 This is for anybody who is managing multiple WordPress websites. Now, for me, I am a huge advocate for other web designers and developers to offer WordPress maintenance and care plans. And when we're managing several websites, we need to have a really solid management tool for WordPress websites. Now we got the old school ones. We got our managed WP and our main WP and infinite WP and it just seems like everything got to have a WP at the end. So my boy Jay from the Lightbox Crew, he put me on to a new tool and that is going to be WP Umbrella again with the WP, but this time they put it in the front, said at the end. Well, this new tool is looking to dethrone the top dogs. So I want to give you an inside look show you how it works, how to set it all up. I also want to show you why I have switched from managed WP over to WP umbrella. So that is what I am now currently using for our WordPress maintenance plans. So let's go ahead and check it out, have some fun. Let's start by getting a quick look at Umbrella on their website. And well, you can see just from going to the website that everything looks clean and very simplified. It has this fresh clean layout and this is the way that I could best describe Umbrella. It's very clean, new and modern. Now for a look over at managed WP and I got to say this, this isn't about slamming managed WP. It's a solid tool. It works. It has worked for me and my agency for several years now, but it is older and it is dated and as a creative and a designer, I like to see things be creative. I like to see clean user interfaces. I like to see clean designs and have that experience. Well, WP Umbrella gives that kind of experience. So I have a testing account that I set up right here and I want to take you through the process. So when you set up your account, you're going to come to a back end and this is how the back end looks without any sites. So let's add a site real quick. When you click on it, it's going to give you these instructions right here, what to do. So we need to copy and paste our API key. And we could also do that up here, it gives you a notification. See, all the details are there, the UI is there, it's really dope. Also right here, the API key, you can just click on that and again, you're going to have it copied to your clipboard. So let's go to the site we're going to add it on and that's going to be this site. This is just a site that I use for tutorials. It is on our hosting so we could connect it. So I'm going to go over here to plugins. Let's go to add new. And then we are going to go here and put in WP umbrella. Oops, I spelled that wrong. And here we go. So let's install it to start go over to the settings. And then we already have our account created. So we don't need to do anything here. All we got to do is paste in our API key here. That's it. Let's go ahead and save that. And that's it. That's how easy it is to connect the site. Now when I was using manage WP, I mean it wasn't difficult, but it was not this easy as well. And you can see right away it connects like this thing is really fast. It connects right away. The onboarding is quite simple. Now let's walk through it and see what it could do. It could do all the basics, all the things that we need a WordPress management tool to do. It will monitor the speed and let us know how quick the website is loading. And if something happens where the speed crashes, we could get notified. It's going to let us know about the updates that are needed. We got backups and we got restore as well. We'll check that out in a second. And then also shows us site health if there are any issues, also PHP issues. There are some other things as well, but let's take a look at these first. So we could check out the performance and it's going to see show us what the performance is. So right now looking pretty darn good, let us know if there are any PHP issues happening on the site. We could go to our updates and right here we could go ahead and update it here. We can do it this way for every single website one at a time. But if you have multiple websites, well as you add them, this is going to grow right here. Your list of websites will grow. And if you want to do everything in bulk, you could always go here to updates and do things by bulk and just update them all. Same thing where we're press core and for theme updates, I like to do them individually because I like to test them and be careful with it. I definitely want to know what I'm updating in case of one of our sites break. So I've never personally done bulk updates because I found that something could get by me and I want to make sure I could catch any breaks that happen. Now we have the updates here. I'm really hoping that safe updates comes in the near future. They don't have it yet and keep in mind this is a newer platform. The beginning of the year when I started it and first started testing it, most of this wasn't in here yet. So a lot has happened this year. Now we could do our backups right here. We could also schedule our backups to we can see what do we want to backup. I always put on both of them. I want to back up the whole thing and then we could save and continue and then go to our scheduling. We could choose how often do we want to back up daily, usually do daily, unless if it's like an e-commerce site that's active, then I'm going to do hourly. Now it does cost a bit extra if you want to do hourly, but you could do 12 hours or daily and it's all included in the cost and I haven't even got to the cost yet. I forgot to get to that. In fact, let me go here and show you the price. So the price of it is $1.99 a website and that includes everything. So where Manage WP on the pricing, you would pay per function that you want to add. If you wanted to do weekly backups, you'd pay more for that. If you wanted to do the security checks and performance checks and update monitoring, you'd have to pay individually for that. With WP umbrella, it's all included for $1.99 per website. So let's go ahead and save that and move forward. Then we could check out our security. We can monitor this as well and make sure that we are on the up with that. Same thing with our reporting. Now I love the reports on this that we could send to our clients because there's a lot that we could do on this. It comes out a lot cleaner and nicer. This is one of my headaches that I had with Manage WP was the reports also looked old, just like the website, just like the platform in the back end. There haven't been any updates. So it is really nice having this clean, modern looking type of report that we could send to our clients. Also, let me just fill this in so that way we could take a look at something else. Hello, Lightbox and email subject reports. Well, we could add in what we want to show. We could show the analytics. We could connect this to Google Analytics. We could show if any custom work is done, we could put notes and put those into the reports. Let's say this month we had to do some extra work on the website. We could put that in there. Maybe we want to hide the performance and uptime. Maybe the website's got to be, but it's still performing really well. And you don't want your client coming back. Well, let's make it 100% given us an impossible task, especially if they got like a WooCommerce website. And then we could set up our scheduling as well and have everything automated. So it's all here, the things that we need to run a proper WordPress maintenance plan. We have more going on in our settings over here. More that we could do for our notifications. And this part to me is really important, having notifications turned on. Now, one thing I do wish is that there was more of these notifications. Like, I'm probably sure I got to dig into it more. But things like security, if there is a plugin that has a vulnerability. That is something ManageWP had where we get emailed and notified that, hey, this plugin was just put on the list of vulnerabilities. You need to update it right away. I love getting that because that allowed us to act quickly before sites get hacked. Now back over here to the settings because this is what I really like about the notifications, we can add multiple emails to it. So I could put other team members, allow them to get the emails as well. And then we could also connect it to Slack. That way our whole team could get notified in case of something happens, like a site going down or some PHP issues or something wrong with the site health. We're able to get notified and that way we could react quickly. So overall, my impression is with this. I started with it in the beginning of the year. When I started it though, a lot of these features weren't there yet. But throughout the time, and maybe it was around mid-year, enough of them were there for me to make that switch. I made it, I first tested it, I brought a few websites over, and I really liked it, I liked the experience. And I decided this is more cost effective. It is, I feel a lot more faster, a lot more quicker, and then the big one. To me, this is super important, and this is reason number two I left managed WP, and that is support. You have support right over here to help you out. Now, it's not like a live chat, but they get back to me always like within an hour or two. I've always had somebody get right back to me, and sometimes I'll have questions or even suggestions of adding something. They've been really quick to implement things and just being really helpful, open. The team behind this, they are active. The team behind managed WP, I don't know where they're at. I think they're go daddy, right? So I mean that kind of, yeah, I'm not gonna go there. But this right here to me was the other huge part, the team behind it. These guys are active and from what I've heard, they are gung-ho and super focused on becoming the number one WordPress managing software and taking over and just to bring it down the top dog, managed WP. And I believe that they could do it as long as they keep going in this direction. Now, there's tons of pros that I gave you. There are some cons though, just like with everything. And I would say the one con that I found with this is that it is still in the early days and there have been some bugs that came up. Now, the bugs have been fixed quickly. Support have always been quickly to help out and been right there. And then we've also seen a big just improvement in features. For example, the backup and restore feature. So now, they do have restore here, which just came out, I believe like a few weeks ago, it's a pretty new feature. So this is still the beginning, but I do believe that this is enough to move away and move to. I've moved there, all of our sites are here now. And that's why I'm really happy to share this with everyone. To get started, I did put a link to WP umbrella inside the description. It's not an affiliate link. This is not a sponsored video or a paid video or promotional in any way. This is just a tool that I use that I really enjoy. It has been helping my business. And I believe it could help yours and many other creatives and agency owners out there as well. Well, let me know what you think. What management tool are you using? And do you feel it's time to switch to a new, more modern tool like WP umbrella? Well, I look forward to your hear back dropping inside the comments. Don't forget to do all the good YouTube stuff, like and subscribe. It does help to support this channel and I'll be back again soon. Thank you for watching.