If you develop many WordPress websites as a freelancer or agency, you are probably well familiar with the process of installing one plugin at a time when creating a new WordPress website. If you want to speed up your workflow, there are several multi plugin installers out there that helps you clone an existing website a number of times. You can use your core set of plugins on all websites that you make, installing them in one shot.

As an agency, we use some solutions included in this article as we are setting up a new WordPress installation multiple times a week, and this saves us the five minutes of having to install and activate our core collection of plugins, which you can read about in this article.

Blueprint on LocalWP

First, if you develop locally, you should take a look at Local by Flywheel. This is a free utility that allows you to install WordPress on your windows or Mac computer, develop offline, and then migrate to a production server. We use this to create sandbox environments and flesh out ideas for client websites. A major feature of this tool is called the blueprint. A blueprint is a this WordPress website which has themes and plugins installed on it.

Instead of creating a WordPress installation from scratch on local, you can choose to replicate the blueprint website. If you replicate the blueprint website, All of your themes, plugins, and additional database entries such as blog posts will be duplicated onto the new installation.

Not only does this save you a bunch of time when it comes to the installation of plugins, but all settings are also carried over.

WP Install Profiles

This is a freely available plugin listed on the WordPress repository which allows you to install one or more plugins by typing their names or download URLs in a text area. This is actually a modification of an older plugin that is no longer compatible with current forms of WordPress.

this tool works with all plugins available on the WordPress repository, but it can also work with any direct download URL. All you need to do is provide the direct download URL for third party plugins, or the title of plugins hosted on the WordPress repository, and the tool will automatically download and install them for you when run.

You can set up groups of plugins, known as profiles, which can be downloaded onto your local machine and then re uploaded onto new installations of WordPress, saving you a ton of time. The plugin was last updated eight years ago, but is still completely functional with WordPress version 5.1.

Wp Favs – Plugin Manager

This is another plugin management tool that helps you integrate with WP Favs, a third party service that allows you to favorite WordPress plugins from the repository, as well as third party solutions. Once  a list is created, you can easily select it to install, delete, or activate multiple plugins on your WordPress website.

There's also a premium version which allows you to upload custom plugins, connect your codecanyon account, and access an API for additional features.

These are the top multi plugin installation tools for WordPress that are functional in 2020. As an agency, we’ve used WP Favs and Blueprint. our main go to way to install plugins in bulk is too upload our base website setup which includes oxygen builder, several add-ons, caching solutions, and more from a duplicator file. This works anywhere, and can easily be deployed to client hosting, which is why we use it.