What is WordPress Toolkit?

WordPress (WP) Toolkit is a WordPress management solution. It has an easy-to-use interface that allows users to install, configure, secure, update, and manage all of their WordPress sites. Users can implement it with cPanel as a replacement for the cPanel WordPress Manager. A2 Hosting will be offering WP Toolkit Deluxe on all Turbo Managed Plans, and WP Toolkit Standard will be included on all other Managed plans. Watch our video below for an introduction to the WordPress Toolkit Deluxe or read the step-by-step guide beneath it.

An Introduction to WordPress Toolkit

So you’ve just created your new hosting account at A2 Hosting and you logged in to find your WordPress site and WordPress Toolkit. I’m going to walk you through some of the features that you’ll see on the dashboard when you first get started.  

Dashboard

There’s a slew of different features that will allow you to control certain aspects of your WordPress site. First things first, let’s say you want to get into WordPress and start writing on your blog or start working on the site itself. Right below the thumbnail and the bottom left is going to be your easy access, one-click login to get into the WordPress admin area. That’s where everything that happens on the app that contributes to your site management is going to take place.

Site Management on Your Dashboard

The rest of WordPress Toolkit is built around managing your site from more of a project perspective. Here is a screenshot of the dashboard and what each section means:

• File Manager: This is where you can look at all of the files that you currently have on your WordPress Site.
• Copy Data: This button allows you to copy data from one site to another if you’re managing more than one WordPress domain.
• Clones: There’s also a place where you can create a clone, which is basically creating a copy of your site and then storing it within the dashboard’s interface.
• Backup and Restore: This feature enables you to save a backup of your website. This backup can be downloaded, it can be moved, and it allows you to keep that record of your site at a certain place in time to be able to restore it at a later date if you ever need to.

Plugins 

So you can see for my site that was just created that I have the Akismet AntiSpam 4.1.12  and Hello Dolly 1.7.2 plugins. I could also enable some others by clicking the install button just below the word Plugins. This will take you to a page where you can search and find additional plugins within the WordPress community that can be added to your site.

Themes

I also have three themes on this example dashboard.: Twenty Nineteen 2.1, Twenty Twenty 1.8, Twenty Twenty-One 1.4. I currently have the bottom theme enabled but you can turn them off and on as needed. You can also search for more themes by clicking the install button and the screen pictured below will pop up. From there you can choose from thousands of amazing free and paid themes.

Status and Updates

So getting into the center section of the site here, we can see there’s a status column and that’s going to provide us with the status of our WordPress site. In WordPress, and with any type of website really, it’s always important to make sure that your site is kept up to date in both the version as well as your plugins and themes. 

The WordPress community is very active and there are people that are trying to maliciously attack websites all the time, so if there’s ever an issue or there’s a way that someone is able to crack the security of a website, these plugins, themes, and WordPress core, as we refer to it, get updated very quickly. It’s very important that you make sure that those updates are always applied to your site when they become available. That’ll help keep your site safe.

Running a Security Check

The next important security step is running a security check, which is included here within the WordPress Toolkit interface. Watch in the video below as I click security to run a check so the Toolkit can tell me what there is to update and fix on my example site. 

Once enabled, WordPress Toolkit will pull up a predefined list of security measures that you can implement to protect your site from outside attackers. If some of these tasks aren’t familiar to you you can click the little notice icon and it will provide you with a little bit more detail so that you can decide if you want to move forward with each step. 

Once you decide that you’re comfortable making these updates you can select the ones you’d like to apply or go ahead and select all and click Secure at the top. Check out the video below where I show you how on my example site. 

Tools

The second column here is tools. These items are a bit more advanced and can be utilized when you need to change how your site is interacting with the outside world or the outside web. 

• Search Engine Indexing: So search engine indexing is just like it sounds. This is where you can turn on indexing and index your site so that it can be found in a search engine or you can turn it off so it’s hidden from visitors.  
• Debugging: Debugging is a tool that allows you to essentially track issues that are happening with your site so that you can catch them and then apply those fixes.
• Password Protection: Password protection allows you to set a password for access to your site. This is a good tool to use if you’re working on your site and it’s currently not ready for production view. You can put a password on it so that only you or anyone with the password can access it.
• WP-Cron: WP-Cron is a technology that allows you to schedule tasks to run on your site and it’s a great time saver. It runs routinely and allows WordPress Toolkit to implement your changes as necessary to make sure that your resources are being allocated correctly and your site stays in production. 
• Hotlink Protection: Hotlink protection prevents other websites from using your images. Basically, if anyone were to come to your website and right-click your image to get the image location, or the image URL, and then link to it from a different site, hotlink protection would prevent them from being able to do that.

Checking WordPress Integrity

The last part of keeping your site up to date and running is to check WordPress integrity. This is basically a way to check to see if your site has files that have ever been infected by malware and it’s an important step in ensuring your website is active and online. Check out the video below to see how.

Implementing WordPress Toolkit for Your Site

Using the WordPress Toolkit Deluxe to manage your WordPress sites can save you time and stress in the long run. That’s why A2 Hosting is offering the WordPress Toolkit Deluxe version for free on all Managed Turbo plans and the WordPress Toolkit Standard on all other Managed plans. If you have any other questions feel free to contact our sales and support teams and they will be happy to help you!