6 of our favourite Plesk WordPress Toolkit features

Plesk WordPress Toolkit is a useful hosting tool that adds powerful yet simple management functionality to your WordPress website. If you are a web developer, the WordPress Toolkit can ease your workload by setting up WordPress with a single click.

Plesk WordPress Toolkit is useful to clone, sync, update, and carry out complex tasks in a simple straight-forward manner. It permits users to test plugins and themes without developing them on a live site. Furthermore, the Plesk WordPress Toolkit can help ensure your site’s security.

Plesk WordPress Toolkit offers Smart Updates

Plesk WordPress toolkit provides one dashboard to mass-manage updates for your WordPress websites. WordPress updates can impact your website’s security, so your WordPress themes and plugins must stay updated at all times. Smart Updates measures the impact an update might have on your website and advises whether you should proceed.

Smart Updates includes the following features:

1. Availability on a per-site basis.
2. Manual and automatic updates.
3. Site cloning to test updates without touching the production site.
4. Automatically determines if you should perform the update on the production site.
5. No impact updates: Until the user verifies the update, the production site remains unaffected.
6. Automatic updates: The production site remains unaffected until there are no issues found.
7. Available for WordPress core updates, plugins, and themes.

Benefits of Smart Updates:?

Automated updates: Smart Updates searches for new updates. It checks the update results on a clone of your website. It will then update your website, plugins, and themes.

Automated testing: It runs the update on a website clone. Smart Updates tests the website for bugs and errors.

You are always in charge: You will get an alert about the test results. Updates will not sync if the automated regression testing tool finds a broken site after the test run.

Staging Sites in the Plesk WordPress Toolkit

Website updates mean taking the website offline and activating maintenance mode, resulting in lost business, weak customer experiences, and time wasted. You can leverage website staging to test your website, or changes to it, before publishing. Plesk provides a testing environment for websites.

To update a production website, you need a staging environment. This permits website owners to get a complete copy of the production website and experiment on the staging site without breaking the production website.

Creating a staging environment and syncing it with the production site is a complex process. The WordPress Toolkit includes single-click cloning so that you can attain this with little hassle. You can protect the staging environment with a password to limit access to new content and settings.

You can use the clone features to:

1. Create a staging environment to update your production site.
2. Publish a website that you were developing after achieving a milestone.
3. Allow the client to choose from many versions of the same website.
4. Clone an existing website to use as a template for future projects.

Once the changes are complete, you can sync to production. In WordPress Toolkit, this only takes one click.

Backup and restore with the Plesk WordPress Toolkit

Here is what you can achieve with the Plesk WordPress Toolkit:

• Create a restore point before updating.
• Restore your WordPress site from the restore point.
• Download the restore point.

Plesk supports two types of backups:

• Plesk Backup: Full subscription backup.
• WordPress Backup via Toolkit: This backup contains data on just your WordPress backup.

Auto restore point created when using Smart Update.

You can store backups in:?

1. Your hosting storage.
2. External File Transfer Protocol (FTP) storage.

Customers may differentiate between backups created by them and technical backups included in their subscription. If any backup task is incomplete, Plesk displays the detailed error in a separate field. Additionally, sensitive data in your backups will be safe with password protection.

You can set up a backup password from:

• Your remote storage settings.
• While downloading a backup file from Plesk to another external location.

Plugin management in the Plesk WordPress Toolkit

WordPress plugins are pre-coded apps that merge with your WordPress website to deliver extra functionality. With WordPress Toolkit, you can install, manage, and update plugins.

You can install free and paid plugins from the WordPress repository. If you are unable to find a suitable plugin, you can upload custom plugins. You can install, activate or deactivate plugins for WordPress installations hosted on the server.

You can update plugins for as many installations or set up auto-updates for plugins. You can also remove plugins from one or all installations hosted on the server.

Theme management in the Plesk WordPress Toolkit

WordPress themes are a set of files that change the website’s appearance. Themes control the site’s layout and hyperlink colours. A WordPress theme changes the website design, such as colours, fonts, and layout.

By choosing a different theme, you can change the look and feel of your website. WordPress Toolkit allows users to install, manage, and update WordPress themes.?

You can install free and paid themes from the WordPress repository. You can also upload custom themes if you cannot find a suitable theme. But, a WordPress installation can have only one active theme.

Users can update free and paid themes through the WordPress admin dashboard and update themes or set up auto-updates. You can also remove themes from specific or all installations hosted on the server.?

Plesk WordPress Toolkit security measures

Plesk WordPress Toolkit can improve WordPress installation security. Individual improvements made to the installation’s security are ‘measures’. Specific measures are crucial. Plesk WordPress Toolkit applies critical measures to newly generated installations.

These security messages may appear on the installation card:

• ‘Fix security’: You are not using all the recommended and crucial security measures.
• ‘Check security’: You are using all the crucial security measures. But, you are not using some recommended measures.
• ‘View settings’: You are using all the security measures.

Some security measures can break your site. If this occurs, you can simply revert some of the security measures. However, some security measures cannot be reverted, so you should backup your site before securing it.

Leverage the Plesk WordPress Toolkit with Conetix

We believe that developers and businesses alike can greatly benefit from the features in Plesk’s WordPress Toolkit. Our WordPress hosting plans include the Plesk WordPress Toolkit right out of the box.?

Learn more about the Plesk WordPress Toolkit and how you can leverage it with Conetix.