UpdraftCentral is a powerful remote control dashboard for WordPress that allows you to manage your WordPress sites from one central location.
You can centrally manage backups, updates and more, accessing each site quickly and efficiently.
This plugin is the central dashboard plugin for installing on the site you want your dashboard (the "mothership"). On the sites you want to control, you instead install UpdraftPlus.
https://vimeo.com/173470901
Don't want to self-host a dashboard? A premium
cloud version of UpdraftCentral hosted and maintained by us is also available with many more features - with control of 5 sites available for free.
UpdraftCentral is the latest release from the makers of UpdraftPlus, WordPress' #1 most installed and trusted backup plugin (active on over a million WordPress sites). As a relatively young plugin we're keen to get your feedback. If you discover a problem, please let us know (rather than slamming us with a bad review!). You can find support or make suggestions
here.
Quick links:
how to install |
how to add a site |
FAQs
Features of this self-install version
Built with state-of-the-art technology, UpdraftCentral is full of features that increase your efficiency and productivity.
With UpdraftCentral, you can…
- Quickly manage all your UpdraftPlus backups from a single place (backup, see/edit settings, see/download/delete backups, initiate restore)
- Log in to the WP dashboard of any connected site with a single click.
- Update the WordPress core, plus plugins and themes of any connected site.
- Clearly view updates from all sites and carry them out according to sophisticated filters from a single screen.
- Clean your database on any site by remotely controlling our WP-Optimize plugin, the #1 most-installed WP database optimization plugin
- Control policies for updates via control of Easy Updates Manager
- Manage UpdraftVault storage
- Easily inspect current system information in order to manage site configurations and settings, and troubleshoot problems.
- See below for extra features in UpdraftCentral Premium
UpdraftCentral Advantages:
- No annoying page refreshes and no WP dashboard to get in your way (this is a single-page/dynamic JavaScript application which runs in the front end and on full-screen mode).
- Fast and efficient: all communications are sent directly from the browser where possible, rather than through a back-end server).
- Secure: all communications between sites are RSA encrypted and signed, and every connection has a unique key-pair. Can be run by localhost, so you can have the dashboard website (i.e. the one that controls all the others) off the public Internet.
- Mobile-ready and responsive
- Extensible and developer friendly: it uses WordPress hooks widely, and all of its JavaScript is documented with JSDoc.
Features of UpdraftPlus Premium Cloud:
UpdraftCentral Premium Cloud is a hosted, cloud version of UpdraftCentral which we maintain so that you don't have to.
It has many more features:
- Run Google Analytics to get an instant overview of important KPIs from all sites
- Easily manage comments on all your sites from one place
- Manage users, giving different levels of access
- Create tags to organize websites into different categories
- Fully supported via a fast, professional ticketed support service and active forum.
- Manage (activate, deactivate or delete) plugins from one or multiple websites all in one place
- Install one or more plugins straight from wordpress.org and automatically activate them
- Manage themes, choose and set your default theme easily and automatically
- Search, choose and click to install themes to one or multiple websites
https://youtu.be/Gmi7AmtTDbU
How to install:
Using the WordPress dashboard
- Navigate to the 'Add New' in the plugins dashboard
- Search for 'UpdraftCentral'
- Click 'Install Now'
- Activate the plugin on the Plugin dashboard
Uploading in WordPress Dashboard
- Download the latest version of this plugin from https://wordpress.org/plugins/updraftcentral/
- Navigate to the 'Add New' in the plugins dashboard
- Navigate to the 'Upload' area
- Select the zip file (from step 1.) from your computer
- Click 'Install Now'
- Activate the plugin in the Plugin dashboard
Using FTP
- Download the latest version of this plugin from https://wordpress.org/plugins/updraftcentral/
- Unzip the zip file, which will extract the updraftcentral directory to your computer
- Upload the updraftcentral directory to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory in your web space
- Activate the plugin in the Plugin dashboard
From our
YouTube channel, here's how to add a new site:
https://youtu.be/5uq39rJgSgw
Requirements
The website being controlled must have all of these:
- WordPress 3.4 (June 2012) or later. There are no further version PHP/MySQL requirements.
- UpdraftPlus version 1.12.2 (free version) / 2.12.2 (paid versions) or later installed and active (but, for full functionality and compatibility, you should have the latest release)
- No active security modules (whether a WordPress plugin, or webserver component) that block traffic based on unusual patterns - encrypted traffic from a remote control plugin is likely to be blocked, as it looks very different to regular website visits from a web browser. We have tested with the most popular WordPress plugins, and these are all not a problem in all the configurations we have tested.
The website that is running the dashboard (i.e. this plugin, UpdraftCentral) must have:
- WordPress 4.4 (Dec 2015) or later
- PHP 5.6 or later
The web browser that you visit the UpdraftCentral dashboard must not have not been end-of-lifed by its maker. Specifically, Internet Explorer 9 (or earlier) is not supported. UpdraftCentral is built using modern JavaScript technologies.
Acknowledgements
We recognise and thank all those whose code and/or libraries are used and/or modified under the terms of their open source licences in UpdraftCentral, at:
https://updraftplus.com/acknowledgements/
== Installation ==
You should install using the standard WordPress procedure:
- Search for 'UpdraftCentral' via the 'Plugins' dashboard page in WordPress.
- Click the 'Install' button. (Make sure you pick the right one)
- Activate the plugin through the 'Plugins' menu in WordPress
Then, you must create a front-end page for your site, to contain the dashboard. i.e. Go to the "Pages" screen in your WordPress dashboard, and follow the link for "Add New". You are recommended to use a template that allows UpdraftCentral as much width as possible - but, note that UpdraftCentral has a "full screen" mode; so, even if your theme is narrow, it's not a problem.
Upon this front-end page, place this shortcode: [updraft_central] . This will allow logged-in site administrators, who visit that page, to use UpdraftCentral. If you want users with roles to also be able to use UpdraftCentral (note that every user has their own list of sites - giving users access to UpdraftCentral does not give them access to your sites, only to their own list of sites), then please see this FAQ for information on how it is done:
https://updraftplus.com/faqs/can-allow-non-admin-users-updraftcentral-dashboard/
Then, to start using UpdraftCentral, simply visit the page, and
you can begin adding sites, using this guide.