When you're managing several WordPress websites, updating plugins and themes one site at a time can become repetitive. Siteligent lets you apply updates across multiple sites from a single Portfolio Updates dashboard.
Apply Updates Across Multiple Sites
Instead of opening each website individually, you can select the sites you want to update and run the required updates as a bulk operation.
This is particularly useful when you manage a portfolio of sites that use many of the same plugins or themes.
Siteligent handles the updates through a distributed queue rather than starting every update at the same time. This helps prevent a large bulk operation from putting unnecessary load on the platform or the individual sites.
How Bulk Updates Work
Distributed Update Queue
Bulk updates are processed through Siteligent's Distributed Update Queue with automated lock management.
This system handles three important things:
1. Concurrency Limiting
Siteligent limits bulk operations to a maximum of 20 concurrent Safe Updates.
Updates can require significant I/O because the process involves downloading and extracting plugin or theme files. Limiting the number of simultaneous operations helps prevent excessive memory and resource usage during large bulk update jobs.
This means that if you select more sites than can be processed simultaneously, the remaining updates wait in the queue rather than all starting at once.
2. Automated Site Locks
Before an update begins on a particular site, Siteligent acquires a site-level lock.
The lock prevents other automated background operations, such as backups or automated scans, from running on the same site at the same time. This reduces the chance of competing processes modifying or accessing the same files simultaneously.
Once the update operation is complete, the lock is released so normal scheduled operations can continue.
3. Real-Time Progress
Bulk updates provide live progress information in the Siteligent dashboard.
Progress is streamed using secure WebSockets, allowing you to see updates as plugins or themes are downloaded, unpacked, and verified.
You don't have to repeatedly refresh the page to determine whether an update is still running.
What Happens When Multiple Sites Are Selected?
If you start a bulk update involving many sites:
Siteligent adds the update operations to the distributed queue.
Available update slots begin processing the queued sites.
A site-level lock is acquired before its update starts.
The Safe Update process runs for that site.
Progress is reported back to the dashboard.
When an update finishes, another queued operation can begin.
This approach allows large update jobs to continue without attempting to process every site simultaneously.
Best Practices for Bulk Updates
Before running a large update operation on production sites:
Review which sites are selected.
Make sure the sites are currently healthy.
Check that the Siteligent Connector is connected.
Avoid making other major changes to the same sites while the bulk operation is running.
Watch the live progress for failed or interrupted updates.
For important production sites, use Safe Updates so each update can go through Siteligent's health-check and rollback workflow.
Bulk updates are designed to save time, but they don't remove the need to review the sites being updated. A plugin update that is incompatible with one site's configuration can still require troubleshooting even when the update was initiated as part of a bulk operation.