Three 2025 Product Updates That Changed How Agencies Work

Managing several WordPress sites for multiple clients involves thousands of small moving tasks that can burn a chunk of your time.

Update notifications piling up. Proving to clients that you did something last month. Hunting through your update history to figure out what changed and when. Disconnected sites you didn’t notice until a client called.

In 2025, we made a few product decisions at WP Umbrella that came from listening to that reality. These features solved problems that have been killing agency productivity for years, and together, they changed how agencies structure their days and their relationship with risk.

The most-awaited feature: automated plugin updates

You asked for it. We built it. Introducing one of our most-requested features: automated plugin updates.

Every single week, plugin updates pile up, and you need to decide which ones are safe to push out and which ones need testing.

With the new feature, you can set automation rules once and let them run. Your sites stay current and safe. And you get back hours every month that you were previously burning on manual updates.

Here’s how it works.

You set automation rules for a specific plugin or groups of plugins. Choose which days they should update. It could be Tuesday through Thursday mornings when you’re around to oversee, or over the weekend when the anticipated traffic is less. Set a time window. That alone saves you hours every month. You’re not manually clicking through fifty updates a week. The system handles it.

But the real thing that makes this useful is the choices you get on how updates happen, because not every plugin needs the same treatment.

Quick Update is WordPress’s standard method. It uses the built-in upgrade function, which is fast and straightforward.

Safe Update backs up your site’s plugin folder before making any changes. If something breaks, you can revert. It’s faster than a full restore, and for most issues, it’s enough. You get safety without the infrastructure overhead. This is the middle ground. Most plugins probably live here in your automation rules.

Advanced Safe Update does the backup and then runs visual regression testing. This one matters for anything mission-critical. Visual regression testing works by taking a screenshot of your site before the update, then another after, and comparing them pixel-by-pixel for unintended changes.

You don’t have to pick one method for everything. That’s the point. Set Advanced Safe Update for the payment plugins because the cost of a bug there is enormous. Safe Update for the standard stuff. Quick Update for the tools you’ve tested a hundred times. Think of it like choosing your own risk tolerance per plugin rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach.

For plugins you’re genuinely not comfortable automating, or ones that need custom testing on that specific client’s setup, you can bulk exclude them. The system remembers which ones need your attention. Or mark them for reconsideration when you’ve had time to test them. The Automated filter in your dashboard shows you at a glance which sites are running on automation and which ones still need manual attention.

And if a site disconnects, we’ll let you know immediately. This alone prevents a specific kind of panic that every agency has experienced.

Audit trail with complete Logs

When updates happen, things change. Those changes could be intentional or a side effect you didn’t expect. Either way, you need to know.

The Logs feature is basically a complete audit trail of every operation on your sites. Database optimizations, syncs, everything gets recorded with timestamps, site names, and version numbers.

The Logs are also home to all the Advanced Safe Updates’ visual regression screenshots.

When you use Advanced Safe Update, the system captures what your site looked like before the plugin updated. Then it captures it after. Those two images sit side by side in your logs. You can look at them anytime.

This solves a specific, infuriating problem: A client calls on a Friday afternoon. Something looks different. They want to know what you did. You can pull up Logs, find the exact update, click “View screenshots,” and show them before-and-after. It’s a visual proof of what changed and when.

You can also filter the logs by Status, process type, and Sites. It’s a complete searchable record. You’re building a paper trail of all your work.

Make invisible work visible with new reports

Here’s something you’ve probably already figured out: clients don’t see you.

You’re optimizing their database, running security scans, monitoring uptime, updating plugins, and scanning for vulnerabilities. All of it is happening on their behalf, and all of it is completely invisible to them. They see the results. Most of the time, it’s whether their site is working or not. But they don’t see the work behind it. So when renewal time comes, they compare your invoice to what they could maybe pay someone cheaper. And they don’t see enough value to stick around.

The new reporting system lets you show what you do. With more than 30+ variables, you can show things like uptime percentage, total backups, database optimization count, PHP version, and so on. It’s basically up to you what you want to show; the client will see.

These dynamic variables pull live data, including plugin updates, performance scores, uptime rates, security statistics, so you’re not manually typing things in every month. The data updates automatically. You preview before sending, so there’s no awkward follow-up explaining what you forgot.

You can also customize the text in your voice. You’re not bound by what the system tells you to say. You can write something that sounds like your agency, with your tone and your perspective. The reports can have custom covers with your branding or client-specific imagery. When they open a report, it doesn’t look like it was prepared by a third-party tool. Email-only reports exist, too. Maybe the client just wants a quick snapshot before their event.

The thing we kept in mind when building this: regular reports change behavior. Clients who get them are more likely to renew. They push back less on price. It’s not magic. It’s just that when people see the work, they value it differently.

Why does this matter together?

None of these individually solves the problem. All three together do.

You’re not manually babysitting updates anymore. You set rules and let automation handle the repetitive parts while keeping control when it’s important. Automation handles the safe stuff while you take care of the tricky part. You get back the hours you were losing to update management.

You’re not scrambling to remember what changed. You have screenshots, timestamps, and a complete record. When a client questions something, you have visual proof as evidence.

You’re not fighting to prove your value. You’re showing it. Every month. In a report that they can understand and that sounds like your agency.

The three problems that have been burning agency time. The update anxiety, the “did I break something?” panic, and the invisible work problem are all addressed by an infrastructure that thinks about how you work.

If you’ve been using WP Umbrella with the old approach to updates and reporting, these three features are worth an afternoon of setup time. They’ll get you back hours every month and let you stop worrying about things you shouldn’t have to worry about in the first place.