WP Engine How To

Table Of Content

• Sites

• Dashboard

• Products

• Users

• Sites Extended

• Environment Settings

• Backups

The link to log into WP Engine is https://identity.wpengine.com/ In this how to you will learn the basics and most used pieces of WP Engine.

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• The blue section is the sidebar where you can explore more areas of what WP engine has to offer we will explore these below.

• The red section is where all of your sites will live. They will include a drop down to expose all of your environments per site (prod, dev, staging)

• The green section is where you could add a new a new site. More on this later.

 

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• The red section is a total report of all of your sites showing information like; Plugin status, Theme status, PHP version, and Smart Plugin Manager Licenses.

• The Blue section is a plan report where you can find all of the information about your plan limits and usage.

• The green section is the Site Health section. This is where you can find any issues plaguing your site and links to more information about those issues.

• The purple section are some trend analytics.

• The red section are the products that are currently being used in your websites.

• The blue section are other extensions that can be added to your WP Engine site that are ready to go with very little customization.

• The green section are a variety of additional tools that can be added to your websites. These plugins may require some setup or additional code to make work to your desire.

The users section holds a lot of additional information around who has access to this WP Engine account and what accesses they have. You can also find account log activity, contacts for who is the head of each site on the account, and other things like access features for signing in and the API.

Here we will get more detailed about what the sites section has to offer. This is the area the vast majority of our time will be spend while using WP Engine. This client make interacting with our WP sites much easier.

• The red section is where we find the different environments available for each site. We can see each site is separated by a little grey space and a title. Clicking each of these take you to a setting section (shown below) for each environment .

• The blue section are the links to the WPadmin page for each site. This is an easy access to the wordpress admin editor for the site.

• The green are the links to the live site itself for each environment.

• The red section is a list of options and settings sections for each of the environment and the ability to click on and change environments. The main sections we use are the Overview (shown here) and the backups section (shown below)

• The blue section is a list of possible updates that could be needed on the site. PHP, WordPress, Themes and plugins can be updated though this section. This is also where you will find your Smart Plugin Manager settings.

• The green section is an overview per environment you can view some analytics of your environment.

• The purple section you can access the WP admin for this environment, also the PHPAdmin side as well which is a client to view the database associated to that environment. the first 2 icons are to create a backup and clear the cache. The actions dropdown allows you to push or pull code from one environment to another. Unlike a git pull/push this is more of an overwrite of an environment with another environment.

The backups section is very important to us. This is the best method we have to use to make something similar to git commits. WP Engine does not have its own version control tool using backups we can mock that. We can create a backup point every time we want to make a save spot we can later revert the environment back to. Any time you make progress and are continuing development you should create a new backup. We can even create a downloadable version of our site to use locally. Locally we can search though the site much easier with VS Code however this is just to review all development is done through the WP clients. Here is a little detail on how all this can be done.

• The create backup button is where we start. Click this use the description section to describe your commit (ex. “added page chart”) and put your email in so you will be notified when it is done.

• This is the description section this is where you will find the details for the backup. Every night a backup is made this will be the daily checkpoint. This section will also have the note you added for your backup, and when you create a downloadable zip the link will be here.

• This section is where you can restore a backup or create a downloadable zip. The 2 options when you click these dots is to restore this checkpoint or create a downloadable zip from the checkpoint. When you restore you will need to make sure you are restoring the DB. Make sure the correct environment is selected. When creating a zip make sure you are doing a full backup. Make sure you are always updating the notification with your email.