do you want to make your website faster more secure and easier to manage today I want to talk through the top hosting add-ons that every website owner needs to know about to kick this off this video is hosted by cloudways cloudways is the hosting solution that I use for all of my websites and have been using for several years now um and so I have absolutely no qualms about talking about cloudways and some of the add-ons available through them as well as available through third parties that are going to help you substantially with your website so we're going to dig into those in fact by the end of this video I want you to know which add-ons first of all some of these are free but which add-ons are worth paying for and maybe which ones you can save some money on so when I talk about add-ons for web hosting I'm talking about features that are available to you that aren't necessarily part of the hosting web hosting is just literally the service that stores the files that make up your website they have to be stored somewhere and host providers available to us today will store those files for us and then distribute them to users around the world but on top of Hosting those files there are things that that provider can do best that are going to make your website faster and more secure and easier for you to manage and those add-ons are what we're talking about right now the first one that I want to talk about is a website backup website backups are essential if you have a website they're storing a copy of your website that refreshes on a regular basis so that if you ever have a problem on your site if you can't just fix the problem which sometimes you can't uh if there's a some sort of a hack or malware sometimes you can clean it up sometimes you can fix it sometimes it's easiest just to go back to before that took place this also happens sometimes when you install certain plugins on your website or make certain changes that end up causing something to break and then sometimes you even lose access to the website and that's a huge problem when you have regular backups you can just go to the most recent backup point from before the issue happened and restore that and voila your s's right back up no problem now cloudways has made this super duper easy for us right here on this application this is my website Pantry preparedness I just click backup and restore and you can see here they're keeping a daily backup for me the other cool thing is I can take a backup anytime that I want to so if I'm about to make a big update on the website WordPress has pushed out an update or I'm going to put a new plugin on there I don't know how it's going to do but I want to make sure that I'm keeping everything on my website up until that Point that's this I don't want to lose the blog post I wrote an hour ago so I take a backup right now and then I go make those changes to the website then if something breaks I just restore the backup which is as easy as selecting the backup that you want and click restore application now all it's going to do is swap out the files that are currently showing on your website the broken one and replace them with the ones from that backup it's so easy now I've been paying for a third party service to do this for a long time because I've I've always believed that there was a lot of benefit in redundant backups and and that is true that separate service that I use is through manage WP and that's costing me $2 a month per website here it's just an added benefit of using cloudways it's totally free nothing you need to pay for so if you're okay with a single backup and I've never had my backups on here fail on me if you're okay with that it's just totally free you don't even have to pay for that so you're welcome the next is website security now there are some really good WordPress plugins that will secure your website and there are free versions of those plugins that will essentially look for malware let you know if it happens but if you ever have a real problem typically you're going to have to pay for a paid plan to be able to have them remove the malware from your website now the most powerful and best ones out there for WordPress websites are secury which is for more than just WordPress but also word fence these Solutions can be pretty pricey but security is become more and more and more important these days a little while back I made a video I'll go ahead and link to it here but I made a video All About WordPress website security that talked about some of the statistics around small websites small business websites that are getting hacked and basically we can't do a whole lot about it because we're usually not paying for Enterprise grade level security well cloudways actually solved that for us too because cloudways introduced their malware protection which is managed through immuni 360 it's the same type of security that is used on big expensive websites but they've worked out a deal where they get all of those features available to us at a ridiculously low cost I think I'm paying $4 a month for a website to be able to have that level of security and the cool thing is is for them it's not at the plug-in level so when you have security that's at the level of a plugin on your website in order for the plug-in to be able to do its work the file that's injected into the that has the malware on it that file has to load before it can be noticed when the security takes place on the server itself at the host it doesn't even have to load they can identify the malware before it's even installed and run on your server this allows issues to be prevented it allows malware to be set aside and never loaded on your website so that it can be reviewed and cleaned up and never ever cause an issue on this website I recently had one pce of malicious code entered into a database and I enabled the malare protection and it immediately cleaned it up it's gone and I don't have any issues they also have bot protection now this is totally free but bot protection allows you to block Bots from coming onto your website which is great because that's one big way that hackers are able to get in and so it identifies IP addresses that aren't actual people and you have complete control so if you need to whitelist certain IP addresses and that kind of stuff you you easily can you can just do it right here from the dashboard they also have this cool tool this vulnerability scanner that's looking at all of the different things you have installed on your website I have WordPress I have several themes most of them are from WordPress directly and then I have some of these plugins and it's looking at all these plugins for vulnerabilities and if there are any known vulnerabilities they'll let me know here and they can proactively let me know about these vulnerabilities they can send me an email send me a notification to let me know that this is happening so that I can either update the plugin if needed or remove it from my website they've done a lot to make my website incredibly secure which is great cuz they've done it at such an affordable price but I have the Peace of Mind of knowing that my website is secure okay the next add-on that you absolutely need in this day and age is a CDN and caching what this is going to do is it's going to make your website load so much faster all this really is is they're taking the pages that people load on your website so let's say I have my website the servers for it are here on the west coast of the United States but somebody over in loads a page on my website well for the data to travel from the west coast of the United States to Germany it's going to take an extra few seconds but if those are pages that load on a somewhat regular basis then a cached version of that page just gets stored on a server closer to the destination and this happens all over the world and then as your website updates over time those pages get refreshed but that way people can load your website from servers that are much closer to where they are now cloudways works incredibly well with the cloud flare CDN and it does all this through their plug-in Breeze now when I create a new WordPress website on cloudways it automatically installs Breeze and gets this all set up for me but I can again make all of the updates and changes that I want to so it's got the cach right here and the cool thing is is I don't need to do anything special here in Breeze to be able to make that work all of the web traffic that comes to my website is going through cloudflare to get routed over to my website and cloudflare will just show them the cash for versions of my website from a server that's as close to them as possible if you want your website to load fast you absolutely must be using caching and a CDN most hosts are going to provide some sort of caching with cloudways it's just done automatically and for free but there's another incredibly powerful tool that not all hosts are providing and many of them that are providing it don't make it nearly as easy as this and it's the most powerful tool that most people never knew they really needed let me show you what I'm talking about this last tool is called staging creating a staging website is incredibly valuable for website owners the purpose of a staging website is to create a duplicate like a clone of your website that you can make all the changes you want to on so if you want to make a big change you want to change your WordPress theme you want to add some new big feature you want to mess with the entire design of your website go ahead set up a staging website make all the changes there and then when you're done all you have to do is push the staging site back to live let me show show you how quick and easy this is I'm here in my cloudways account on this website panry preparedness and I click on staging management and I just click launch staging application I put it on the same server or a different server I have several then we wait for a couple minutes because that's what it takes to set up a new website all right there we go and now it's done so now I can go to my staging for Pantry preparedness and you'll see that it's at a new URL so I can click on that open it in a new tab now this username and password is to password protect the website so on the front end nobody can even see it Google can't index your staging site because of that which is pretty cool so I can copy that username and I can copy that password now the other option is if I'm not that worried the staging site's not going to be up for that long I'm not worried that Google's going to try to index it or anything right away I can just turn off this password protection no problem but now I'm here I've got the front end of the website now I can just put my WP admin at the end of the URL and then I use the same login credentials that I would use the same username and password that I use on the live website and here we are now I can make whatever changes I want to to this website and when I'm all done making all those changes I simply come back here I click on staging management and I push now with the live website let's say I went ahead and I made a new blog post and stuff while I had the staging site in existence instead of creating a new staging site again I can just pull all the changes that are from the live application over to the staging site so if I made some updates on the live site whatever I can pull them into the staging site but then when I'm done with the staging site I press push give it a few minutes and voila all those changes are live this gives us the chance to test things now I can't emphasize the importance of this we just worked with a client who literally had their website completely messed up this is someone who didn't lose traffic and rankings with the helpful content update their website has been doing incredibly well and they just wanted to make some changes to the design and the structure of the website they paid someone to do this and this person did it on the live website they ended up taking down the website for about two weeks we had to fix a bunch of other issues and redirects and stuff for them to get everything back so that they wouldn't lose the traffic and the traffic has been recovering since but this was a nightmare because this active functioning website was down for 2 weeks don't let that happen use a hosting provider that has very easy to use staging so that you can create staging websites for big changes I don't use a staging site to publish a blog post but any substantive change to the overall structure and design of the website absolutely doing it on a saging site then we push it to live when we're ready now at this point I want to encourage you to go check out these add-ons see what you have already with your hosting provider if you don't have access to these kinds of add-ons or it's going to cost you a bunch more money I encourage you to evaluate whether or not that's worth it at your current hosting provider cloudways is currently doing a Black Friday Cyber Monday deal where you get 40% off the cost of Hosting for the next several months I think four months plus you get a bunch of free website migrations so if you have an existing website you're not totally satisfied with your hosting provider they will move it for you to cloudways it's a great deal so go ahead and click on the link I'll put it in a I'll pin it in a comment but I'll also put it in the description of this video to go check out cloudways and see you might be able to save a bunch of money over what you're currently paying for hosting and get a better outcome as a result of switching to cloudways and now is the best time of year to do it it's the best deal they ever have I also would love to answer your question about hosting add-ons about hosting in general go ahead and drop those questions in the comments below and I will answer every one of them okay so check it out and uh let me know what you think in the comments below and we'll talk to you soon [Music]