Brent Weaver: Robert from Prince Edward Island, 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. This complements our client billing feature that came out last year, so we’re continuing to expand the agency Suite for Cloudways users. So without further ado, we’re about three 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 of 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 as I go through content today, and we’ll definitely have plenty of time for questions at the end of today’s session. So if you don’t know who I am, my name is Brent Weaver, I’m a Cloudways Maverick, I kind of direct the agency team here, and I’m also a product evangelist for the platform, and I’m really excited to be introducing both Cloudways as well as the client reporting feature for you today.

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 with some new upcoming features and improvements on these existing agency Suite features. So we’ll be covering that and more today. If you haven’t yet seen on the website, I’ll provide a link here 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 I definitely encourage you to check that out.

So we’ll first cover a couple details about getting started with Cloudways, kind of 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 loyal Cloudways customer, heck yeah. So lots of Cloudways fans, anybody here not yet a Cloudways customer? All right, we are hanging with customers today, very cool.

So you guys know, we are 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 websites and applications. Our team is here to support you 24/7, 365, so create a leaner, more profitable agency by leaning on our team for your DevOps 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 and out of how to keep your WordPress and PHP applications optimized.

It is worth noting that Cloudways is currently only supporting PHP-based applications, so WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, Laravel, Drupal, Joomla, these are all amazing platforms you can run on Cloudways. We don’t currently run any kind of Microsoft stacks or 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. The client reporting feature is part of our agency Suite, so over time we’re going to continue to expand features to help agencies, enable them 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 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 really clean and easy-to-use and white-label 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 malware and security and patches and updates. A lot of you might be using SafeUpdates, 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 an 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 managed WordPress as a part of their overall Suite of services that you’re offering, and this client reporting feature hopefully will just go hand in hand with that.

So 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 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 add-on enabled, we’re going to actually be able to tell your client, hey, this is how many incidents were detected, this is what we did in terms of cleaning, file integrity, SSL 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 webmaster might be 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 cache performing on the website if you’ve got the Cloudflare Enterprise plugin enabled on the site.

So some really good, awesome features for the first iteration of this tool, we will be planning additional feature enhancements over time, 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 a WordPress app, generating, downloading, and sharing that report, and then overall managing that report. So that was kind of the crash course on what we’re doing with client reporting, so let’s take a look.

So first of all, if you guys want to have finer details on client reporting, I’m going to put that link in chat, definitely go take a look at that following today’s webinar. If you haven’t yet enabled client reporting within your account, I definitely encourage you to do that, we’ve got a couple of different plan levels that are accessible to you. So when you first log in, you’ll notice here on the left-hand side you’ve got this little kind of 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, 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, if you have questions about that we can cover that in the Q&A. I’m going to go ahead and jump right to reports, so if you have client billing and reporting enabled on your account, you can just go ahead and jump right to reports. And actually, just in case you guys don’t have that enabled, 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, 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 billing and 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 an 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. 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 how to create a report from scratch, and then we’ll look at a couple of reports that we already generated just for you to see kind of what it looks like with actual traffic and website usage data in there. I’m kind of in a staging account.

Can you do it without connecting Stripe? Yes, so on that last page, David, when you are going into connect Stripe, 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, not connect your gateway, click finish setup, and it should take you to just the main dashboard with billing and reporting. 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, if you have any troubles with that.

All right, so when we go to create our new client report, we’ve got basically two sides to this screen, the left-hand 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 email that to the client, this is a great attachment if you’re sending a monthly managed WordPress update to your client, hey, here’s all the stuff that we did, and by the way, there’s a detailed report from our backend hosting platform or from your server that shows some additional details of the things that we’re doing to keep your website 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 live demo report, you can select the time period here of one day, 7 days, 14 days, 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, but for right now you can basically do a report for the last day, the last 7 days, last 14 days, the last 30 days. Select the app that you want to generate a report for, so this is actually only going to show the applications that have a domain associated with them inside of Cloudways. So if you have a whole bunch of staging and test applications that don’t have a domain added to them, you’re not going to see them in the client 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, you can go in here and you can modify your agency logo, 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 Cloudways is the name of my agency.

All right, so now we go down to the features or parameters that are going to be included within your report. Right now I have a few features enabled on this demo account, one is Cloudflare, one is SafeUpdates, one is malware protection, so if you don’t have those three add-ons included, then you won’t see those options. So, David, likely if you click the “i” next to some of these items, if they’re grayed out, it has to do with the fact that that website might not have malware, Cloudflare, and SafeUpdates. So several of these items are looking at how those specific things are performing on your website, so in terms of caching for instance, that’s going to be pulling data from Cloudflare, or automatic updates for WordPress, that’s going to be pulling from SafeUpdates. So you will need to have those features enabled in order to test all of these features. I believe traffic and backups are going to be included by default regardless of what you have there.

So once we have all the features, you’ll see here that I’ve got a very robust report, if I want to remove, let’s say, cache or traffic statistics, or I don’t want my client seeing that there was malware detected, because maybe you’re working on something and you don’t want to cause alarm, you can basically uncheck those, and you’ll see this preview 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, it’s like those cooking shows, you know, where they make the turkey and put it in the oven and it takes a little while, these reports are actually pulling a lot of data behind the scenes from your website, so they’re not instant, 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. I’m going to go ahead and jump into this demo report number one, which is already ready.

So you can see here, 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. We can see here this website does not have any last updates for website or WordPress core through SafeUpdates, so that’s not updated there. We do see here on backup, last backup was March 5th, it’s 2:00, the site currently is 214 megabytes, there’s 17 total backups available within the Cloudways platform. You can also see some vulnerabilities fixed or identified, so currently it seems like we’re pending an update, there’s two vulnerabilities detected, and those vulnerabilities have not yet been resolved, and this is going to be data that’s available to you as the web pro through your malware scanner, so you can basically see a more detailed view of those if you want to go and then send the client report. And you can also see here the malware protection, of the automatic things that are cleaned and removed. You can see your cache updates here on dynamic as well as requests bypassing the cache. We can see traffic statistics here, this website is 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 report is available, I can simply close that out, I can re-access reports at any time 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, throw it over on a Slack message, hey, just want to give you an update on things that we’re up to on your website and make sure that you’re up to date on everything that we’re doing.

And so let me jump over here to another browser, and I can show you some tests I ran on the UGURUS website that have a little bit more data in that report. So you can see here a little bit more information on this one, you know, vulnerabilities detected six, none resolved, the cache reports a little bit more robust, there’s several other different types of statuses that have happened with this website, that is actual traffic, we can see top bots here, we can see top pages, top countries. And again, I don’t have SafeUpdates running on this site, so we’re not seeing the automatic updates there from the tool, but if you had SafeUpdates on all of your client sites, that’s going to simply update there and show you when was the plugin or theme updated, 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 to date.

So that was the crash course on the new client reporting feature. If you guys have, I saw a couple of questions in chat, again that was from David, 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 reports to be generated for each application with the domain, you can select some basic time periods, and you can get those reports and download those as PDFs, which is a great value-add to the existing client billing feature. Something to note here is that this tool was actually included in existing plans for client billing, so this is just a straight-up feature enhancement, if you are already on the client billing growth plan, or you were already on the scale plan, these are things that the reporting will just be included as an add-on there. So you can just see here, we added on one report, ten 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 plant in the audience. 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 beach and hang out by the tiki torches and drink your piña colada, right, that’s how we all run our business, right, anyways. 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 have to go in there and generate the reports. So that’s something that is definitely on our immediate road map for this tool.

In addition to that, we want to help you 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 now we have those six or seven features within the report, we want to further provide customization and additional level of insights that we have access to, because we’re kind of managing and hosting the actual website itself. 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 done by like a virtual assistant or something like that if you had like 150 clients. 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, so we’ll make sure that that is something that is added in the near term.

Yeah, I’m going to look here, Mary, the plans refer to services included, does that refer to items being reported, like plugin updates, traffic, etc? So that’s a great question, Mary, so I’m going to pop back over to our demo account here. And so currently, 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 doing, what kind of services you’re doing for your clients. So let’s say for instance I had a service called, which this account currently isn’t connected to Stripe so I’m not going to demo that part, but let’s say for instance I had a managed web care service that was $300 a month, I could set that up as a service, I could add my clients 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. Over time we do see opportunity to make 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 these things kind of connecting and playing together where possible, but right now client reporting doesn’t necessarily do anything with the billing features, those are separate things.

Melanie, 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 charts? Great question, you know, we’ll definitely be taking that feedback, 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 data and charts, but right now that’s not currently on our near-term road map. So these are the things that we are currently working on and plan to release.

In addition, on the billing side, we have customized invoice features, creating more customized invoices, 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, but PayPal is definitely on the near-term plan of releasing that feature, so we’re really excited to see that happen. And Usman on the team is in chat, so I don’t know if he has a more confident timeline that he can get you than just “it’s on the near term,” but 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 suggestion there. In terms of the branding, 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 not a ton of customizations there, but I think in terms of looking at this PDF that gets sent, being able to change this logo, change this accent color, really there’s not a whole lot of other design elements there in terms of rearranging. Yeah, we’ll definitely look into that, but right now it’s really more about what you’ve got selected on the report, and not necessarily being able to rearrange that within this view. But looking at the fact that we do have a preview here, Mark, 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 available.

The other thing that we’ve suggested to 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. Usman, I know you’re hanging out with us, I don’t know if you want to throw your email or URL into chat if people have additional product feedback, where they can route that to, 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 Usman know, 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 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 features. So very good feedback already.

So take a look at, yeah, so if you go to the website, you can see additional information, let’s go back here, there we go, 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 just so you have that. So you can go ahead and sign up, again as I mentioned earlier, over here on the left-hand side, client billing and reporting, all of the plans include a report, so for free you can access one report per month, that’s not a ton, but you can upgrade here to the growth plan and run up to 10 reports. If you want to continue demoing or trying it out, definitely reach out to our team and we can see what we can do in terms of 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 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, this is March 18th and 19th, so coming up here just in a couple of weeks. We’re running a two-day session with leading security experts, some interactive discussions about how to connect, learn, and protect your websites, navigating the dark web, protecting your site from hidden threats, decoding bot traffic, capture the flag the CTF challenge, enforcing zero trust architecture for client websites, so a really awesome first day on the security boot camp. Bug bounty hunt closed 1,000 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 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, 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. Thank you for being a loyal Cloudways customer, we love supporting your business and seeing you grow, so 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.