the changelog is right here. And it says that that is not a great ticket description, but that's okay. Let's go to Google Translate. Gutenberg. Let's go to the changelog for Gutenberg. And they have one somewhere else. Also okay, that's fine. So you can go in here and click update on each individual site. Or you can click this checkbox and update selected. I'm going to go ahead and do that. You can see here that you have the option to create a backup before update. I'm not going to do that because I didn't set up backups for my testing sites, but if you have backups set up, it just slides right into that process. So let's hit update items, and there we are, 3 successful, 0 failed. I'm gonna hit reload here. And there we are, updated. So I'm going to go to update available. And here we are. So there's, it says 15. There are only 3 plugins that need to be updated, but each of them is on 5 sites, which gives you 15 plugins. So I'm gonna click here and update selected. And away we go. It does say large updates may take several minutes to complete. A very large plugin might take more time to download to all 5 servers, et cetera. Gutenberg being one of them. Gutenberg is a pretty big plugin. So I'm going to open up this one and watch it do its updating thing. And there. Now, because we're on the updates available page, It's not showing. I'm going to run it on Disable Comments. There we go. All of our plugins are updated and it happened right here, just that fast. And I had the option to do backups. You can still go to All, here we go, and see all your plugins and see that they're all updated. And how many sites they're on, et cetera. I wanna show you, you can do themes also, and then WordPress core. And then this is really valuable. There's an update history. I just did it a second ago, so it hasn't caught up. The log files haven't caught up, but it would tell you what was done, when was done, et cetera. Many of the services that I reviewed before doing this video offer many other features. And so they'll say, well, yeah, it's, it's X dollars, but you offer all these other features. Well, xCloud does as well. Many of those offer backups, which xCloud offers. They offer role management, so you could say certain people can do things and others can't. xCloud does that. xCloud does pretty much everything they do It's just not part of this particular page of Updates Manager, which makes me wonder, should those other sites or those other services be doing them either if they're just an updates service? Either way, xCloud has you covered and provides a great service with their Updates Manager, especially if you have a lot of websites.
