And yeah that will get everybody connected with those captions. So again, welcome everybody if you're just joining us glad you're here. Pop open the Zoom chat and say hello, tell us where you're logging in from today. I would love to greet you as we're getting started
all right, the captions should now be working for everybody
excellent, glad everybody's here. attendee numbers starting to tick up good to see Rosendo from Kingwood. were sent knows that Kingwood, Texas right above Houston. Excellent. I have some friends. They're in Kingwood. They live there for a long time.
Welcome, Lou wasI Am I saying that right from from Nigeria. Welcome. Glad you're here. Dylan from France. Good to see you. If you're just joining us in zoom, pop up in the chat and say hello and let us know where you're logging in from today. You'll also find in the chat the link bundle which contains the Google Drive link to download this guide which is currently displayed on your screen. It also has the link for the replay that will be available in about an hour after we finished today. There's also a great coupon code if you are not currently a solid suite member or if you would like to purchase additional solid products 25% off deal through this live stream. Hey, Ben from South Carolina everybody. Welcome Ben. He is the lead for all of the solid support team that they have been there in the chat to help answer some questions as they might come up.
So again, welcome everybody. Glad you're here. We're just about five minutes away. We'll kick off officially at three minutes after the hour. So glad you've chosen to spend a couple of hours today. I am really looking forward to this topic because I think it can be super helpful for all of us who are doing client work with WordPress and using the solid suite as the foundation of a great care plan. Yes, still and if you'll look above in that link bundle, there is a link for the replay. It's the same URL that you use to register and that will be available about an hour or so. After we wrap up today. All of our solid Academy live streams are recorded and available in our live stream library. If you take a look at Academy dot solid wp.com Here in our live stream library there are over 1000 live streams from going back many years on a variety of topics which you can search by whatever you'd like or drill down by category or whatever you would prefer presenters, a lot of good stuff here. So take a look at that and this live stream will be added to that library. Like I say about an hour or so after we wrap up today. Ryan Great question there in the q&a. This is a two hour livestream today. So our first I'll be talking about this as we get started officially that our first hour we'll be doing kind of setting up our products, our solid Suite products to do a care plan. What should the care plan include? Those sorts of things? And in the second hour, we'll be talking about the client facing language How to Sell how to package and price and sell care plans to clients. Yeah.
Alright, so again, if you're just joining us in zoom, welcome welcome. Glad you're here. We'll be getting started in about three minutes officially. If you will open up the Zoom chat, you will find a bundle of links there. One of which is the PDF that you're looking at on your screen now. 27 pages of care plan goodness so take a look at that. Yeah, you can download that PDF and follow along if you'd like. We'll be just working our way straight through that PDF in this live stream. We'll also have a replay available about an hour after we finished the URL is they're waiting on you in the chat. And there's also a coupon code for 25% off of solid WP products right there in that link bundle also it's also in the guide if you would like So again, welcome everybody. Really glad you're here. We're gonna make this two hours really worth your time I believe as you start to grow your business with recurring revenue or continuous growth. The solid suite is the perfect set of tools to do that. I've been using these products for many years in my agency, and I'd like to talk to you about how to do the same in yours. So it's great to see everybody if you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat and say hi, tell us where you're logging in from Hey, Kim. Hey Paul. Good to see everybody. Yes, replay will be available. The link is there in the chat. Now Kim from Utah awesome, glad you're here. We'll be getting started very soon about a minute and a half to go. Hey Giselle from Hamilton, Ontario. Powell from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Welcome, Jenna from Orlando. Good to see you. Hey, Sherry.
Sherry, I'm not quite sure what you're talking about there. The Google Calendar is so that if share if you're talking about the old calendar that was set up for I iThemes Training that is no longer being updated. You can grab calendar links. Actually, I'll talk about that after we get started. There's a calendar view in the live stream library now. Hey, Jane, good to see you. Ryan are great Louisiana. My wife is actually from Louisiana down from the Lake Charles area. Paul, my phone did the very same thing when I just said that so I apologize. For all the devices that I may have inadvertently set off just a minute ago. Good to see Rob from Chicago. John from England. Welcome. Class from Arkansas. Emmanuel from London. Welcome. Alright, folks, we're about 30 seconds away from getting started live. If you're just joining us in zoom, I'm going to drop in our link bundle once again in the chat. So open up the chat, and you will find the link to this PDF that you're looking at here the monetizing solid security guide. Also the link to the replay that will be available about an hour after we wrap up. Hey John, John, you're only chatting with me by the way, I feel dropped down in the chat from hosts and panelists to everyone, and then everyone will be able to see. That's a good note from him to everybody. If you look in the Zoom chat, there's a little blue bar right above where you type your message. It probably defaults to hosts and panelists, but you can change that to everyone. So all the folks can see. Okay, I've got three minutes after so we're going to begin the recording and dive right in. Well, good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning, wherever you happen to be around the world right now.
glad you've joined us for the solid Academy live stream talking all about monetizing the solid suite to build recurring revenue in your business. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at the solid Academy. And every week we do multiple live streams on WordPress topics just like this many of them are free and we're glad that you've chosen to join us for this one. We are and we've got a lot to cover over the next couple of hours. And it's great to see folks logging in from around the world. We have folks from many countries around the world many states across the United States and super happy that you are with us. If you're just joining us in zoom I would invite you to open up the chat and say hello. There in you will also find the link bundle I just posted again that has the Google Drive link to download this guide which you see on the screen now. Also it has the replay link that will allow you to replay review, share whatever you like. You'll have that video about an hour after we wrap up today. There's also a coupon code that's good for 25% off all solid WP products other than solid central monthly in the patch stack upgrade for legacy I iThemes members so use that code live stream 25 to get a deal on your solid products. Let me talk just a minute about how we're going to proceed over the next hour or so. We do have a couple of fine at least two I see fine folks from the solid team that are in the chat. Ben Meredith who is head of support, and also John hooks. One of our developers is there in the chat. So say hi to everybody there also Matt Cromwell. I just see Matt signing in there saying hi from Germany. So Matt is with us as well. He's the head of customer experience. So say hi to everybody. Glad you're all here. And what we're going to be doing over the next couple of hours is unpacking how to set up and create website care plans WordPress care plans, using the solid suite and I'm really excited about this information. I have to bring it today because it really can make a difference in your business. One thing I would ask a lot of times in these live streams, I'm sort of moderating as the host, and we have a presenter presenting so I'm actually wearing both of those hats today. So it will be helpful to me if you have questions to use the zoom q&a We'll be taking a time for questions and answers at the end of each hour today. We will be taking a break in the middle about 10 minutes or so depending on how our time goes. But if you'll ask questions in the q&a, rather than in the chat, that will allow me to focus on getting through our guide here and showing you all the great things that are there. And I'll circle back around to the q&a as they're listed there in the zoom q&a. Something else I would invite you to do is if you just keep that q&a window open, that will allow you to see the questions of others. And if you want to hear that question answered, you can click the thumbs up icon. And we'll take the questions in the order of upvotes when we get around to that q&a time. So once again, I'm glad you're here I'm going to drop in our link bundle one more time before we start into the content here today and it's there in the chat. If you're just now joining us. You can download the guide and you have the replay link for you as well. I'll drop that in later as well as we get going. Okay, so let's get started talking about recurring revenue is critical in growing your business. So one thing I want to say at the beginning, there are there are some settings and opinions about how the solid suite in the product in it should be set up for clients. Those are my own these are not solid WP official recommendations. My goal in this guide is to give you the settings that I typically use. From my own experience, you should weigh those recommendations and make sure it makes sense for you and your business. And if you have questions just put in a support ticket and the folks that solid support will help you decide what settings are going to be best for you or your clients. So the big idea at the beginning here is that recurring revenue is the foundation of a successful agency. And it's been my experience both in my own practice working with clients and in coaching work that I do. I've had hundreds of coaching conversations over the last eight years with solopreneurs and micro agency owners around the world. And what I can tell you is recurring revenue is essential if you want your business to survive, it is absolutely critical. It is virtually impossible to survive without it. If you don't have a growing stream of recurring revenue in your business, then you're completely dependent on consistent sales for survival. Now what I've come to understand both in my own world and in working with others and coaching conversations, is that many of us got into this whole web development world because we love the tech. The Tech is a lot of fun. We love to build websites, we love to get into the technical aspects of putting things together to build something really great. And that's wonderful and sometimes that hobby grows into a job is a very common story among folks in our world. But we tend as a whole not to be great at the sale, the selling side. Now if you are if you are really good at sales naturally, that's awesome. And you are, you know a foot ahead of many people who are doing what we do. But this is why recurring revenue is critical because if you don't have recurring revenue that's building into a strong revenue stream for you, then you're dependent on sales. And if that's not your strength, that's going to be a problem. You end up living project to project and oftentimes the sound familiar you're waiting waiting waiting on the client to finish supplying you all the assets you need to finish a project in order to get paid. So really even your ability to pay yourself is dependent on the client giving you things that they may take months to give. So it's really difficult to live project to project it's like walking a tightrope without a safety net if you're building your business without recurring revenue, we need recurring revenue in our business. And our clients really do need a care plan to keep their website healthy. So it's a win win. recurring revenue is critical and the care plan is the place to start. Now the wonderful thing about what we do at solid WP is that all of the products that we offer as as solid WP and part of the solid suite are foundational to offering a successful care plan. All the core tools that you need are included. You also get helpful support from the solid team. And if you're a solid suite member, you get the ongoing training and community that happens here at the solid Academy. Now I just want to take a minute here to tell you what we do here at solid Academy because you might not be familiar. We used to be called I iThemes Training and before that years ago, we were called web design.com And we offer WordPress education specifically targeted at people who build and manage WordPress sites for clients. So we have our own website here at solid Academy dot solid wp.com. And let me just give you a quick walkthrough of this. Right here you can see our upcoming live streams. This one that's just starting now. And our ongoing schedule of live streams here. Many of them are free. Many of them do require membership, but you can filter those out here. You can search for upcoming live streams here. Not only that, we have a live stream library of well over 1000 livestream events about all sorts of different WordPress topics. And you can search for those here in the search bar or look at it by category. It's very easy to find what you're looking for there. And each month for our members we offer a premium course. Now these are courses that I've specifically selected the topics for because I know that they're important to people who build and manage WordPress sites for clients. Like just last month I did a course on creating a Starter Site so building a site that you can then replicate for every future client project. We did one on using AI and WordPress. We have done many this year courses on Google Analytics and SEO. There's a local SEO workshop video marketing. So each month we have a course and that's just one of the benefits of being a member of the solid Academy. You get access to all the premium training that includes an our office hours each week with me to ask questions about anything you'd like and that premium course every month so solid Academy is free. If you if you're a solid suite member. We also have a Slack community that we just got started so it's really great to see all all of our folks in the membership of solid Academy coming together working together sharing ideas and thoughts. And if you are not a solid suite member, now is the time to take advantage of this 25% Discount using codes livestream 25 on the solid, suite upgrade so again, here's where we're headed today. We're going to spend a little time in the first hour talking about what makes an effective care plan. How do we build a care plan that that's going to meet the needs of our clients? And then how do we create that care plan using the solid suite. Now in the second hour after a short break, we'll be talking about packaging and pricing care plans, and then selling care plans to clients. Now I started these off as a as a slideshow and then I realized quickly, there's far too much text to put into a slide. So I've given you this guide. It's 27 pages long and it has a lot of wording especially in the selling here plans to client section. Because it's used this wording this this is the same kind of wording I use when I'm selling care plans to my clients. And I've been at this since 1995. So a while so I've given you all this wording you're you're free to use it, tweak it and make it your own. But that's why I put it together in this really long PDF can hopefully be very helpful to you. Well, let's dive right in and talking about what really makes an effective care plan. And I use an acronym to describe this even when I'm talking to clients, and it's the acronym hubs. Hu b s so hosting WordPress updates, backups for your WordPress site and WordPress security. Now those are the four walls that to me create an effective care plan for my clients. And I want to spend just a minute on each one and talk about what needs to be involved in each of these elements. So hosting is of course, necessary for any website that's on the internet. But I recommend to people to provide a hosting solution to their clients. And the reason that I do this is I've spent so much time in my professional life, trying to go into somebody else's hosting environment. And figure out what in the world is going on. And it might be some obscure control panel that I'm not familiar with. And they have certain restrictions on resources or something else weird going on. And it just takes me time to figure out so it's much better I found to have a consistent environment across all the sites I manage that I have some control over. When you do this, you're more productive and there's no surprises when it comes to the web hosting environment. Also, if you're not offering hosting to your clients, you really are leaving money on the table because every website needs hosting and you are you've already built the client relationship. And in general, the clients are going to do what you tell them to do and take your recommendation as far as hosting. And quite frankly, it's better for both you and your client. Because otherwise we might get into this blame game and it's the hosts fault, says the developer and the host says no, it's the developers fault and the client's kind of left in the middle, not knowing what to do. I find it much better to sell a care plan where I say we include hosting. There's one contact if anything goes wrong with your website, you have one neck to strangle and it's mine. Simply reach out and we're going to help you. Now it's critical to choose the right host when you're putting hosting into a care plan. You obviously want to choose a host that takes proactive security seriously. In other words, they're doing all the things on the hosting end to make sure that that hosting environment stays secure with all the patches and updates that need to happen. And they're providing a free ssl certificate. In most cases, there's no reason why you should be paying for SSL yet. There are still hosts today that are selling SSL certificates that really should be provided free. So that should all be part of the hosting partner that you decide on also in this may be the most important piece, whichever hosting partner you choose now, solid WP as a liquid web company I love liquid Web. I've worked with him for years for hosting. But whoever you choose, choose a web host that provides excellent support because when things go wrong, the most important thing to me is that I can immediately reach out to web hosting support and get an intelligent answer to help me solve my problem. That's critical. Now I realize there's some pushback from folks that don't want to offer an offer hosting service for a number of different reasons. And if that's you, I'm not going to try to change your mind necessarily today. But my advice to you is pick one or two hosts just a couple and require that the clients on your care plan use one of them establishes some sort of partner relationship with that host. So you get compensated in some way for the referral. The bottom line here is going back here is you want to have environment hosting environments where there's no surprises. And if you have one or two hosts that all your clients are on, then there's no surprises. You understand how they work, you know how to get help if you need it, and so forth. So, hosting is absolutely critical. And it's a part I think of every successful care plan.
This next element here is WordPress updates. This is a valuable service. When I first started into WordPress, I hadn't really thought through the business model very well. And I was just keeping all of my client websites updated for free. They were paying me a small hosting charge, but I was doing all of the WordPress updates and I quickly realized this can be a lot more involved than just clicking the Update link in my WordPress install or using a dashboard I started WordPress before any of these dashboards like solid Central or even around. And so this is a valuable service that you should not be doing just for free. So instead we need to create a system where we are doing regular proactive updates of the sites that we manage. We typically do our updates once a week and then we offer a break fix as part of our care plan that in other words, something stops working. We're going to fix it up to about three hours of work. That's how it's defined in our contract. So we'll either fix the problem or replace a broken plugin with something that works up to three hours that's included in our standard care plan. So running WordPress updates regularly critical to care. The next element is backups. We need our websites to be backed up. And three things that I realized right away need to be part of an important backup process is that these backups need to happen automatically on a schedule so whatever backup solution that you're using, it needs to happen automatically. The backup should be the full site, all the things in the site, not just the database, and they need to be easy to restore. So you know there's there's a lot of plugins out there that offer a backup even some SAS solutions that offer WordPress Backup. But the restore wizard is complicated and sometimes it doesn't work. And look, I've got to have total trust in my backup solution to restore a site if something goes wrong. Last of all, you should have the ability to store backups off site in some sort of cloud storage that you have control over. And so whatever WordPress backup solution you offer ought to have these three criteria. And last of all, of course WordPress security is critical. We've seen the number of vulnerabilities on a monthly basis increased significantly this year. So as part of every care plan, we're going to do some basic security hardening, hardening, adjusting settings and WordPress features that could create some security risks. We're going to do some user security guarding users from insecure or compromised passwords and offering two factor authentication options. We want some sort of security option that gives us vulnerability scans to let us know if any of our themes or plugins have security issues. And we want some mechanisms to stop brute force attacks. So securing that WordPress login area and blocking bad block bots is critical to our WordPress security. So the good news is everything in the solid suite is geared toward this foundation of hubs, these four elements of an effective care plan when you bring your hosting now we can do our WordPress updates with solid Central, we can do our backups with solid backups and we can do our security our WordPress security with solid security and I want to dive into each of these and talk about how I set up the solid products to do those very things in my agency. So how do we set up solid central for client sites that's super easy. So adding a site to solid central you simply use your solid WP username and password. And once you are here in central when I find the correct window here, you can manage all of your sites in a single dashboard. I simply have my one demo site here WP nathan.com. But we can see all of our updates and things for all the sites that are stacked up here in our central account. You can create nicely formatted reports to send to your clients that can include the information that you want them to include. So it's a very simple and easy report manager here. Those can be sent at whatever interval that you'd like them to be sent. If you want full help on setting up solid central there's a link here to the solid Help Center for all those solid central articles. So a basic process to set this up. We're going to add the solid central plugin to our WordPress site. We've already done that it's right there in the WordPress plug in directory. Our solid central plugin is active. Once we get the two connected we can go in and monitor our our uptime by clicking the plus button which will show up right here in our site list. Makes it really easy to add that simple uptime monitoring. We can hide solid central from our client by clicking the gear icon so our clients can't see what we're using to manage the site. I effectively hides that plugin from them and then set up those reports that I just showed you. Now once we get all this set up, my recommended update strategy for all the sites that you manage is pick the same time every week to do your plugin updates. Now there's a reason for this. Number one, it makes sense to do everything at the same time. So you're focused in on that work. And if you do it once a week, you're not spending a lot of extra time, every time some update drops. Making that update. We pick Sunday nights typically is when we do our updates in my agency. It's a low traffic time and updating the same time is important because if we ever have to deal with some issue of a security issue, and we start looking at file change notifications, then we know things you know things that happened around six o'clock Sunday night for example, that was probably us running plugin updates. So we can sort of disregard those times file changes during that time, because we're usually running updates during that time of the week. So just get into a habit set up a system in your business where we're regularly running our updates at some low traffic time but the same time every week. Now I also recommend generally speaking to delay major WordPress updates I usually wait for the dot one release of any major WordPress update that comes or at least a couple of weeks after a major core release before we update sites to the next WordPress version. That delay allows any of the bugs that might be present to surface and be fixed or patched in a dot one release. I just like to let other people test the software for bugs before I update my sites. I'm also constantly watching WordPress industry news and listening to people and what's going on in the WordPress world about people who have run the update and when the problems they are encountering. One thing I'd recommend you do is register for my monthly WordPress news roundup live stream where we cover these things every month we look across the WordPress ecosystem at news in a number of different categories and bring you the things that I think are the most important things that people doing WordPress with clients ought to know. That's a free live stream every month. It's usually like the third Tuesday of the month, typically. Now as far as minor WordPress releases, we let those run automatically. So that's the core default behavior. That if that dot one dot 2.3 release is updated. WordPress automatically updates that latest release. And so I let those go we've never think had any problem with that. In all the time we've been running WordPress. I'd also recommend delaying major plugin updates. It's wise to let major plugins like WooCommerce, for example, I let that update sit for a little while after after a major update. The reason is that those larger plugins just as a whole tend to have that they're more likely to have bugs and issues than maybe a smaller plugin does. And especially consider delaying updates to any plugins that have third party add ons or any plugins even that offer core add ons like WooCommerce there's some official add ons. There's lots of third party add ons for WooCommerce. It's really important to make sure that the third party add ons you have for a plugin like WooCommerce that those have all been updated before. You think about pushing the the major
updating to the next version of WooCommerce for example, sometimes that doesn't always happen with the add ons many times it does. Just be aware of those because what will often happen is those third party developers might be slower to update their plugins for compatibility with the next major release. And so things break. So it's a good habit to let your third party plugins update before you update that core plugin. There's a link to the WooCommerce developer news for example, and they'll tell you exactly what's going on in each release and whether it's a breaking release that might cause some issues or not. This is a good link to save in your favorites. So also stay current on WordPress security news. WordPress theme and plug in exploits are just a fact of life so it's important for us to stay informed to those you can track industry news like the WordPress security category here on the solid WP blog that includes our weekly WordPress vulnerability updates. Course my news roundup covers some of those but the good news is if you're using solid security Pro, and the which now has patch stack integration, if you actually this just happened today, there's a plugin that we're using on virtually all of our clients sites that had a vulnerability and we got an email about it today. And because the plugin developer already patched the vulnerability, solid security with its version management features that I'll talk about in just a little bit. I automatically updated that plugin, I didn't have to do a thing. It automatically kept the because there was a version of the plugin released to patch the problem. It automatically updated because I had those settings set for all of our sites. So we were protected and I didn't have to lift a finger. So make sure you're using I think security and patch stack to their fullest degree and I'll be talking about those settings in just a minute. All right, WordPress backups. Solid backups has been for many years a great solution to keep your WordPress website backed up and safe. Called Backup Buddy at the beginning it's now solid backups. full explanation of all the settings and there's many, many, many granular settings inside of solid backups that help it be as compatible as possible with with your hosting platform. There's a great help center here. The link is there in the dock. By the way, if you're just joining us and see our attendee numbers changed a little bit I'm going to drop in our link bundle in the chat where you can download this guide that's on your screen. What I will tell you is that virtually anytime you're having issues with solid backups in my experience over the years working with Backup Buddy now solid backups. It is almost always a hosting related issue. There's just not enough resources at the host for backups to happen very well without some tweaking to the settings. So there's a wealth of settings inside of solid backups that that solid WP support can help you get the right combination of settings to work in your environment. But also, this is another reason why it's important to have your own hosting platform that you control and that you know that a backup plugin, like solid backups works and without any issue. It just gets all those problems off the table. So this is the strategy that we use at my agency we do a full website backup every day on every site that we manage. Because of its low cost for many years I used and recommended Amazon s3 as a remote storage destination. I've moved now personally to Dropbox and at $200 a year it gives 180 Day history so we can push backups over there. Only keep a few of them live in the folder. But we can show deleted files up to six months ago. So in effect, we get a six month history that doesn't count against our storage total. We also of course have solid stash that allows you very easy with your simple simply logging in with your solid WP username and password you can connect your site to solid stash and use that as a cloud backup is the simplest remote destination to set up. In solid backups. So here's my basic setup process. We're going to go into solid backups and create that remote destination. This one I believe is connected to stash. Yes, this is my super secret John Smith user. Yep. So we have our solid stash setup. Simply using the solid WP username and password. Really easy. It's always important when you set up a solid, a solid backups remote destination to run a backup and send it over to that remote destination. Make sure it arrived correctly, just to make sure everything is correct correctly connected. Something else to consider is solid stash live. We're active websites stash live can actually keep a live backup of your site. So as a changes made it's immediately synchronized within just a little bit with the solid live servers. This is really good for ecommerce sites, learning management Horseware type sites where there's a lot of user interaction. This just every time something happens it's going to ship those changes over to your cloud storage that's a really good option. Of course you want to test your backup run a full backup of the website, send it to the remote destination and verify that it arrived. And then I'll set up when a site launches a full backup on a daily schedule. So it just happens without me having to think about it. For sites and development by the way, we run an hourly database backup and twice a day full backup. We do this because more than once recently, I have made a mistake and we needed to roll back a database and we have all those sitting out there in the Dropbox folder where you can just pull in your database backup and rewind the site to before you made that catastrophic mistake. So we found that very helpful and we've rolled back a number of times recently in some development work. I've given you also a cluster of settings here that I've used for years. I actually got these many years ago from Backup Buddy support probably seven or eight years ago and these settings still work today. If we're trying to pull a site out of really low quality hosting. These are really good settings that just seem to always work for us again, these are my settings that you know put these in your back pocket stored away and whatever you use to store information. And these tend to work even in really poor hosting situations. I just decided that drop that in so you would have them. Now there's a number of really cool tools also hiding inside of backup solid backups that I'm just going to mention briefly. Once you get into the diagnostic section of solid backups, you get a lot of information about your environment here. So actually this is a great spot if you're going to onboard a site to your care plan that you didn't build, but solid backups on there and you get a quick at a glance view of exactly what the environment looks like and what you can do. You also can take a look at the database here and see all the tables and what's going on there. Even down at the bottom there is a tool we got some problems here. There's a tool for search and replace text in the database you need to make sure you know what you're doing of course before you mess with this tool, but it's like plugin like better search replace does this but it's already built into solid backups. So lots of great tools here that are hiding under the surface. We've also got some site size maps. So if you wonder why in the world is my backup so large, you can actually take a graphical view of your entire folder here like what's going on in my uploads folder. And why is it so big it drills all the way down. You can see this that's a really great tool that we use quite a bit. You can also take a peek into the WordPress cron schedules. Now one of the big changes in going away from solid backups and into going away from Backup Buddy and then the solid backups was that the plugin now no longer uses WP Cron. It's actually now using the action scheduler which you can also see here at tools and schedule actions for all of the actions within WordPress. It's a more reliable way to do this. And you can take a look at all the schedules and what's going on here under Cron. recent actions lets you see the things that have happened recently in followed backups. Here's a more granular view of some of those things. In this troubleshooting I find this page very helpful. If I get into some situation where for some reason, my backups aren't running correctly. Usually this button right here is your Savior. It may be that you've got a bunch of backups kind of stacked up and causing problems. You can hit the force cancel button and it just clears all those out and you can start fresh. It's kind of like erasing the board. It just makes thing gives you a fresh start. Also cleaning the data and performing daily housekeeping will just help to give you a fresh start. If you if you're having issues with backups running, and you want to get started again. So a couple of great options there. All that's lined out here in the guide. All right. Moving into some WordPress security and setting up solid security. The new solid security plugin has a beautiful new dashboard. It's been designed with now our sub menu items that make finding all the things in solid security all the settings much easier than it was before as I think security. Again link here to the solid Help Center. That's going to give you all the explanation for all of this. But I do want to take a minute and just walk you through my standard solid security settings. Again, disclaimer, this is what I use for the sites that I manage your needs may vary pop the solid security support if you have questions about any of this and and how you ought to implement the plugin on your site.
There's also a really good guide here that I'd recommend to you. It's the ultimate guide to WordPress security. This tells you how to do what we talked about in our advertising how to reduce your risk to nearly zero and your WordPress site. This guide is free download. It'll help you through all of that. So the settings below represent a flow for installing and activating solid security for the first time. So one thing I would recommend is just doing that one time if you're if you have a base site like I recommend that you're using to build all your other sites for clients, do it once there and you have your settings it's great. Otherwise, you can do it once and then use the really excellent export feature that's here under Tools. To create an export of all your settings you can import and export the settings right inside the solid security plugin. Alright, now the first thing you're going to get, which I've already gone through it on this site, so I can't show this to you. But there's an onboarding wizard that helps you make some decisions about how the site ought to be set up. This is really aimed more at less technical users for solid security and so these are just common the common ways I would skip through many of those settings in the wizard and get to the place where now I can tweak the settings myself. The first thing I would do once we get through the wizard is to set up the security dashboards. The dashboard has been significantly improved in solid security, this latest versions moving away from I think security and into solid security. And the dashboard is just much more beautiful. And what I like to do is set up a dashboard that shows me the information that I want. And then I could even set up a new dashboard for clients. We could create even a new dashboard here that we call for clients and we can share that one with only people that maybe have the editor role or have the author role or whatever role your client has on the site. So that's helpful get it all set up once then you can export that into other sites, very helpful. So I'm going to go on down now to the settings and security so we'll go here to settings and just start to work our way through each of these areas. For the settings that I usually use. Let's see. So some folks are asking to increase the size. I can't go super Is that better? And you see better now. Maybe they're a little bigger. Hopefully that's that's better. So I've given you a little bit of explanation on the settings that I'm going to use here. Here under global settings. You can adjust the days to keep your database log Do you want to hide security in the admin bar, but importantly here, add your IP to the list. So drop your IP in there so that you're on the allow list. So the rest of the settings are here. You can also check your IP and make sure that the proxy working the proxy inside of solid security is identifying you correctly. So Scrolling on down here, we'll go into the Features tab. Again, you can get more detail on each of these settings in the solid security Help Center or just by putting a ticket in to solid support. So login security here allows us to decide which of these options do we want our users to have access to to secure their accounts so we can force two factor if we want and how that all flushes out in the flow of how users will be presented with two factor options. We can also set up password list login which is going to send folks an email to validate. This is a great option here. If you for example, need to allow a plugin developer to have admin access to your site. You can create a subscriber user and then escalate that users privileges in the user settings, the settings for that particular user for a certain period of time so if you like me have ever given plugin developer admin access to your site and then forgot about it for a month or so. This is going to help you not to do that. So like here's this author user and we can set up I missed it let's see where is my.
Interest it may actually have to be a subscriber user. But here on the user profile you'll see the option to create
to enable their their account to be a user for longer. Let's see. Alright, so that's preventing that from working here on my demo site, which is frustrating. But here on the profile, you'll see the ability to escalate that users privilege for a certain amount of time. Oh, I have to I have to enable passwordless login Alright, let's try that.
I'm not seeing it's probably something in this demo account. This this demo site. This is where we run the plugin roundup every month and sometimes there are things that get caught up in the site that cause other things not to work. We can also run through our trusted devices if we want to enable that and of course paths keys which is becoming more and more more and more used across all of tech. So all the detail for all these settings. You'll just want to make a decision for yourself on which of these methods you want to enforce on your users. But you have the ability to do all of that. Here in the firewall settings. This is where we turn on our bait we can ban users. Specifically also we're going to be taking at the bottom here we're gonna be making use of the i themes brute force protection. We have some settings for our firewall we have here what's actually going to trigger a brute force log out based on certain criteria. Here's where we can join our brute force network. And by the way, you can actually put in the same email address on all these sites and it's not going to it's you don't have to have a separate email address set for each of these the other thing about this brute force network, if you do this once in a base site that you're replicating for future clients, the key that is used can be used on multiple sites so you don't have to change that.
You also have the ability to turn on CAPTCHA settings, so you can protect with a variety of different captures. I personally liked the Cloudflare turnstyle. But whichever capture option you select, you can add in your API keys whether it's reCAPTCHA Cloudflare H captcha and decide where you want to use that on login on your new user registration, on reset passwords on comments. And then set your thresholds here so set all those one time and you can move those over to all of your all of your client sites. Alright, a few other things we have here are access to some utilities on our site check first. So you can toggle on or off file change notifications. If you want to do that. You can exclude certain files from file change notifications, which is very helpful. If they're WordPress core files you can decide do I want to compare these WordPress core files with what are known good core files that's very helpful. We can turn on our site scan here so twice a day. This is going to have the patch stack scanner scan my themes and plugins on my site for known vulnerabilities. So we definitely want that to be on. We can also log our users this is very helpful to see if one of your clients is logged in and made some settings changes. This is super helpful. i This is my favorite setting on this page, the version management that I mentioned earlier, where we can actually tell what I think security force theme and plugin updates automatically if we'd like but really this area down here is what I like specifically this feature, which is the auto update, it fixes vulnerabilities. So twice a day. I think security is looking at your site to see if any themes and plugins that are currently on your site are in the patch that vulnerability list and if they are it's going to say is the patch available? Like has the plugin developer or theme developer released a fix? If so automatically update it. That's super helpful. We just use that this morning. It happened automatically for us this morning as I described earlier. But also if it's not available, then you'll get an email you get an email either way to let you know there was a vulnerability which is really, really helpful. You can also scan for other WordPress sites in the hosting container. That's that can often be a source of vulnerabilities like you make a dev site in the same container that the site is in and you forget you forget to run updates on that site. This will let you know that another WordPress instance is existing in that that you need to be aware of that can be helpful depending on your setup a lot of settings inside of user groups here this is really helpful because what it's going to let you do is create a set of rules for every type of user in your WordPress site. So you might want to say administrators have the ability to manage solid security, they can create dashboards, we're going to require them to have a strong password. We're going to refuse compromised passwords. This is a very powerful feature. You may be familiar with this have I been poned upon database. This is an ongoing updated list of username password combinations that have been or that are known to be used in an exploit. And so what this does is attach solid security to that database. So if there is a username password combination present on your WordPress site that is known to have been exploited. This is going to force that user to change their password on your WordPress site. Really, really powerful. We can actually set password age so after 30 days, the administrator has to change their password. And we can add them to logging if we want. So maybe you have a couple of user groups. There's administrators in there site editors for example. And so roles of editor author, whatever maybe they have a different set of rules where you know, you're not forcing a password reset after a certain time, but you're able to at the user level or at the role level set up different user requirements. So you know, maybe we want admin to have certain features and others not we can do that here inside of user groups. Now in addition to that, we have our notification settings here, where we can decide who's going to get the email and what email address it's going to be from. This is really helpful and then each of the different email options that solid security will send are listed for us here we can decide how often we want a digest to be sent, for example, that we want to know when a person is locked out of our site. We can turn that on or off file change notification. Where does the settings export go? What does the magic link email look like? What is the site scan result email? Who does that go to and so so you have control over all of the way that notifications are sent and to whom they were sent. Right there. In your settings here. There's a few Advanced Settings. Check all these boxes under System tweaks, unless there's a reason that you know specifically not to this is a great way to lock down some of the WordPress settings. We want to disable that file editor under themes and plugins. My goodness, don't edit your WordPress site using the file editor. This is where we can also disable XML RPC which unless you need it should be disabled because it's a known exploit point for WordPress. We can also decide how we want to treat REST API I typically restrict that this is also really helpful. Right here and solid security we can decide that we want people to be able to log in in the WordPress login with their email address and their username, or just their email address or just their username. And we have a couple of clients that only want people to log in with us with their email address and not their username. And so we can restrict that here. It's really easy. Have some other options here like disabling extra user archives. So if there's a person who has an author and they don't have any posts, we just don't make an archive for them. But all those settings are listed for you there you can follow this flow. And if you have questions, I know I went through that pretty quickly. It will take us two hours to go through just the solid security settings in detail. There's a link right at the top of this section where you can go to the solid security Help Center and get all of those things. All right. So one if you are migrating or replicating your base site for example, here's a couple of things you might want to change on every site going forward from if you export these settings and import them. Pay attention to these settings right here. Those are helpful. You also have the ability to roll your salts from site to site and that's also helpful. I've given you a lot of information here that we're not going to have time to get into. But just take a look at that because there's some helpful tips there for you. Now one thing I do want to mention is the patch stack firewall. So if you have bought the solid suite, if you came in with your license after i Things became solid security, then you automatically have access to the patch stack firewall. And right here you'll see real time updates are active and virtual patching is active. Now this is one of the best features of solid security pro with with our partnership with patch stack because if you're not aware of patch stack is doing incredibly good work inside the world of WordPress security. They are one of the folks on the cutting edge of identifying vulnerabilities and letting plugin and theme authors know that vulnerabilities exist in their software. But this piece right here this virtual patching is gold. And the reason for that is when patch stack realizes there's an issue and there's a fix for that issue. What they are actually going to do is in the firewall layer that traffic passes through to get to your WordPress site. They can actually virtually in that firewall layer, fix the problem so that even if you haven't updated Well, let's say the plugin developer hasn't sent an update for their theme or plugin in that firewall layer it is as those they have. So virtual patching fixes all those issues. And this is absolute gold for us who are working with clients because let's say a vulnerability is made known we get an email from solid security saying hey, there's a vulnerability in this plug in that you're using. And you reach out to the plugin developer and they say, you know, they're just quiet there's no response at all. And a week or a month goes by and you're sitting here with a vulnerable plugin. Well, if you have the patch stat virtual patching active and if you are a solid solid suite, remember this is included with solid security for you at no extra cost. That virtual patching has you protected. This is one of the reasons you can reduce your risk to virtually zero because which with that virtual patching active, the vulnerability does not exist. For people coming into your website. It's fixed automatically. So if you are in a legacy, I iThemes member say you have one of our old toolkits, or you have a former I think security bundle. However that might look for you, you know that we're not going to change those if you like your current membership, you can keep that but one of the things about patch stack is because of the licensing restrictions, there's a certain amount that you know, solid pays to patch that for every site that's using the patch stack firewall with virtual patching. So there does have to be some additional cost involved if you want to use the virtual patching. So licenses can be purchased at $49 per site per year.
So this is again only if you are a legacy I iThemes member if you are a solid sweet customer or you've purchased solid security, as solid security, this is already included for you. This site, for example, is licensed as solid security. That's why it shows virtual patching. If you're an i iThemes member and you're licensed with an ally themes toolkit or I think security license, you won't see this, but how do you do it? You can go to this link right here. And that will take you to a checkout page where you can purchase a how many lines of ever how many licenses that you would like to purchase here. It's a simple process and you'll have those in your account and you can add sites to that license. Now, here's the thing, like you know, you look at this $49 per site per year, that can add up right if you're managing 100 sites, that's a lot of money. But let me show you what you can do with this add on. So I've called this how to add $10,000 of annual recurring profit next year by selling a care plan that includes packstack. So the addition of the patch stack firewall with virtual patching provides a great opportunity for us as business owners to create a new care plan tier with higher security and higher prices. So figure $49 for 10 sites is 49 490 a year. So what if you created a higher tier care plan that includes patch stack for your customers that would you know, would specifically be interested in that and benefit from that and charged an extra $25 a month for that plan? Look at how the numbers break down. If you had 10 customers that did this, that will be 490 A year your cost, but $25 per month per site is $300 a year profit. So you just made $2,500 When he cites doubles that if you have 40 customers and you're adding on a $25 a month higher tier care plan that includes patch stack, it's going to cost you a little bit less than $2,000 a year to offer that but look, you're gonna make $12,000 at $25 per month per site, or $10,040 Next year in profit that's you know, there is some cost involved to adding patch stack but it's going to make your work easier because you have that virtual firewall in place. And it can be a huge new profit center for your for your business. And all you have to do is reach out to your customers and help them understand the value and then upgrade them to a higher level care plan. This makes sense like this is this is a huge opportunity for those of us that are working with clients. All right, we are at kind of the natural halfway point here. I'm going to pause and take a couple of questions and then we'll take a break before we get into the quarter. This was all the technical side of getting, what products should be involved and how to set those up. In the next hour. We're going to be looking at client facing language sales techniques, sales language that you're where you're willing to use. Yep, so that's where we're heading in the next hour but let me check the q&a before we pause and anonymous question as a personal question for me. How do you balance being a business leader with being so awesome people want to know I look I I have a really good team. That is the answer to that question. But seriously, it's all for me. It's all about alignment, everything I do. You know, the reason I'm able to talk about this on this live stream is because I'm doing this already in my own client work. I'm just telling you what I'm doing. Ron copying is not allowed for chat. That that is true. It's a limitation of zoom webinars. And I'm sorry about that. Now what I will tell you is this on every single replay Ron, below the video is the list of all the resources. This guide that you're looking at is one of those, the chat log will also be there so we know that there's valuable information that's shared in the chat. And so we actually take that whole chat log and make it available when the replay publishes so you'll be able to go back and get any of that after the fact. Let's see Gudrun I missed the 404 log and the new solid security proof log. That's a good question. I'm not sure about that Gudrun. Is anybody any of our solid folks in the chat? Do does anybody have anything to say about the 404 log? Ah, well, Ben answered it right there. Actually in the question that was removed as part of the rebrand the answer as to why is it's not strictly a security feature. And yeah, because 404 has happened for a lot of reasons that are not specifically security related. And what I would recommend Gudrun is to use if you are perhaps already using the really good redirection plugin from the plugins last plug in developers last name is godly. It's the old redirection plugin, the classic one that's been around forever with a million plus installs, it will actually log your fluorophores and more importantly right there in that plugin, you can create a redirection from the 404 to where you want it to go. That's really good. Ryan solid central only comes if you have the sweet I don't believe so. You can actually let's go to solid wp.com And each of these, you can purchase solid central right here on its own. And there's your pricing right here. So each of the products in the suite can be purchased separately. The only thing you can't get separately as a membership to solid Academy. That you have to have the sweet four. Let's see Sherry, how do you deal with hosts that automatically update WordPress Core updates if it's best to delay? That's a great question Sherry and generally hosts that do that they're a Managed WordPress host and usually they'll have a setting somewhere in there control panel to allow you to turn that off. That's what I'd recommend. Kim says we have the full solid suite what else is recommended? What else is recommended? So in the current Kim in the context of what I'm talking about, if you have the solid suite and a great web host, you're ready to do care plans just with those two things. Yeah. Gerd, what is the difference between the plugin suite and the solid suite? Great question. And Ben has answered that for you. exhaustively there, under your question, good but basically the plugin suite is was part of I themes, and that's no longer offered. So everything is now the solid suite. Elizabeth does Nexus hosting that includes solid security include patch stack, I don't know the answer to that question. Does anybody any the solid folks in the chat Do you know the answer to that question? Elizabeth, I don't know.
Karen years ago, you shared your MRR package. Are you open to sharing the new one with packstack? Do you mean what I'm charging? Heron that that would be a good that'd be a good Office Hours question. So right now we're already at the top of the hour, one hour in we're going to take a break. That's a more detailed answer that I could show here. But I would recommend asking that in office hours we can get more into it. Okay, folks, well, thanks for hanging out with me for the last hour. We've gone a long way with a lot of granular details about plugins. In the next hour again, we're going to be talking about how do I package and price my care plans. I'm going to give you some pricing ideas and suggestions and also getting into specific language on how to sell care plans to clients. It's all about education. And I'm going to talk about how I how I word some of those things and give you some sample wording to use in your conversation with clients. All right, it is now one minute after the hour. Let's take a five minute break. Okay, a five minute break. So we're back at let's say seven, five minutes and 45 seconds. So seven minutes after the hour. We'll come back and we're quiet until then.
This is your One Minute Warning we're back in one minute from now.
All right, folks, it's seven minutes after so we're back for the second part of our live stream today talking about monetizing the solid suite to grow recurring revenue. So where we're headed over the next hour or so we're probably going to run a few minutes late in the second hour if I had to guess we're going to be talking about packaging and pricing our care plans, and then selling those care plans to our clients. So thanks, everybody for the great questions you put in in the zoom q&a. And also just note that Ben Meredith is doing a great job answering a lot of those questions. There in the q&a. So pay attention to that. Thank you, Ben for your help. Alright, so let's talk a little bit about how to package and price our care plans for our clients. We've done the hard work of putting all the things in place, getting our settings right knowing exactly what we're going to do for each of our clients in our care plan. And now, how do we put those together into a way to make money, right? How do we package in price? So for years, marketing experts have demonstrated the effectiveness of a three tiered pricing strategy. So kind of a good better best situation. Or you know, silver, bronze, silver, gold, platinum, or whatever you want to say, down here. My example is basic standard Pro, whatever you want to call them. So the way to do this, and this is some one of the things I do in coaching conversations with with agency owners is how do we flesh this out into a three tiered strategy. So my advice is always start with the middle tier. The middle tier in the three tiered pricing strategy is where most people are going to choose that's why when you see these pricing tables on a lot of you know websites selling things or whatever, like the middle one, they say recommended our best value or whatever. That's because you design with the middle tier in mind, this is your core offering, which most of your customers are going to want. Now once you get the middle tier, right we're gonna go to the left and do a first tier and this is take some things away from that middle tier option. And to make it lower priced for folks that may not be able to afford in their budget, the standard tier. Now, we take the middle tier, we go the other direction, and we're going to add some things to our core offering in the middle column, or this this pro version that the larger tier for customers who have a larger budget or greater needs or whatever, some people are just always going to want to buy the top tier. There are some folks that are just going to do that. So that's our three tiered approach to pricing, and here's how that might translate into care plans. So again, we're going to start with our standard plan in the middle. We're including our hubs, H UB s hosting, WordPress, updates, backups, security, that's part of our core, we're always going to offer that. Now what also is our typical client going to want? Well, they're going to want a monthly report which you can generate right there. Within solid Central and have some really great information of how many plugins were updated, all those all the things that are included there to let the client see the value of the work that you're doing. But also, a number of years ago, we started adding two quick content changes to our standard tier. And the reason for that is we were kind of doing that anyway. But let's just get this into a system where every you know, every client can, can ask for up to two quick content changes a month that's update some text, add a picture, paste in a blog post, basic simple things. So that's included in our standard care plan. Now we go to the left what can we take away from our standard plan to make it more of a basic plan? Well, let's take away content changes in a monthly report and just give them the basic hubs Hu B S, hosting updates, backup security. Alright, now we go to the right what can we do and I Pro Plan again hosting updates backup security, but Allah we're gonna do maybe this the Pro Plan is really geared toward clients who are you know, have a a an important website for whatever reason, right? So maybe it's you know, it's it's a large corporate a large business or whatever, or it's an E commerce site or it's a learning management courseware type site, and there's something about the site where its needs are more a greater than our standard tear. So we're going to run four times a day backups for them, and with our standard hosting and update, practice weekly. Let me mention one thing here. weekly updates. Now I've seen as I've started to work with some folks in a coaching situation. They've had different tiers, where their basic plan was monthly updates. And while I understand that sort of it that's I would not recommend doing it. That way. Because it's simply not enough to update WordPress once a month. We need to keep WordPress updated and have some eyeballs on WordPress every week. And so, I would just put that into your plan plus, not only that, goodness, it's harder on you as an agency to remember which ones are monthly and which ones are weekly and all that just Goodness me. You want consistency from your agency process side so you can deliver these plans consistently. Consistency is your friend. Okay, so hosting updates, backups, security, maybe double the amount of content changes, a monthly report and then I here's where especially if you're a legacy, I think member maybe you upgrade them to a higher tier and they get the virtual patching. You know, you could do this a lot of different ways. This is just an idea of how your plans could be fleshed out into a three tier system. Hopefully that makes sense. So with that perspective, how then do we carry forward into some pricing? Pricing in general is one of the hardest things you're going to do as a solopreneur or a micro agency owner or an agency owner? It's just hard. One of the hardest things there is in working with clients and care plan pricing can vary wildly from agency to agency, but one factor as a rule of thumb, the price that you can charge for your care plans depends on the price that you're charging for your websites. Now, I said this in a live stream a couple years ago and I got into all kinds of trouble like somebody quoted on Twitter out of context and let me explain what I mean by that. I'm not saying that your the value of your care plan is any more or less. What I'm saying is, the clients you serve matter and their price point matters. So for example, if your pricing of your websites is under $2,000, you're probably going to need to price your care plan somewhere around $50 a month and up if your website price is 2000 to 3500 you probably can only get about $75 A month 3500 And up maybe in the $100 My point here is it's really hard to sell $100 A month care plan $150 A month care plan if you're charging $1,500 for a website clients that pay $1,500 for a website are not going to pay $100 a month for a care plan. They're just not. So that's why I say your website price influences your care plan price because that tells you what your the clients you currently serve are willing to pay. Now my suggestion is if you're charging less than $2,000, you need to raise your prices. I'm always telling people to raise their prices, it's it I rarely find that people are charging too much for their website design or management services. So that just gives you some idea let me ask you, let's do this. Quick, informal, unscientific poll in the chat for anybody that wants to take part. What do you charge for your typical center column the basic care plan for your clients? Drop it in the chat if you will. What are you charging monthly for your care? Plan? So this is just watch the chat now folks, and it'll give you an idea of what other people are charging
Oh, Cheryl, you're only chatting with hosts and panelists. Make sure you're chatting with everyone so they can see you there. Yeah, Ryan, if you're bundling other things in like SEO, Google ads and so forth. Yeah. So I'm only at this point talking about WordPress care plan. Yes. Okay. So everybody can see the range there and it's usually from $65 up to round $200. So you kind of see the range there. And I do that simply to give you an idea of what other people are charging. I think it's helpful. All right now, how do we sell this right? So we've done a lot of hard work, we put all these things together we thought through our pricing. We you know some tear type is tear strategy of how we might work that out into a care plan. How do we get the client to buy it? Right? Okay. We've said that selling care plans is the starting point for a recurring revenue strategy. And we know as I said at the beginning, that recurring revenue is the key, the key to being successful long term in a WordPress business. So how do we sell to our clients? You've built the client relationship, so maximize its value for the long term, not just the single project. Every WordPress site needs ongoing care. So we need to offer this to every client every time. Matter of fact, we require if we build a website for a client, they must be on our care plan. It's a requirement I have in the past turn business away on a site rebuild because they didn't want to take our care plan. It's just not where I want to spend my time. We require our care plan for clients. Now I know that's not the right solution for many of you, but it might be so how do we explain then to clients why they need a care plan. So this can be a challenge of showing a client why a care plan is important. So clients are often not tech savvy. They don't understand the challenges or the benefits of keeping a website healthy. A lot of times they just know I don't have any idea that this is important. Right? You know, remember, I'm not gonna tell that story. I'm gonna keep that to myself. So it's up to us, as WordPress professionals, to explain the needs in a language that the clients can understand that even a non technical client can understand. Now, this can be difficult if you like me are a self identified geek. It's really hard for us to stay out of the weeds in the technical terms. But we have to be very careful that we don't muddy the water with jargon. We need to explain to clients in simple language why it's important. So they're like we're on page 17. There's 10 more pages of text here. And a lot of it is the kind of language I use with the client. So I've given you some samples of how I explain things. All right. So here are two common mistakes that I see people making is I have conversations like if I'm going to work camp and we're talking about recurring revenue and well how are you selling your plans? Or it might be a coaching call that I've had, you know, hundreds and hundreds of coaching calls over seven or eight years now I'm doing coaching. These are the things that I see the mistakes that are made. The first is presenting care plans as an option. I mentioned that a minute ago. They're not an option. Like you this word of WordPress site. WordPress is awesome. We love WordPress, but WordPress requires care. And there's a second Nathan Ingram that just popped in here. It's me Nathan. It's Jennifer. Sorry. Oh, say hi to Jennifer, everybody. Hi, everybody. All right. So all right. Let's see here. That was awesome. All right. So presenting care plans as an option is the number one mistake so we know that WordPress requires care security and management are not an option for WordPress sites. a care plan is not like that optional extended warranty that car dealers try to sell you whenever you buy a car. It's not like that. It's much more important. a care plan is more like and I use this analogy a lot. a care plan is more like regularly scheduled maintenance on your vehicle. The oil changes the fluid checks the rotating and balancing of tires. If you skip those things, your vehicle is going to have problems at some point. Right. So the care plan is not the extended warranty. The care plan is regularly scheduled maintenance when a client is budget challenged. I'd rather see them spend less on the project so that they have the budget to invest in the care plan. And I've actually told clients this we worked with an organization a little over a year ago that had a certain amount of budget annually to do to deal with website things. And so we actually reduced the scope of the build. So they would have enough in their budget to pay for the care plan. And then in the second year, we would build out in a face to the rest of those features. The care plan is that important. So my proposal has two prices, the price to build the website the price to manage the website and one place to sign up for years I used to have the care plan is like a checkbox. I'm gonna check to agree to the care plan. No, I stopped doing that because I realized number one, they were missing it and I had to have more conversations with him about that, but number two, this is one thing. You're buying a solution. You're not buying a website, you're buying a solution to a business problem. That's why people need a website, not just to have a website. The website should solve a business problem. And the solution to their business problem is larger than some person building them a website that website also needs to be cared for. On the long term. There's two prices in the proposal one price to build for the scope of work one price to manage one signature line. Alright, so that's the first step that's presenting care plans as an option. The second Oh my. How many of you have done this? Like I have me this is in my notes because I've made this mistake a lot of times unfortunately, and it is waiting until launch to mention the care plan. If you wait until the website launches before you start talking to the client about the need for ongoing management. You're rarely going to sell a care plan. Matter of fact, you're going to it the client might feel deceived, because they their investment in this website is going to change significantly. And quite frankly, I don't blame the client for feeling this way. Because I should have introduced this earlier on. That's why care plan pricing needs to be part of your proposal. It's just as important as the cost of the original build. Now, here's the thing. When we talk about all of the things being equal, the most important thing you can do to sell your care plan is educate the customer. The key to selling WordPress care plans is education. And that conversation needs to start at the first consulting conversation you have with your client, whatever you call that a discovery conversation, or the initial client call whatever you call it. Whenever you start talking about the website and what it's supposed to be and do and whatever the pre proposal conversation WordPress care plans need to be part of that conversation. Introducing it at low we offer there's a two prices you'll get in the proposal cost to build cost to manage management is critical and here's why. So here's how I present care plans to clients. This actually came about from I did this accidentally one time and I thought wow, that was really good. I gotta remember to do that every time now. And I was sitting at a coffee shop with a client This was before COVID Before Now we all meet like this on the screen. But when I was sitting with a client at a coffee shop we were talking about you know, I was getting into the care plan conversation. And I actually grabbed one of those really terrible Starbucks napkins, and I drew out a square just like what you're seeing here. And I called it the four walls of protection. I was very proud of myself for that. And it's it holds true it's the same it's this Hub's strategy that I mentioned in the first hour of hosting updates, backup security. And when I talk to clients like this, I still use this analogy. I explain why each of those walls is important like I did at the beginning of the last hour. I don't necessarily spend a lot of time on each individual any single wall unless the client is interested in this and has questions. So again, feel free to use this example in your conversations. Ryan is suggesting in the chat to make it a pentagon and add performance. You can I mean if you be careful because it could real quick become a dodecahedron or whatever with many many things. Keep it simple at this point, I think is good with the client, but whatever are the core offerings of your care plan. That's when you start talking about it right. So here's I'm gonna unpack each of these four walls in client language. Okay, we did it in the first hour with you know, technical language now we're going to translate this into client language. And these are some of the phrases that I typically use with clients as I'm selling them this care plan. So when we talk about hosting,
the client may or may not be familiar with inexpensive low quality shared hosting and I don't usually go that direction unless they ask about it. So you know, the client may say, Well, what about that, you know, $10 a month right now I'm paying 1295 a month for hosting, et cetera. So I'll talk about that. And I'll say, look, there are those kinds of hosting services out there. Just like there's $500 cars on Facebook marketplace. A car like that might work for a little bit, but I'm not going to put my family in one right and you don't want to put your business website on low quality shared hosting. The reason shared hosting is so cheap, is because there's 1000s of other websites on that server. And those other websites can make your site run slower. They can affect your website security, if they get hacked. They can even cause your site to be blacklisted. If they do something bad, like over and over again, shared web hosting companies if one site is spamming the whole IP address for that whole server with 1000s of other sites on it gets blacklisted. It's just a bad situation. So I make this analogy. Like living in an apartment building where you have no control over who your neighbors are. There might be a meth lab operating next door and there's no way you'll know until it's too late. Shared hosting is not for serious business websites. It's just not. So what I'll say is not only does our private server provide much better security for your website, it's also significantly faster than the alternatives. A faster website can lead to better customer conversions and a higher rank on Google. So a lot of times the client won't care about all this. You have to make that decision. Don't go into all this detail unless the client has questions about it. A lot of times, you know well, so right when I'm dealing with a business owner who has since has no issue with spinning money, I just explained that we have our own private server that we control ourselves that have all of our clients websites on it. And folks, so many times the client is just grateful that we have a hosting solution, and they don't have to figure that out. I mean, really clients who come to you for your expertise, they're reaching out to you because they don't want to know all this web stuff. They just need somebody they can trust that's gonna handle it for them. And so you know, they are making a trust based choice to invest in you. This is super important. So sell benefits, not features. And in general, if gigabytes of storage space comes into the conversation, you're probably doing it wrong. unless for some reason your client actually wants to know that. That's geek language. And I say that lovingly as a geek. That's geek language. We need to stick to client language. Usually, in my world, at least, the client simply wants to know you got it handled and they don't have to think about it. And they have one person to call if something goes wrong. All right. So that's hosting updates, WordPress software updates. Now this one's a little more difficult to explain to clients. And I've started using this term software updates, because if I start talking about just use the term updates, and I'm thinking running WordPress updates, or if I even use the term WordPress updates with the client, they might think I'm talking about Oh, so you're gonna update my contact page. If I change my phone number or you're going to update my profile if I change what so they might be thinking, I'm talking content updates. And so that's why I use the word software updates to talk to clients about this. So when it comes to this discussion, there's usually two kinds of clients that I've found that push back on the importance of WordPress theme and plugin updates. The first are non technical clients who just don't get why this is important. The second are maybe semi technical clients who they maybe they've played with WordPress before and they just go in there and hit update. They don't worry about it. And they think updating WordPress is as simple as pushing a button and let's face it, many times it is WordPress. Updates aren't a problem until they're a problem. And probably if you have any length of time managing WordPress sites behind you. You've had an instance where an update did not go well right. And now you got to figure out critical error and what's causing the conflict and all these things right. WordPress updates are easy until they're not. But that's why we have a professional taking care of that for us. So here's the analogy I use especially for non technical users, software, WordPress software updates or like software updates on your computer. Why do we apply those when the little thing comes up and says you got a software update? Because the developer has found problems or security vulnerabilities, and so the patch was released to fix those or if you don't keep your software up to date, you can become infected with malware or ransomware really bad things can happen. WordPress updates are similar. But even more important since unlike your computer, your website is actually out there accessible for anybody to go to right. Which means that hackers can and will snoop around looking for problems on your website to exploit. So we update your WordPress site every week under normal circumstances we make sure that all the patches and software applied. We also have software that proactively watches your website for vulnerabilities that solid security. It alerts us if a vulnerability exists and we make sure a patch is applied as soon as it's available. Now, we make sure if you're doing this right you have version management turned on that automatically update if the vulnerability fixes the problem. You're still making sure you're not actually doing the work but you're making sure that it's happening. So I feel okay with that wording. And as part of our work, we stay up to date on web security, so you don't have to know all that stuff. That's our job as your WordPress professional. We just take care of this. And the goal here in this part of the conversation is for the client to understand that you have their back on all these things, and they don't have to be a web security expert. You've got them covered on that. Thomas that is a great point about client security and scare tactics. I am not thank you for mentioning that Thomas. I am not a fan of scare tactics. I am a fan of honest education. And quite frankly, security is an issue. You know, you don't if a client says you know, I don't know if I want all of this. I mean, do you want to come in on a Monday morning and your site is full of links to things that you would rather not your site be linking to, you know, think adult websites and mail pharmaceuticals and those sorts of things. I don't want that all over my website, but that is definitely something that can happen. So information without twisting their arm on scare tactics, you know I believe in in consultative sales which is educating the people to why they need something and guiding them toward that decision. I agree scare tactics have no role in my world. And thanks for mentioning that. Alright, so we got hosting and WordPress update software updates now WordPress backups. Now a lot of clients backups, they just get they understand why backups are important, just in general. So there are two reasons we provide backup services. First of all, if something happens, and there's damage done to your site by hackers, we can roll back we're good or this is the one that I really harp on, especially with business owners. Is if you have people logging into your site making changes what happens if they mess something up? Right, that happens more frequently than a hacker issue has to be remediated, we protect against human error. So you know, if somebody goes in and add something or break something accidentally we can roll back your website to something to a backup that's no more than 24 hours old. And problem solved. Right? So business owners appreciate this. I explained that we're relentless about backups, and we provide a two tiered backup strategy. So we have hosting level backups and we also have our cloud backups with a six month archive, like I discussed. And again, you have to be careful here. Don't get into geek language. Don't get super excited about all your technical solutions. Focus on what does this client actually care about? What's important to this client? Again, they may need all they may need to know is that you've got a backup solution in their site and that's great. Some may have curiosity so get into it with the client if they really have some legitimate questions. Otherwise, too many details can muddy the water and make a client less likely to come to a decision. All right, WordPress security. So WordPress security is a this is the HU BS the fourth wall. WordPress security is a three phase approach in my world, there's architecture, meaning we only choose the best WordPress themes and plugins to build your site. We only use good code. So the site is built with security sort of baked in like we're building it the right way. Then as part of our launch process, okay, feel free to steal this. We perform a 43 point WordPress lockdown protocol. That sounds great, doesn't it? And these are all the boxes of things that we check in solid security and a couple things we do on the server in count the boxes you check. And now you have a 43 point WordPress security lockdown protocol that you follow. Yep. So feel free to use that. I found that to be kind of helpful. It sounds really good, and it's totally honest. Also, we monitor your website for hack attempts. We're doing that with solid security and notifications and so forth. Our advanced firewall patches the vulnerability in real time again, this, it's easy to kind of get into the geekery language here. Just figure out what is it that this client is in particular interested in and give them the information that they want? free ssl certificate, you don't have to buy that and so forth. Okay. What about hackers? The good thing,
the good news is the only good news about hacking in 2023 is that more and more and more people are just aware that it's a fact of life. And you don't have to explain the danger of hackers out there because people realize that they're out there and they can cause problems. The question they'll have is, well, I'm just a small business. I'm just a little nonprofit. I'm just, you know, a solo practitioner. Attorney over here. Why would a hacker want to access my website to begin with? Why do I need you to protect me from these people? Why would they even want to, you know, be after my website to begin with. They also might take a so what approach you know, so what if I'm hack, right? So it's often helpful to explain hackers to clients, and I use an analogy to do that. So I tell a story a few years ago, in my neighborhood, we had a string of vehicle break ins now I live in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama, and in a relatively safe area very few things ever happen around here that are you know, a problem. It's suburbia, so it was weird. All of a sudden, people were reporting on our little neighborhood group on my car was broken into stuff was taken out of my glove compartment or driver's seat or whatever. And it turns out, I mean, no, no cars were damaged, but some things were stolen. But turns out there were a bunch of teenagers walking around from driveway, the driveway just checking the doors to see if anything was open. And if the car was unlocked, they'd rummage through it and take anything they thought was valuable. That is exactly what hackers do. They're just checking your doors and windows. Of your website to see if anything is there that's going to allow them easy access. Now, there are some hackers that target certain big corporations to try to get into whatever. But many hackers are just trying the doors and windows of your website and they don't care who you are. It's not about you. It's about getting access to your website. The thing is, the hacker doesn't just try one door one window at a time. They have software that's hammering away at 1000s of these things every minute and just trying, you know all the doors and windows of 1000 websites. It's like the hacker pressing a button and automatically checking all the doors and windows of all the cars in the neighborhood at one time. So when you think about a hacker, don't think of a single person in their parents basement late at night typing away on the computer with Cheeto dust on their fingers. They create these little programs little bots and I call them computer programs that scan the Internet looking for website vulnerabilities. When they find an open door. They're pre programmed to exploit it and follow it as long as it'll go and report back to the hacker and all of a sudden the hacker has hundreds of websites to exploit all at the same time. And they will why why would somebody do this? What value is my little website to them? The answer is they're not looking for you. They're not trying to attack you. You're just one of a million websites they're trying to exploit so why do they do this? The number one reason is server resources. If a hacker can get into your website, they can use the digital resources with the horsepower of your server to run complex calculations. They can use it to create Bitcoin. They can use it to do a number of different things. They can send millions of spam emails and I'll tell clients, all those spam emails that you get every day. Those are coming probably from people whose websites got hacked and that website is just cranking out 1000s of spam emails every minute. Something else they'll do is content injection. So they'll add text and images to products and sites that you probably don't want to advertise again think porn sites, mail pharmaceuticals. You don't want your you know church website to have those things on it when you come in on Monday. Morning. It's not a good day if that happens. And they'll also try to inject malware so they can add code that will exploit vulnerabilities on your visitors computer so you could actually be exposing your website visitors to risk if your website gets compromised. So the bad deal and you don't want to be part of that. Now the good news. And again, here's the point where is as Thomas mentioned earlier, we have to really tread that line, but I don't want to try really I'm not trying to scare a client into by getting involved in our care plan. But I do want to be honest about the the reality of web security these days. non technical clients especially might just be really scared at this point. And there's a fine line between scare tactics and education. So just be very careful how you handle this. I just simply do this by assuring you that look WordPress is quite secure. When a good security strategies employed like the ones we use under our care plan. And the bottom line is, we've got this covered. We do this every day. You don't have to be an expert in any of this. And for the lope for $100 150 dot whatever dollars the month you charge for your care plan. You don't have to worry about any of this and we're going to take care of your website. That's the sale. WordPress care plans are not about gigabytes of storage space and all of that. It's all about trust in you and knowing that you've got them covered. It's a trust decision. It's not a gigabytes decision. It's a trust decision that you are the person they're going to trust. To manage their website and keep it safe. Now I'll also go through a little conversation in this as in my master services agreement contract as well about the client's responsibilities and security. They need to understand that even when we do our best job on keeping the website secure, they also need to they have some responsibilities in this matter too. And that's keeping all their computers protected. Any computer that's going to log into the website needs to be updated with the latest versions of the browser and operating system and all those things. They need to have a unique password also. As a user, strong unique password as shown by the WordPress password indicator, just to make sure that their users stay safe. Using a password manager will talk through all of this. If the client has their one favorite password that they use for everything Oh, my goodness, it's like a master key to their life and we explain a little bit of that. So what do you do here? At the end of the day, I give my client three options. So care plans are important. You can do nothing about this. And you know we require care plans if we build your site but if you choose not you know doing nothing is a bad option. You will eventually get hacked your website will eventually break. It's like choosing not to do the recommended maintenance on your car. It might be okay for a little while but sooner or later something bad is going to happen. Or you could do it yourself like you could learn all these things that we've taken years to learn in our agency about keeping WordPress safe and having good systems for backups and security and all of that. You can learn all of that that is an option. There's a great tool from my friend Kyle at the admin bar called the website owner's manual that is wonderful for showing a client just how much work is involved in the care plan. So that's a great resource or hey, look, you don't have to, you know, doing nothing is not a great option and you don't have to learn all these things. Simply we offer a suite of ongoing services to keep your website safe and working properly. And it's only $100 a month, $150 a month, whatever you're charging. For a good business owner. That's a good decision. So we've gone a long way over the last couple of hours. We have several questions stacked up that we'll get to in just a moment. We've talked about how to use each component of the solid suite to create a care plan. That's based around these four walls of protection as you bring your hosting solution into it. We've talked about packaging and pricing those care plans how to make money with patch stack. We've talked about how to talk to clients about the various aspects of the care plan. I let me just remind you before we get to q&a, this great deal that's going on right now through December the 21st. So that's six days from now. This deal is good for the next six days. When he 5% off of all solid WP products other than solid central monthly and the patch stack upgrade for legacy I iThemes members. This still doesn't affect that but if you'd like to buy new solid product 25% off using the code live stream 25 Good through December the 21st. This is a great opportunity to take advantage of that deal. All right. Let me invite you again to open up the q&a If you have questions that weren't answered before or if you put a question in the chat. I'll put it there in the q&a. And we'll start going down that list now. Let's see. So Sue had a great question about the toolkit, which Ben I think answered pretty well there so we'll skip to the next one. Okay, anonymous attendee is asking about the three tiered approach. And do I offer all three tiers in the proposal? So actually, I suggest the three tier approach. I don't do things that way in my agency, we have a single good tier and then we kind of customized care plans based on the client need so generally, I offer one care plan approach. That's the one the client needs. If you you know, it's a it might be good to offer those three tiers on your website, but in the proposal, I would have one solution. So based on everything, like if the client has a WooCommerce site, and they got a bunch of or it's a Learning Management site, bunch of people are logging in and out doing things, they're going to be on that top end care plan. They're not you know, they're going to need more help than that. So that's the care plan that goes in the proposal for me. Hope that makes sense. Next question, is there a proposal is there a problem with offering just one flat care plan and a proposal? No. And that goes again, back?
I think that was a follow up question to the previous one. No, matter of fact, I would recommend that it's all about the psychology of calls to action to me. If you offer a client too many choices, they'll freeze right? I think it's better in a proposal from my perspective, in most cases, simply to offer one solution. You need a website that solves this business problem that you have the cost to build the website is this much and to manage the website is this much now I'm not going to go to war over that and fight about it, but that's the approach I would take. All right. Let's see. Kim has a good response to that previous conversation. Great. Thank you for that Kim. Giselle, what is the turnaround time for priority support for the solid suite? Great question. And then just answered We usually reply writing within four business hours, nine to five central US time. Yeah. So for our response on business days, yeah. Let's see Thomas. What is a good rate slash time conversion ratio? Let's say you charge $150 a month, how many hours of actual work should it take maximum? That is a great question, Thomas. So the beautiful thing about care plans is that what if you build your care plans based on consistent systems and what I mean by that is I've got if these are sites that I've built, and all the sites are using a pretty consistent theme and plugin stack that makes them easier to manage. There's a lot of things about your business process that go into making this easier. So in my world, like most of our sites are on the same theme and plugin stack. We're using the same tools to manage and do care plans on all the sites based on the solid suite, solid backup, solid security, all those things. So if you have 10 sites on a care plan, let's say it's going to take you so much time. Having 20 sites on your care plan is not going to take double the time that 10 sites take. There's a there's a multiple I don't know what that is. It depends on every person but it the more sites you add to your care plan service, it takes you less time per site as you add, if that makes sense. So it's it's a it's a really good return on time. So as you're sitting down to run updates in my world once a week, it doesn't take that much more time to update 20 sites that it would 30 or 40. Right or 100. It doesn't take that much more time to do that. Certainly not, you know, it doesn't take double the amount of time to manage 100 sites and it does 50 The quick that kind of The X Factor is we in our typical care plan, roll in those two quick tasks every month. You know, a simple change. It depends on how many of those we get right and that's that's hard to predict. But it's really the building your care plan so that it's scalable like that. It makes managing more and more clients easier and easier as you go. So I'm not sure if I can give you the exact ratio, but that's the way I would look at it Ronan pardon me? Do you offer the care plans to customers you haven't built the site for and if so, do you market it? Great question. So, Ronen, this is tricky. Okay, because when you take on I call these rescue sites, right? So typically, this is a situation where the the original site developer has poof disappeared and the client can't find them anymore, or whatever. Or they've got a really bad experience with that former developer and now they looking for somebody else for help. So, goodness, especially in the case of a rescue site, where the developer has vanished. You never know what you're gonna get when you get under the hood. Of that WordPress site. Like I've seen. I've seen WordPress sites built in such a way that I'm left scratching my little bald head wondering like this. This developer had to try to mess this site up that bad like it was so bad one of the stories that I told here is what we took on a site one time and these are still clients to this day now they loved our work. But about four years ago, we took on a site and the original developer in in many different places had various image sizes defined somewhere in plugin some was in custom code, some was in the functions dot php. And every time you uploaded an image to the site, it was creating 28 different image sizes. It was nuts like so. All of that to say, yes, we will take on. Yes, we will take on sites that we didn't build, but the process in that requires a Site Audit. That is chargeable at the beginning. So they pay a certain amount of money for a Site Audit to see what in the world is going on behind the scenes of the site. And then frequently there's a remediation fee. So in order you know and the way I explain this to clients, and again, feel free to use this language. I tell the client, I want to be able to look you in the eye and tell you that we will take responsibility for your site. Its security that it runs well. And in order for me to do that, right like right now I can't do that. I have to do a thorough audit to know what's going on behind the scenes. And there might be some things we have to fix to get it to a point where we can manage it. And so that's the way I approach that if that makes any sense. And yeah, like Thomas is saying they Yeah, it's let me it's an old theme from ThemeForest or they don't have licensing. So that audit is going to reveal okay, this theme is not licensed, these plugins are no longer in the directory. So there might be a lot of replacement that has to be done. And so you need to charge for that. And you know, give give the give the client a cost to remediate the site. Before you can even take it into support and a care plan. So does that help? Yeah, good. All right. We still have a few minutes left. I thought we'd run a bit late today had plenty of time for questions. Any other questions? drop those in the q&a. Otherwise, I hope everybody has seen how really honestly easy it is to set up a care plan using the foundational products that solid WP offers with our update service and solid central with solid backups with solid security to keep your site safe. We offer everything that you need for the basis of your care plan, bring your hosting solution to that and you're ready to go. And hopefully this has been helpful to you as especially as you're talking to clients about these things. All right, Thomas Do you still offer lifetime plans? I Jennifer can speak to that in the chat perhaps I don't believe there's any lifetime deals offered. And honestly, I would you have to be so I am of two opinions about lifetime deals. First as an agency owner I love lifetime deals because they cost me one thing and I'm done. Right. However, when it comes to plugins, the likelihood of a company that lives on Lifetime deals later going out of business is a lot higher than a complete company that has recurring revenue from annual licenses. And so there are things that you definitely want to pay for on a regular basis, you know, foundational plugins like solid WP offers. That's something that I'd want to pay for on an annual basis. And there's several other plugins in our in our standard stack that I pay regular, regular annual cost, because I want that developer to be there two years from now three years from now continuing to develop and support and iterate on that product. And if they just get one lifetime deal with what's keeping them in business next year. It's the same reason that we as a WordPress developer, we can't just live on sales we need to live on recurring revenue, right? Ricart What about the offer patch deck upgrades not include oh great question. Let me let me re explain that. So what is meant right here patch deck upgrades not included. This is specifically talking to people who have a legacy I themes license like the old items security gold or some of those old packages or an iframe toolkit that included security. We can't include patch stack in that because I mean, honestly solid WP pays a fee to patch tag for every site that's on the plan. And so real quick we can accrue a bunch of costs. So there is some cost if you are a legacy I iThemes member to add patch stack to your solid security Pro and the 25% off deal is not applicable to that. If you bought solid suite, or if you bought solid security as solid security patch stack and virtual patching is included. Already in your license. Does that help regard
Ryan Do you call this managed WordPress solutions or WordPress care or what? So I call this WordPress. I call it website management. website management although I will tell you I just heard somebody a few weeks ago in an event where I was they call it site care. I don't like that site care. It's shorter. But we currently call it website management but I like site care. Paul, you bring a client you bring on a client for a care plan and they turn out to be a bad decision now what Okay, so all this I'm sure this would never happen to you, Paul. But if you have what do you do if you bring on a client and they turn out to be a nightmare monster client? What do you do now as this is always my suggestion in this case, is you know what you what you should do is keep a running list of other WordPress developers that you don't like and then refer those bad clients to them. I'm kidding. Don't do that. Don't Don't do that. I'm kidding. But you can you can certainly you know what is the language of firing a client? You know, you simply can say, you know, based you know, we will no longer be able to service your website after such and such a date. Honestly, there's no other explanation that's required. I would even if it's a terrible client, I would still be gracious and offboarding that client and helping them move to another provider to a certain point. But yeah, it's at some point you do have to fire the client. Ben, that's funny. Okay, you guys are killing me over there in the chat. All right. Ryan, can you give us an example landing page describing your offerings? I am not going to do that for my agency on this live stream for a number of different reasons. But, you know, where can somebody go? Brian, I don't have an immediate answer for you on that question. I would just say Google WordPress management and you will find some landing pages that describe it from different agencies. Yeah. Elizabeth Are you saying do I have to pay more for packstack? No, absolutely not. So I think security, that whole plugin works very, very well. And the only time you have to add the patch that cost is if you want that firewall with virtual patching. So the way your I think security, now solid security works with the twice a day site scans, that's still using the patch, that database that's included already, but costs extra is the firewall with virtual patching. Okay, and we can't just give that free because it costs solid money per site, right? That just makes sense. So you can continue to use solid security just like you are now with the twice daily scans for vulnerable themes and plugins with the version management that will automatically update to the correct to a fixed version. If a problem exists. You only have to pay more if you want the virtual patching and firewall. Does that help? Yeah, so Elizabeth, I would talk to Nexus about that. Again, I don't know how they're offering that nexus for those of you that aren't aware is another in another in the liquidweb family of products and they are including solid security. I just don't know that it includes the packstack integration. Oh, good. Okay, here's a great link. Let me share this with everybody. If you have questions about all of this, I think security to solid security transition, we know there are many out there. There's a great FAQ page right here on solid wp.com that the team has done a great job of answering many many of these questions. And of course if you have questions you can reach out to support and they'll do their do their best to answer those for you. Sherry, do we have suggestions for quality WordPress hosting? Absolutely. Now again, I'm gonna speak to the home team because solid WP is one of the stellar WP products which is owned by liquid web and part of the liquid web Family of Brands. I started hosting my agency with liquid Web. Goodness wait Farbe years up seven, eight, maybe nine years ago I started with liquidweb with the VPs and the move to a dedicated server. I'm always been very happy with liquidweb also if you want to manage WordPress solution Nexus is the liquid web brand that that does manage WordPress hosting, and it's quite good as well. So those are my two options if you want if you're comfortable doing a few more of the technical server things liquid web and get a VPS or dedicated server. Then next is if you want managed WordPress Elizabeth Yeah, the liquid web used to have a Managed WordPress offering. But when that nexus what was brought into the liquid web Family of Brands to provide managed WordPress so liquid web proper does dedicated and VPS servers Nexus does the managed hosting. Rick, Richard, is it possible to use your own patch stack license bought through patch stack.com. Okay, somebody other than me needs to answer that question. Who's got a good answer for Richard? I don't know the answer to that. Richard. I don't think so. I think it needs to be the key in order to connect it to in order to connect that to solid security. It has to be our key
Alright, so hopefully somebody was solid will answer that in the chat in just a moment. Richard. An anonymous attendee is asking is the managed WordPress hosting, shared hosting? No. So I assume anonymous you're talking about the Nexus managed hosting, I was just mentioning, it is not shared hosting. It's a Managed WordPress environment. That is it's different than a VPS but you're still walled off and you have your own. Sorry about that. You have your own resources. So you're in your site protected resources. All right. Any other questions before we wrap up? We are right at the top of the hour three o'clock Central. Okay, so here's the answer to your question, Richard. Solid security with patch stack includes functionality you don't get with just solid and patch stack alone. So you do need you would you couldn't you wouldn't be able to use your patch stack license from patch stack within solid security but technically you can use solid security basic and patch stack if you wanted to do it that way. Patch stack standalone, solid security basic standalone. But that if you have specific questions about that, I would I would recommend putting in a support ticket and getting some more detailed help. All right. One more time before we quit. I've just dropped the link bundle in the chat. The monetizing solid security guide this 27 page PDF we've been looking at is there for you to download in the chat. We'll have the replay up in about an hour at the link there on the screen. It's the same link that you use to to register and once again that 25% off coupon is live stream 25 and we invite you to use that one last thing before we quit. I would really love to see all of you on our upcoming solid Academy live streams. So you can go to Academy dot solid wp.com Go here to upcoming live streams. And the premium ones are for our members only. But there's lots of upcoming live streams on all sorts of things in the month of January. You can filter those you can even view them on a calendar and see what's coming up. Normally our Kadence for live streams are Tuesday, Wednesdays and Thursdays from one o'clock to two o'clock central time. We'd love to have you with us on more of the solid Academy webinars. And if you can't make it live, then just go right here, right here to the live stream library and you'll see right here, they're all right here ready to go. So you can go back and rewatch any of these. For example. On Monday we had our Tuesday we had our WordPress news roundup, and right here is the replay the slides, the chat log somebody was asking about there's a live transcript. All that is here. For all of our live streams. Going back for many years, there's over 1000 in the library. Alright, folks, that is gonna wrap it up for us today. Thanks for hanging out with us the last couple of hours. Hopefully it was a good use of your time. You've learned some things now you're thinking about some things. Hopefully it was helpful. So that's gonna do it for us. This week. We're back for members Tuesday and Wednesday of next week is our optimizing your Starter Site course. That's coming up Tuesday and Wednesday. Until then, have a great weekend. We'll see you back here next time on the solid Academy where we go further together.