Plesk offers an extensive catalog of extensions: over 130! So how do you find what you need fast? Luckily, that's where Lighthouse Extensions come in handy. Jan Loeffler tells us all about these extensions, as well as tools every website should use.
What are Lighthouse Extensions?
What are some Lighthouse Extensions?
Speed Kit
SEO Toolkit
How would they use it on their site?
Joe: (0:01) Hello and welcome to another episode of Next Level Ops a podcast that explores tools, tips, and techniques for hosting and managing websites presented by Plesk. This week we’re talking to Jan Loeffler about Plesk's own lighthouse extensions. Those are a set of extensions that really stand out among the hundreds of extensions that Plesk has to offer. So, we’ll be highlighting some of them and how they can help you as the hosting provider, the web developer or the Plesk user. But, before we get started, a quick reminder, please subscribe to this podcast to get the latest episodes as soon as they come out. All right. Now let's get on with the show.
Hey everybody! Welcome to the Next Level Ops presented by Plesk. Today I am talking to the CTO of Plesk, Jan Loeffler about Plesk’s lighthouse extensions. Jan how are you today?
Jan: (1:03) Perfect. It’s a little rainy here in Germany but everything is fine. It’s becoming warmer as usual, so everything is good. Business is going good. I’m happy to be here Joe.
Joe: (1:17) Awesome. Glad to hear. We’re happy to have you. As we record this, it is the right amount of warm for me here on the East Coast of the United States. We are coming out of what seemed to be a very cold but snowless winter. So, I'm happy that things are getting warmer here. So, on Next Level Ops we've talked about all sorts of features and toolkits and things like that where people who are either managing hosting or customers who are looking for hosting can better manage their websites. But today we’re going to talk about Plesk's lighthouse extensions, which is a suite of tools exactly for that. So, maybe we can just jump right into it and maybe you could tell us what exactly the lighthouse extensions are?
Jan: (2:07) All right let’s do this. So, as you’ve learned before Plesk already has a vast amount of functionality and features on board that help you to build better websites in shorter time, become more productive, and get more out of your server. But there are certain aspects that you need additionally. These are brought to you as so-called extensions in the extension catalog. Now all these extensions, they follow the value chain of web professionals. So, these are all solutions that web professionals need to be successful. So, tools that help you build better websites, to stay secure, have better email experience, tools for faster websites and better rankings in search engines. Make sure you have backups, monitoring, and all that stuff. To give you, or to give our users some clear recommendations so they don't get lost in the catalog of more than 130 solutions, we define the lighthouse extensions. The lighthouse extensions are just the set of the most popular, most powerful, most valuable solutions that we have in the catalog. They should give you, or our users guidance to have a look at what they would need. I will give you an example. So, whenever you want to create your first website the first thing you need is somewhere to host that provides a web space for you or a server to do it yourself. Plesk exactly is the solution. On the one side, it's used by many hosting companies around the world as their hosting platform but for more professional users that have more higher expectations for traffic, for example, they usually purchase a whole dedicated server or rent a work shared server on companies like Digital Ocean and Co. To manage the server, you need a solution that does this, that makes it simple, that takes away the burden of server security and configuration. This is exactly what Plesk delivers. Now, on top of that once you have your server up and running the first thing you probably need is backups. Because never code your website without a backup. Come on. Most of us experience already a change on the website then something happened, and you didn't have a backup and you had to start over again. So, that’s very unpleasant. So, that’s always the first thing. You need to have a backup and there are tons of different backup solutions out there but there are big differences. So, important for a backup, for example, you can go back in the history to any point in time and you can do a fine granular restore. So not only a disaster recovery that helps you when your whole server has crashed; but usually the server doesn't crash. So, that’s a very rare use case. However, you need to be protected against it. But what happens more often is you say like “oh s*)$”. I deleted accidently a file and now I need it back. Therefore, you need a backup solution that allows you a single file recovery or multi-file recovery. The best is where you can just select the files that you want to restore. The same of course is for the databases. Such a solution is Acronis backup. That’s one of our lighthouse extensions.
Joe: (5:54) I’m going to jump in here and just kind of quickly parse through a little about what you said. There’s a lot of really good stuff there. First is that you’re giving your user clear recommendations, right, with more than 130 solutions. We can get analysis paralysis, right? It's like when we were talking in the preshow about WordPress specifically and how there are so many different plug-ins that do so many different things. How do I know to use? Your lighthouse extensions are the top recommended ones. So, it's like if you need a backup, we have maybe a bunch of backup solutions but here's the one that the we recommend. Using the example that you used about the backup solution is great because it's one less thing that I, the web professional would need to worry about, right? So, I don't need to worry about grabbing a WordPress backup plug-in or whatever, which might not get everything. There’s one right on Plesk that they recommend, or that you recommend that I can use.
Jan: (6:58) Exactly. On top of it, these extensions are also the most popular ones from our community. So, if you look at our whole customer base of 400,000 servers then we can see that these lighthouse extensions are not only our recommendation but also the recommendation from our community around it. So, these are the ones that provide the most value, that have the best solution, that have the highest rating from the community but also our recommendation that on the other side get most thoroughly code reviewed from our side. So, only the highest quality extensions get called lighthouse. So, they get special treatment. All in all, it's a package that you can trust. However, these solutions are also premium solutions, so they come at a price. But it's definitely worth it because it's far better quality than other solutions.
Joe: (7:56) Yeah. I mean absolutely. That’s great. So, it’s like a multifaceted review to make sure that these extensions are the highest quality. I've said for a long time if you want quality you need to pay for it, right? I wouldn't necessarily trust a free backup solution unless it was directly included in my hosting package or something like that, right? So, if I need to add on a backup solution, I would much rather pay for it and get that piece of mind that I know my site’s going to be protected whether I crash the whole thing by accidentally coding, or accidentally corrupt part of the database or whatever.
Jan: (8:43) Yeah. In the end you save money. Of course, you pay for the solution but what you get in return is you save a lot of precious time that you can spend on different things. A lot of web agencies are using Plesk and are our customers. And if you think of what their price per hour is, then every hour you save there is a super important. Then, talking for example about another solution which is a malware scanner, ImunifyAV, that's so basic and essential. Every server needs to have a malware server because malware is everywhere. Nothing can be worse than having an upset customer who calls you because this customer got actually told by his clients that visited their website and told them that hey! There’s something happening. Your website redirects us to a porn site or whatever. Therefore, you need a malware scanner that protects you from this. This solution cost five dollars for the whole server. So, that's nothing. You get so much in return. It’s not a question whether you should have that or not. This is where we say these lighthouse extensions are really outstanding. They help you to give you a better experience, but you make the choice. Because there are solutions, for example, for email for protecting your mailboxes. If you don't have mailboxes on your Plesk server and use it only for websites for example, fair. Then you don't need an antispam or antivirus solution for mailboxes. So, this is where you make the choice as the user and we give you a clear recommendation and if you want something else, or something different, then we have 130 other solutions in the catalog that solves your problems.
Joe: (10:35) Yeah. That's great, right? Giving that sort of choice to the user, right? You’re saying we recommend this one. But if you had a bad experience or you don't necessarily need this, here are some other ones. The malware scanner, just security in general is so important. I have, you know when I do web design work for clients, I always try to sell them on the protection package at the end. Most say no and then something happens and then they pay me double that for just fixing it and then they decide it's time.
Jan: (11:10) Only double?
Joe: (11:11) Yeah right? You know. I charge them for several hours of work to make sure their website gets cleaned up. But then there like well all right. I guess it's worth it for us to pay you to protect our site, so we don’t end up paying way more than that.
Jan: (11:27) Yeah. Absolutely. That was exactly my business many years ago when I owned my own web agency. I was all time cleaning up servers from malware and viruses; websites and so on for my customers. So, this was how I earned my money. But on the other side, it's so easy to be protected. Today, knowing how many websites get hacked every day, it's between 60 and 100,000 websites get hacked and infected with malware every single day. So, there is nothing that we should talk about except how do you protect your site?
Joe: (12:11) Yeah. Absolutely. So, let's look at a couple of the other lighthouse extensions. We focused primarily on the big value ones like malware scanning and backups, but looking at some of the example ones you've listed here, we also have Speed Kit and SEO toolkit which aren't necessarily things that you need to protect or make sure your website is running efficiently, but these are big wins for web developers who might not necessarily know SEO or the best way to improve their websites, right?
Jan: (12:44) Yeah absolutely and talking about speed that’s one of my favorite topics because there are so many people that talk about how to speed up or how to your website into different cases. There’s a lot of guessing around there but it makes a difference. If you just take your normal car and put a different exhaust pipe on it and think like now, it’s a bit faster or if you play Formula1, right? If you want to play in Formula1, you definitely need support from professionals that know how to make websites fast. This is the company behind Speed Kit. So, let me talk about this for a second. Why is this important? Of course, if you have only your cats and pets on your website then probably speed doesn't matter too much, but as soon as you start selling something from your website or you have a lead business where your site is also the entry place to acquire new customers or leads, then performance matters. The younger generation gets more and more impatient, so it’s proven by a lot of studies while older people are sold on that computers take long, with the younger generation if the website takes longer than three seconds then they're gone. Amazon actually published statistics about their performance and how much revenue they lose if the site is too slow. This is why they’re obsessed with performance, of website performance. Everybody who has a professional website needs to take care. That means that the site needs to load in the customers browser in less than three seconds. Here comes the first important phrase. It has to load in the customer's browser not in the shell on your computer. It has to be fast where the customer is and for the customer, so that means in the browser. Here's also where a lot of performance diagnostic tools lack actually functionality because they often just measure the duration of the site from the shell to the Web server. So, it’s a so-called latency but what about rendering time? What about simulating a real browser? This is something where a lot of websites, especially lots of WordPress sites lack. If the rendering takes too long then it's unpleasant for the customer. There’s so much you can do about good performance. Often, it’s a combination of things. All right. So, understood a solution for faster websites needs to be there and now the question is how do you get your website fast? That’s very complex. There's one very famous person IT that's Martin Fowler. He is from Thoughtworks. He always says there are only two difficult things in computer science, caching and naming things.
Joe: (15:57) (laughing) I have to agree wholeheartedly with that.
Jan: (16:02) Caching is very complex if you look under the hood. There can be so much wrong that leads to a bad experience. A customer seeing the wrong website, or even worse performance. There you really have to have technical knowledge to do it yourself and to be familiar with…now naming some of the tools like Varnish. Memcached, Redis and so on. If you don't know what that is, then definitely don't try this. It is difficult especially with Varnish. So, what it is, is this is a caching solution that takes care of remembering parts of your websites in memory in the closest location. That means when your visitor, your website visitor accesses your website then the content gets delivered from the nearest location directly from the memory of the server. It doesn't have to travel the whole way through the Internet to your Web server and check on the hard disk or database. This makes things much, much faster. So, now talking about Speed Kit. Why is this solution so much better than everything else? A few years ago, I met a team of people that obsessed about website performance. This team has spent years investigating how to configure Varnish correctly and how to get most of the performance of websites. They developed a product that can do that. This is the product I speak about in the end and uses a globally distributed content delivery network. So, that means these are data centers that are spread around the world that cache the content close to your visitors. Additionally, and this is in comparison to all the other CDNs as they are called, with Speed Kit there are very precise parts of your website cached. It's more vanilla and it’s more dynamic and it understands WordPress sites immediately. Especially your specific or your personal websites. It analyzes your site and knows how to cache it. This is really cool. But a second advantage, and is even more crazy, is it just personalized in browser caching. That means that if you visited a website, and you pick somewhere and it needs to load resources like images or JavaScript or stuff like this, then it doesn't have to even travel through the Internet to the nearest location. No, it just happens in the browser because you cached that part already. This makes websites really fly. However, a tricky thing, you have to use to the right performance measurement tools if you want to test this out because most of the measurement tools don't simulate a browser. That means that they don't benefit from Speed Kit. While the human beings like us, as visitors of your website we do, obviously, because we use a browser to access websites. This is where Speed Kit really excels. But the most important aspect of Speed Kit, and this is something that outperforms all the others, is it’s a one-click solution. We made it together so the Plesk team and the Speed Kit team that simple, that is just a click of a button and then your website is fast. It's even better. It tells you, when you add your Speed Kit, it measures all your websites and shows you which of those can be actually made faster and how much faster. It’s also super fair. It tells you if a website won't be fast with Speed Kit. It just tells you it’s already fast. It’s good. No need to improve it. No need to waste money on that. But for those that can be improved, it tells you it would be three times faster. Click this button. You click it and it does the job automatically for you. It configures the whole server, the website and your website is fast for your customers immediately. This is why I'm so excited about this topic.
Joe: (20:14) Wow! Yeah that's huge because can I tell you? You mentioned Varnish. I have experience using Varnish. Much to the chagrin of me as the developer and my client’s wallet, Varnish is a very difficult thing to get working especially on dynamic sites, right? Because we ran into the bug where the first user to login on a Varnish cached website, their logged in experience got cached and every user saw like their name and their information, which luckily, we found in testing. Yeah. Luckily, we found that in testing. But I mean that's not something that I necessarily want to worry about when I'm trying to improve the performance of a website. So, like the fact that Speed Kit understands WordPress, does personalized in browser caching, I mean that's incredible, right? Because the fastest solution is the one where you don't have to travel at all. It resources the right travel.
Jan: (21:15) Exactly.
Joe: (21:16) The fact that it’s all on a one-click solution is fantastic. That is hugely beneficial to users and website developers alike.
Jan: (21:23) Absolutely. That’s what we always strive for. It’s something where I'm very passionate about; is to provide solutions that are super simple, and everybody can use it. But on the other side, very powerful to achieve the best performance and the best value for our users. This stretch is sometimes very hard. It's a pain in the ass, to say it like this, for our developers but this is where we are obsessed about to deliver in the end, the best possible appearance to the user.
Joe: (22:00) That's a big differentiator. Because you know I mean a lot of hosting solutions or hosting tool solutions will say yeah. We offer cache but you know I've seen examples where it’s like only cache, not like non static websites, or only cache, non-eCommerce websites or whatever. So, eCommerce sites are where caching can be the most beneficial or performance. Like you said about Amazon and their stats. So, I'm a millennial and I expect things fast. I mean, websites, because I'm a developer, I try to be more understanding. But with like two-day delivery, if I order something online and it takes more than like three days to get to me, I'm like incensed about it. So, your absolutely right about the mindset of the younger generation and technology. So, we've been talking for nearly a half hour at this point but we did bring up SEO toolkit and I'm curious about this one because SEO is a hard thing for most people, right? Even with some of the plug-ins or tools that I've used, it’s like all right. Your site is optimized for SEO, but is it really? So, I’m curious about that extension.
Jan: (23:23) All right. Yeah, cool. Why do you have a website if nobody visits it, right? So, there's only a reason that you have a website if you can get what attracts visitors that go to your site. That requires (usually since we’re all not like VIPs and super popular like Kim Kardashian) if you can remember the url or so. It requires to be listed on the first page of the search engines. That means Google, Bing, Baidu, Yahoo and the likes. Wherever you are in the world because there’s not only Google. And this is like a challenge for itself. We could speak several days about how to do search engine optimization of course. Not everybody is a professional. I would say like the least people are professional SEOs. But still it's a topic for everybody to be listed on the first page and to become found. This requires help of professional tools to tell you where is your site listed, for which keywords, and who is your competitor for example. How do they rank actually in comparison to you? How does this change over time? Then you make some changes. You need a tool that maybe gives you some recommendations. You do some tests and it needs to tell you what was the impact of this test? So, was it helping you with your ranking or not? If it was good, for which of the keywords. What should you do differently? It’s an ongoing thing. So, usually it's like running a marathon. If you want to run a marathon then you don't do that on one day. Yeah? It needs consistent training and working towards this goal. The same is true for getting on the first page of Google. It’s not a one-time thing. So, you need to continuously improve your sites and measure what worked, what not and go step-by-step. Then you will be successful in the long run. SEO Toolkit is a solution that exactly helps you there. Now you can say ok, especially if I use a WordPress site. There are tools like Yoast for example. They’re very popular. What's a comparison to Yoast? Does it make sense to use both? Yeah. It does. Yoast is great because it is directly on your WordPress site. It allows you to optimize your website directly where you write it. SEO Toolkit has some functionality that Yoast doesn't have. It comes on top and this is for example, since SEO Toolkit is running on the server, it works with all your websites independently whether you use a content management system or not. Additionally, it knows all the log files of your Web servers independently of which Web server you know or use. Why is this good? It knows exactly when the spiders, when the bots come to your site and what the status is, what they crawled, and how often. This gives you very precious insights about how your site is performing and if there are issues. It tells you if you have bad links, or if the performance is not great, or something is missing. On top, it gives you a clear plan with a task list, like what you should do to become better at search engine writing, or which keywords, it does competitors, analyzes and there comes on top one thing that is dominant. This is not in the SEO Toolkit extensions but in the full-blown solution which is called Sovi. When you sign up on Sovi on your website then it tells you the whole history, like how you have ever performed in the past.
Joe: (27:19) Wow.
Jan: (27:20) This is something that's a big difference in comparison to other tools. The other tools start showing you statistics from the day when you sign in. Sovi tells you exactly what happened in the past, what happens in the present and it tells you what you should do next in the future to be listed on more popular positions in Google. Yeah. Economy of scale only the first two positions are the most impactful. This is where the traffic goes. If you're on the bottom of the first page, then there's only a few people clicking on your link. That’s why it’s so important.
Joe: (28:02) Yeah. Wow that's amazing. I like the comparison to Yoast, right? Because lots of people are probably familiar with Yoast. It's not just a WordPress solution but it's a very popular specific WordPress solution. I love Yoast. I use it. I try to get as many green dots as possible but chasing green dots is not an SEO strategy. I think that's not a knock on Yoast. I think they would probably agree. But SEO Toolkit seems to be able to give you some sort of strategy. I know that other tools that are not necessarily integrated with your server cost like hundreds of dollars a month to be able to use those things. So, having that sort of integration directing in your server, again, it's hugely helpful for both like me as the web developer and my clients. It makes my service more valuable. It makes their website more popular. It's a great relationship.
Jan: (29:01) Absolutely. That’s why I am using it. I am using both for my site. With Plesk.com we also use both. So, there's value in using multiple tools at once because they all cover different aspects. If you’re professional and you want to really scale and attract a lot of users, then you need the best tools to get the job done.
Joe: (29:25) Yeah. Absolutely. That's great. So, why don't we wrap up here with how does one get started using some of the lighthouse extensions on Plesk? Is there a specific place that I can go to in the dashboard? Do I need to look for something? Will they be presented to me? Let's say I'm logged into to my Plesk dashboard. How do I start using some these lighthouse extensions?
Jan: (29:48) Yeah. That’s very simple. Some of them are actually already preinstalled if you just create a new Plesk server. Some others are not. For example, Plesk premium email that’s like the perfect solution for having an experience like Office 365 or Google GSuite, but on premise, on your Plesk server where you control the data. It’s all happening only on your server. But this, obviously is only for those people who want to have mailboxes on their server, same is for Plesk email security, which is about anti-spam and antivirus. So, these are optional. Where do you find them? The first place to look at is the extension catalog. The extensive catalog is very prominent in Plesk and shows you already the recommended and most popular extensions. So, always pay attention to the top header of the start page of the extensive catalog. Additionally, there is a very powerful tool that is much loved by the community so far which we introduced two years ago, that’s called the Advisor. The Advisor is a tool that helps you to become more productive, more secure, have better websites and just get your job done. It guides you through along the value chain. So, like starting to configure a server properly, make sure that you have SSL and the best ratings everywhere for all the websites. You get an A+ rating from SSL testing software. Sites are fast, secured, all that stuff. The Advisor recommends you in the right moment in time to use the right tool. So, it is also a good place to look at. A part of our product to trust.
Joe: (31:36) Wow! That's great. So, there's the general extensions catalog. Some are preinstalled but this Advisor tool it sounds like, is like the just-in-time solution, right? It gives you what you need when you need it.
Jan: (31:47) Exactly. That’s also our plan that continues to really take the hand of our users, help them to do a better job and getting their stuff done in a more frictionless way. That’s what we help them do, just become more professional and better.
Joe: (31:10) Awesome! Well this has been great. So, if you are a Plesk user be sure to, in your dashboard check out both the extensions catalog and the Advisor tool. If you are interested in learning more, we’ll have some links in the show notes for this episode. Jan, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate you coming on and talking about some ways to make web developers more efficient.
Jan: (32:35) Thanks a lot Joe. It was my absolute pleasure to be here and speak with you. If there are any questions from the audience, just out reach out to me at https://www.jan-loeffler.de/. You find me also on the Plesk website. Make sure you contact me on Twitter or wherever. I am happy to answer your questions.
Joe: (32:56) Thanks so much to Jan for joining us today. What a great conversation and a lot of really cool and powerful solutions that you don't really get anywhere else. You know? We talked about Speed Kit. I think I was legitimately impressed by that. Then the SEO Toolkit, which I know there are other tools that may pay you hundreds of dollars a month for. So, definitely be sure to check out Plesk's own lighthouse extensions. For all the show notes head over to plesk.com/podcast. If you like this episode, please consider subscribing and giving it a rating and review on Apple podcasts. It helps people discover the show. Thanks so much for listening to Next Level Ops. Until next time, remember to take it to the next level.