• Monday, July 4, 2022

What is WordPress Toolkit Deluxe?
WordPress (WP) Toolkit Deluxe 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. inputhost has now implemented WP Toolkit Deluxe on all hosting plans. Whilst other hosting companies are charging for this tool, we thought it best to give our customers this premium feature as standard. Ensuring your WordPress website hosted with inputhost is the most secure and up to date possible.

An Introduction to WordPress Toolkit
So you’ve just created your new hosting account at inputhost 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:

WordPress Toolkit Options

  • 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
You can view a complete list of your plugins for your WordPress website. You could enable more plugins from here 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
You may have multiple themes already installed on your WordPress eg. Twenty Nineteen 2.1, Twenty Twenty 1.8, Twenty Twenty-One 1.4. One theme will always be enabled but you can turn them off and on as needed. You can also search for more themes by clicking the install button. From there you can choose from thousands of amazing free and paid themes.

Status and Updates
You will see a status column and that’s going to provide you with the status of your 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. (If you are an existing inputhost customer we have already implemented the critical security measures for your website.)

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 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.

If you have any questions regarding this awesome new feature feel free to open a support ticket and our team will be happy to help you out.