How to Set up Whitelabel in Hide My WP Ghost
October 20, 2021
- What is Whitelabel?
- 🚨 White Label Requirements
- How to Access the Whitelabel Panel
- A Quick Look at How it all Works
- 1. Plugin Name
- 2. Plugin Menu Icon & Plugin Menu Name
- 3. Plugin Logo
- 4. Plugin Website
- 5. Deep Settings
- How to Install Your Customized Hide My WP Ghost Plugin on a Client’s Site
- Managing Licenses/Websites under Your Account from a Single Dashboard
- White Label List
- Still have questions?
What is Whitelabel?
Hide My WP Ghost can be completely white-labeled and appear under YOUR brand’s name and logo.
This is a great option for agencies who want to be able to offer clients a premium WordPress security plugin – and have it be perceived as their own tool.
🚨 White Label Requirements
The plugin must be ACTIVE on the client’s site.
If you’re worried that a client of yours may deactivate the plugin, you can use CSS to remove the Hide My WP Ghost plugin from the Plugins list.
That way, your end users won’t be able to deactivate your white-labelled plugin.
Technically it can’t be done in a different way.
Otherwise, your instances wouldn’t be able to connect to the main update branch and the plugins you install to others would never get updates when we release them.
💡 Tip – if you want to hide the plugin without using CSS, there is the admin menu editor plugin that you can use to hide the Plugins section: Admin Menu Editor.
IMPORTANT! If ANY of your clients finds a way to de-activate the plugin, it will NOT AFFECT your other installed plugins. Every other instance will still be white-labelled and continue to get updates.
For example, if one client is a coder and figures out you’ve used CSS to hide the plugin and he will also remove your code and then go on to deactivate the plugin:
- he will see Hide My WP Ghost in the plugins list;
- nobody else on your 200+ sites, for example, will notice anything;
- everyone will keep getting updates;
- every other instance will still be white labelled.
How to Access the Whitelabel Panel
To access the Customize White Label panel, go to: https://account.hidemywpghost.com/user/auth/whitelabel
The customize White Label button shown in the screenshot above will automatically show if your account meets the requirement to enable Whitelabel option.
A Quick Look at How it all Works
Next up, we’ll go through every setting you can make inside the Plugin Customization Panel and provide more details about what each item helps you achieve (and how they translate into actual plugin changes).
1. Plugin Name
This option allows you to set a custom plugin name. The name you add here will appear in the WordPress > Plugins list instead of showing our branded name – as long as the plugin is active on a client’s site.
Example: If I go to setup and say my plugin name is: Hide Custom and my domain name is: example.com, end-users will see the active plugin in their Plugins list as: Hide Custom, and if they click the “By Hide Custom” link they will go to example.com, which means they won’t keep going to the hidemywp.xyz website.
2. Plugin Menu Icon & Plugin Menu Name
Once you change the plugin menu name and icon, your clients will NOT see the Hide My WP name in the WordPress menu. Instead, they will see the custom plugin menu name. Same with the icon image or class name.
If you want to customize the plugin menu icon, you can also use the WordPress dashicons classes:
https://developer.wordpress.org/resource/dashicons/
3. Plugin Logo
This White Label option in Hide My WP Ghost enables you to change the default, branded plugin logo with your custom logo URL.
To ensure the best look, we recommend using images that fit the following image size guidelines: 180px width and 35px height.
Note! The image needs to be on your website. Only add the image URL in the Plugin Logo field (nothing else is needed).
4. Plugin Website
(Optional) If you want to create a separate plugin website with a different plugin Knowledge Base, you can add your own website here. This way, all the Help links will take users to the website you specified, instead of taking them to hidemywp.xyz/knowledge-base.
Example: If you add a different domain like https://domain.com, then all the help links within Hide My WP will take users to: https://domain.com/knowledge-base instead of taking them to https://hidemywpghost.com/knowledge-base. Note that this means you will have to have a website whose structure mirrors the paths (URLs) that exist on hidemywp.xyz.
Let’s take for example: https://hidemywpghost.com/kb/customize-paths-in-hide-my-wp-ghost/ – there will need to exist a corresponding URL for this on your website (https://domain.com/kb/customize-paths-in-hide-my-wp-ghost/). Same applies for ALL the other URLs we link to from within the plugin.
Note! As our content is copyright-protected, you can’t copy-paste the content from hidemywp.xyz to your website. You will have to create your own, original content (different from ours).
5. Deep Settings
Setting up this plugin for every client can be time-consuming for developers and agencies managing multiple websites. However, deep feature customization allows you to configure the plugin once and apply the settings across all your client sites easily.
You can configure the plugin with suitable settings by going through each setting tab, ensuring all your client sites are protected with optimal security practices while maintaining a consistent brand presence.
All the plugin features and how to use them, are presented here: https://hidemywpghost.com/kb/hide-my-wp-ghost-tutorial/
How to Install Your Customized Hide My WP Ghost Plugin on a Client’s Site
- After you’re done configuring the White Label options, download Hide My WP Ghost (the ZIP file).
- Log In as an Admin on your client’s WordPress website.
- In the menu displayed on the left, there is a Plugins tab. Click on it.
- Click on: Add New.
- There, you’ll see a button that reads: Upload Plugin. Click on it.
- Upload the configured hide-my-wp.zip file.
- Once the upload is complete, activate the plugin. The plugin will be automatically renamed according to your White Label customization.
Managing Licenses/Websites under Your Account from a Single Dashboard
We also provide access to a dedicated dashboard to manage and monitor all your customers’ licenses through the SaaS Side of Hide My WP Ghost (the cloud app for it on: https://account.hidemywp.xyz).
Go to your Cloud Account > Connected Sites to reach it.
You will see the list of sites under your account and be able to deactivate their access to the plugin, in case they quit working with your agency, for example.
Note! WhiteLabel method for the plugin, which uses API to check license. If it’s the proper license, then the plugin will work under your own private label. Once the license is deactivated, it will revert back to the HMWP brand.
If a client of yours quits your service, you can go to the SaaS side of Hide My WP Ghost (the cloud app) and look at the list of connected sites (as shown in the screenshot below).
Delete their website from that list to deactivate their license, and they will lose access. The plugin inside their WP will tell those customers they need to re-connect and they won’t be able to use it.
White Label List
Here you will be able to see the list of all customized plugins you’ve set up using the White-Label settings. This makes it easy to keep track of all the configurations you’ve made using the White-Label options.
Also from this panel: you can easily download the ZIP file(s) containing all those configurations by using the Download Plugin button associated with the customized version you want to download.
Still have questions?
Please contact us if you have any questions, and we’ll do our best to get back to you as soon as possible.