Introduction & Purpose Robert from Prince Edward Island got Philly we’ve got a truly Global audience today got Canada in the house today so very cool so I’m broadcasting today from Parker Colorado in the United States and we’re going to be walking through some really fun new features that we’ve just released as part of the cloudways agency Suite uh this complement our client billing feature that came out last year so we’re continue to continuing to expand the agency sweet for uh cloudways users so uh without further Ado we’re about 3 minutes in I’d love to go ahead and kick off and get things started here so we’re going to be looking through a couple stuff a couple features live I love the live demo portion of these sessions if you have questions for us find that chat put them in there I’ll do my best to follow along uh as I go through content today uh and we’ll definitely have plenty of time for questions at the end of today session so if you don’t know who I am my name is Brent Weaver I’m a cloudways uh Maverick I kind of direct the agency team here and I’m also a product evangelist for uh for the platform and I’m really excited to be introducing both cloudways as well as the client reporting feature for you today yeah my my outcomes from today are pretty simple I want you to get excited about cloudways I want you to get even more excited about the new client reporting feature hopefully give you the confidence to try this and implement it within your business or your agency to deliver some extra value to your clients and also share a little bit about our vision of how we’re going to support agencies and Freelancers in the future uh with some new upcoming features and improvements on these existing uh agency Suite features so we’ll be covering that and more today uh if you haven’t yet seen uh on the website um you can I’ll provide a link here uh at the end today but you can go and look at a more in-depth view of the client reporting feature we did announce this earlier this year and uh and I definitely encourage you to check that out so we’ll we’ll first cover a little couple details about getting started with cloudways um kind Overview of Cloudways of a a show of hands here anybody here not yet a cloudways customer or cloudways user let me know in chat are you a cloudways customer yes or not yet all right yeah Jose already a Lo loyal CL cloudways customer heck yeah yep yep so lots of cloudways fans anybody here not yet a cloudways customer cloudways all right we we are hanging with c custom today very cool so you guys know we are the a managed Cloud hosting platform for WordPress and PHP applications cloudways I think provides you as an agency owner incredible price to Performance ratio we know your clients need fast responsive reliable web hosting for your your websites and applications um our team is here to support you 247 365 so create a leaner more profitable agency by leaning on our team for your Dev Ops and support needs we also provide application Level support for your PHP and WordPress applications which means again you can focus on running your business versus having to figure out every in andout of how to keep your WordPress and PHP applications optimized um it is worth noting that cloudway is currently uh only supporting PHP based applications so WordPress woocommerce Magento laravel Drupal jumla these are all amazing platforms you can run on cloudways um we don’t currently run any kind of Microsoft Stacks um or other other types of systems so if you’re running one of these platforms and you’re looking for a managed option cloudways is a great platform so here we are today talking about client reporting so I don’t want to hold out on you too long on that um the client reporting feature is part of our agency Suite so over time we’re Client Reporting Feature Introduction going to continue to expand features to help agencies enable them to to run more effective businesses and we know that you need to provide your clients updates on what you’re doing on their websites what are the things that you’re you’re fixing you’re patching what does uptime look like what does security look like and so we know that providing ongoing reports to your clients is a key part of your relationship with clients you might provide them SEO reports you might provide them website performance and traffic reports and so we want to be able to provide you a a really clean and easy to use and white label uh or brandable report that you can send to your clients it kind of shows them what’s going on on the back end of their website what’s going on in terms of of malware and security and patches and updates a lot of you might be using safe updates or you might be going in and updating your client’s website yourself and so we want to show your clients very quickly and easily hey here’s the stuff that we did in the last week or here’s the stuff that we did in the last month so we want to help you build trust reduce churn and ultimately grow that recurring revenue and automated report is a great way to make that happen so we’re going to make client reporting really easy for you again build trust justify your monthly and ongoing fees I’m a big fan if you guys know me from the agency Community I love seeing agencies have managed web care or manag WordPress as a part of their overall Suite of services that that you’re offering and this client reporting feature hopefully will just uh go uh hand inand with that um we’ve got a couple of things that we’ve included in the first release of the client reporting feature so we provide some insights on your overall update and maintenance now this has to do with your WordPress core plugins and themes you all you obviously might be doing additional updates above and beyond this but we’re going to at least provide you kind of an automated report of what happened in terms of WordPress core plugins and themes as well as a detailed change log of all system modifications we’re going to give you an update on security status so if you’ve got the malware um add-on enabled we’re going to actually be able to tell your client hey this is how many um incidents were detected this is what we did in terms of cleaning file Integrity SSL sech status vulnerability detection so we’ll kind of itemize that stuff out even though it’s happening all the time in the background you as the the Web Master might be uh seeing this stuff but your clients aren’t seeing it in a centralized way also showing your clients how often your website’s being backed up you guys know if something happens I.E your client goes in and changes something and breaks it they want to make sure that your website’s backed up as well as performance analytics so seeing a device usage breakdown as well as geographic location of visitors top traffic and how is Cash performing on the website if you’ve got the cloudflare Enterprise plug-in enabled on the site so some really good uh awesome features for the first iteration of this tool um we will How to Enable & Use Client Reporting be planning additional feature enhancements over time uh we want to make these reports amazing for you and your clients and so do expect more features coming from this platform here pretty soon so we’ll walk through a couple of core workflows today creating that company profile creating a report for WordPress app generating downloading and sharing that report and then overall managing uh that report so that was kind of the the uh the crash course and what we’re doing with client reporting so let’s take a look so first of all if you guys want to have more finer details on client reporting I’m going to put that link in chat definitely go take a look at um that following today’s webinar if you haven’t yet enabled client reporting uh within your account I definitely encourage you to do that we’ve got a couple of different plan levels uh that are accessible to you so when you first log in you’ll notice here on the LEF hand side you’ve got this little kind of uh icon down here with the person and the document looking thing this gives you access to client billing and Reporting if that’s enabled if you have not yet signed up for that it’s going to have a call to action to basically enable and it’s going to take you to the plans page we will review the plans page here together uh I’m not going to spend a huge amount of time on client billing we have a separate webinar and YouTube video that we’ve done on that before uh if you have questions about that we can kind of cover that in the Q&A I’m going to go ahead and jump right to reports so if you have um if you have client building and Reporting enabled on your account um you can just go ahead and jump right to reports and actually just in case you guys don’t have that enabl I will go quickly to the manage plans we currently have three plans available for you to enable client billing and Reporting right now those features are bundled together um anybody on the cloudways platform can get access to client billing and client reporting for free the limit is one client two services in one report a month so everybody here on today’s session you should just go into your account enable client building reporting select the free plan and you can go ahead and create your first report as long as you have an application that has a domain added to that application so you can generate a test report for any of your clients if you want to upgrade you can pay five bucks a month or 14 bucks a month to get additional reports or unlimited reports personally I’m partial to the unlimited plan because if I’m a agency owner and I want to test things I might want to create 20 or 30 or 40 reports just to test things kind of get things sorted plus if you have 30 or 40 clients you’re going to definitely want the unlimited so you can run all of those reports uh so make sure once you go into your account you’ve gone ahead and enabled your client reporting and billing add-on and then from there we can go ahead and have some fun so for today we’re going to go over to client reports I’m going to show you kind of how to create a report from scratch and then we’ll look at a couple of reports that um we already generated uh just for you to see kind of what it looks like with actual Customization & Features traffic and website usage data in there I’m kind of in a u a staging account uh can you do without connecting stripe yes so on that last page David when you are going into connect stripe um there should be like you can check a box to connect stripe and there should be an option to finish setup so you can basically not finish you know not uh connect your Gateway click finish setup and it should take you to uh just the the main dashboard with uh billing and Reporting um ultimately if you’re going to collect online payments you will need to connect stripe but you should be able to just bypass that on the last screen there when you’re setting up your agency great question David let me know if you get stuck on that uh if you have any troubles with that um all right so when we go to create our new client report we’ve got basically kind of two sides to this screen um the leftand side is essentially setting up the report and the right hand side is giving you a preview of what information is going to be on that report and it basically is set up exactly how the report is going to look both on the website and ultimately as a PDF version so your clients won’t be necessarily logging into the website to view these reports you can just take the PDF and you can email that to the client this is a great attachment if you’re sending a you know a monthly uh managed WordPress update to your client hey here’s all the stuff that we did and by the way um there’s a a detailed report from our our backend hosting platform or from your server that shows some additional details of the things that we’re doing to keep your website uh online and secure and all that good stuff so this is the preview and this is the setting so we’ll go ahead and put in here uh live demo report um you can select the time period here of one day 7 Days 14 days um again this product is currently kind of in an initial release we will be adding additional features here in terms of time period selection custom date things like that um but for right now you can basically do a report for the last day the last s days last 14 days the last 30 days select the app that you want to generate a report for uh so this is actually only going to show the applications that have a domain associated with them inside of cloud we so if you have a whole bunch of staging and test applications that don’t have a a domain added to them you’re not going to see them in the client report reports area you’re just going to see reports for applications that have a domain attached so we have one application that has a domain um you can go in here and you can modify your agency logo um if I go ahead and open that in a new tab real quick you can see and update this logo so in this demo you’ll see the cloudways logo on the report just know that that’s the logo that we have as the agency your reports won’t have the cloudways logo on them they will have your agency’s logo on the report so we’re just kind of make believing that you know cloudways is the name of my agency uh all right so now we go down to the features or parameters that are going to be included within your report uh right now I have a few features enabled on this demo account one is cloud flare One Is Safe updates one is malware protection so if you don’t have those three add-ons included um then you won’t see those options so um know all features on the free plan so David likely if you click the I next to some of these items if they’re gray out it has to do with the fact that that website might not have malware Cloud flare and safe updates so some of several of these items are looking at how those specific things are performing on your website so in terms of like caching for instance that’s going to be pulling data from cloudflare or uh automatic updates for WordPress right that’s going to be pulling from safe update so you will need to have those features enabled in order to test all of these features um I believe traffic and backups are going to be included by default um regardless of what you have there so once we have all the features you’ll see here that um I’ve got a very robust report if I want to remove let’s say cash or traffic statistics or I don’t want my client seeing that there was malware detected um because maybe you’re working on something and you don’t want to cause alarm um you can basically uncheck those and you’ll see this preview here uh update here on the right hand side so once we’ve gotten our report to where we want to get it I’m going to go ahead and add everything to it we go ahead and click generate report so real easy to go in generate your first report and then always like it’s like those cooking shows you know where they like they make the turkey and put it in the oven and it takes a little while um these reports are actually pulling a lot of data Report Generation & Automation behind the scenes from your website um so they’re not instant right it’s going to take a little while to generate that report pull the data from all the systems and then create that PDF for you uh I’m going to go ahead and jump into this demo report number one and which is already ready so you can see here um we’ve got our app details it shows the application name the IP address shows that we have an SSL certificate that it’s active and it is valid until May 20th your client might want to make sure hey that we have an active SSL that’s not going to expire in the middle of us doing a launch or something like that um we can see here this website does not have any uh last updates for website or WordPress core through safe updates um so that’s not updated there we do see here on backup right last backup was March 5th it’s 200 the site currently is 214 megabytes there’s 17 total backups available within the cloudways platform you can also see some vulnerabilities uh fixed or identified so um currently it seems like we’re pending an update there’s two vulnerabilities detected uh and those vulnerabilities have not yet been resolved and this is going to be data that’s available to you as the web Pro uh through your uh malware scanner so you can basically see a more detailed view of those if you want to go and then send the client report uh and you can also see here the malware protection uh of of the automatic things that are cleaned and removed you can see your cache updates here on dynamic as well as um request bypassing uh the cache we can see tra statistics here this website is a um just kind of a Sandbox for the demo so some of this data is not going to be included there I’ll show you a website that does have traffic here in a minute so that’s our report we can see here this this report is available I can simply close that out I can re access reports at any time um through that dashboard View and then I can also download the report and it’s going to download that PDF so this would be something that you might send to a client through an email attach it through throw it over on a slack message hey just want to give you an update on things that we’re up to um on your website and make sure that you’re up to date on everything that we’re doing um and so let me jump over here to another browser and I can show you some tests I ran on the ugu’s website that have a little bit more data uh in that report so you can see here uh coup a little bit more information on this one um you know vulnerabilities detected six none resolved the cash reports a little bit more robust there’s several other different types of uh statuses that have happened with this website that is actual traffic we can see top Bots here we can see top pages top countries um and again I don’t have safe updates running on this site so we’re not seeing the automatic updates there from the the tool but if you had safe updates on all of your client sites that’s going to Simply update there uh and show you when was the Plugin or theme updated uh what version did it start from what version did it go to so your client can see oh hey all of my plugins themes are currently up toate so that was the crash course on the new client reporting feature if you guys have I saw a couple of questions in chat uh again that was from David um but would love to hear any questions or any features that you want us to kind of go back to and review but right now it’s pretty simple you can go into the platform request uh reports to be generated for each application with the domain you can select some basic time periods um and you can get those reports and download those as PDFs which is a great value add to the existing client billing feature um something to Future Enhancements note here is that this tool um was actually included in existing plans for client billing um so this is just a straightup feature enhancement if you are already on the client billing growth plan or you were already on the scale plan um you know these are things that the the reporting will just be included as an add-on there so you can just see here we added on one report among 10 reports a month and unlimited reports on top of our existing client billing feature any questions on client reporting sending this report automatically to the client every month would be great is this a planned feature Richard you’re like my my plant in the audience um let’s look at our upcoming client billing and Reporting features so under tour number one automated schedule reporting so we obviously know as an agency the ideal situation would be that you can just sit back on the the the the beach and uh hang out by the the tiki torches uh and drinking your pina colada right that’s how we all run our business right anyways um but yes so we want to be able to help you set these up to where they’re automated they get scheduled and sent either to your team as an automated report to identify issues ahead of time and then also be able to send these reports automatically to your clients so that you don’t don’t have to go in there and generate the reports um so that’s something that is definitely uh on our immediate road map for this tool in addition to that we want to help you uh with customizable reports and distribution so tailor reports with custom templates date ranges multi-site data and then schedule automated email distribution to clients so again providing you further customization right right now we have those six or seven features uh within the report we want to further provide customization and additional uh level of additional insights that we have access to because we’re kind of managing and hosting the actual website itself uh and then we have the bulk report generation so generate reports in bulk with ease so if you’re somebody who has 20 50 100 200 websites and applications that you’re managing going in and creating these individual reports would probably need to be need to be done by like a virtual assistant or something like that if you had like 150 clients um so we definitely are going to provide you the ability to create bulk reports so like on the first of the month you could run a report for all of your websites from last month and again have those automatically emailed to your team or to your clients uh so we’ll make sure that that is something uh that is is added in the near term um yeah I’m going to look here uh Mary um the plans refer to Services included does that refer to items being reported like plug-in updates traffic Etc uh so that’s a great question Mary so I’m going to pop back over to our demo account here and So currently uh client billing and client reporting are kind of individual functions within the agency Suite so Services actually have more to do with how you’re you know what kind of services you’re doing for your clients so let’s say for instance I had a a service called um which this account currently isn’t connected to stripe so I’m not going to demo that part uh but let’s say for instance I had a man webcare service that was $300 a month I could set that up as a service I could add my clients uh within the client billing feature and then I could send invoices for those services and collect payments for my clients so client billing is kind of its own little ecosystem within the agency Suite right now and then reporting is a separate feature within the agency Suite um over time we do see opportunity to make you know the clients and the services kind of aware of what we’re doing in terms of reporting but right now I just want you to think Mary reporting is sending those client reports and then client billing and payments is kind of its own thing obviously this is all within this agency Suite platform so we do see uh these things kind of connecting and playing together where possible but right now client reporting doesn’t necessarily you know do anything with the billing features those are those are separate things uh Melanie um I’m comparing this to what I used when I was with WP engine any plans to be able to pull in Google analytics data Upcoming Features charts uh great question um you know we’ve got um you know we’ll definitely be taking that feedback um you know the the team is definitely looking at a lot of different options we know being able to relay traffic reports to your clients is key so we will be looking at third party Integrations like Google analytics uh data and charts um but right now that’s not currently on like our near-term uh road map so these are the things that we are uh currently working on and plan to release um in addition on the B payment side uh billing side we have customized invoice features creating more customized invoices um allowing you to design your invoices as well as adding PayPal as a supported Gateway so right now stripe is the only Gateway we support uh but PayPal is definitely on the near-term plan of releasing uh that feature so we’re really excited uh to see that happen um and uh Usman on the team is in chat so uh I don’t know if we have he has a more confident timeline that he can get you uh than just it’s on the near term but um yeah PayPal is definitely a high priority for us so that we can support agencies with PayPal as well as Stripe from Mark here would like to see header options for different brand standing ability to turn off display for features not used and or ability to rearrange content to display in different order okay great uh suggestion there um in terms of uh The Branding um let’s the ability to turn off for different branding so right now if I’m inside of reports and let’s go ahead and get back to that so inside of your agency profile you can change your logo and you can change your color so um you know not a ton of customizations there but I think in terms of looking at this uh you know PDF that gets sent being able to change this logo change this accent color um really there’s not a whole lot of other Design Elements there in terms of rearranging um yeah we’ll definitely look into that but right now it’s really more about what you’ve got selected on the report um and not necessarily uh you know being able to rearrange that within this view over here but you know looking at the fact that we do have a preview here Mark um I think it could be possible in the future for the team to make that a little more interactive let’s say for instance if you wanted to move WordPress core up to the top or you wanted to move SSL down and you had certain data that you wanted to make um available the other thing that we’ve suggested the team is being able to add notes in here for the agency so essentially being able to customize that template so you could add notes directly to the report that’s also a feature that we’ve brought up with the team so looking forward to seeing additional suggestions uh Usman I know you’re hanging out with us I don’t know if you want to throw your email or URL into uh chat if people have additional product feedback where they can route that to uh that would be pretty awesome these are great suggestions across the board there we go there’s the man if you have additional suggestions for client reporting definitely let usan know uh same goes with client billing if you’re in there using these features we are definitely keeping our pulse on every piece of customer feedback obviously we can’t Implement everything overnight but um we’re definitely getting feedback from our customers figuring out what’s the most important thing for you next in terms of expanding the existing agency Suite features as well as the new things that we’re thinking on the horizon for the cloudways agency Suite uh features so very good feedback already so take a look at um yeah so if you go to the website uh you can see additional information o let’s go back here there we go uh you can go to that client reporting page kind of runs through details of everything that we covered on today’s webinar I will put that link here in chat for you all um just so you have that uh so you can go ahead and sign up again as I mentioned earlier uh all of the uh over here on the left- hand side client billing and Reporting all of the plans include uh a report so for free you can access one report per month that’s not a ton um but you can uh upgrade here to the growth plan and run up to 10 plan uh 10 reports um if you want to continue like demoing or trying it out definitely reach out to our team and we can see what we can do in terms of uh enabling further credits for you all right that pretty much covers client reporting any other questions in chat while you’re thinking about that I want to make you aware of something coming up here that is super special we’ve got a uh security boot camp so if you want to really up your game in terms of website and WordPress security we have a fantastic event coming up uh this is March 18th and 19th so coming up here just in a couple of weeks we’re running a two-day uh session uh with leading Security Experts some interactive discussions about how to uh connect learn and protect your websites navigating the dark web protecting your site from hidden threats decoding bot traffic capture uh the flag the CTF challenge enforcing zero trust architecture for client websites so a really awesome first day on the client security boot camp bug bounty hunt closed 1 th WordPress plugins in a month identifying WordPress threats security knowledge quiz and why hackers Target small business websites and what you can do about it so we have a really awesome group of of speakers coming in to talk about the security for WordPress and your overall websites so if that’s something that’s top of mind for you and you’re looking at ways to add value to your clients and the businesses that you help run then definitely take a look at that security boot camp coming up here in two weeks we’d love to see you there if there aren’t any further questions um Q&A we can go ahead and kind of wrap things up so you guys have been absolutely awesome Jose always good to see you Matt wils Matt Mark thanks for jumping in there those of you that did ask questions Mary and Melanie and Richard thank you so much David great to have you here so if you guys have any additional questions please reach out to Usman on the team uh thank you for being a loyal cloudways customer we’ love supporting your business and seeing you grow so uh yeah thanks for being here and that is our program if you want to catch the replay of this keep a look on your email We’ll add this to our YouTube channel and that is our program so we’ll see you all next time potty good to see you Robert Steven David Melanie Andy Jay you guys are awesome have an amazing day and we’ll see you on the next session