A client portal for WordPress that does not live inside WordPress
You can add a portal to WordPress with a membership plugin. The question is whether your clients' identity documents should be sitting in a WordPress uploads folder.
Free for 14 days, no credit card. Your portal carries your firm's name from the first client you add.
Estate documents
5 of 8 received1 item overdue — FirmHello is chasing
- Death certificate Received 7 Apr
- Original will Received 7 Apr
- ! Property valuation Overdue
- Bank and investment statements Reminder Friday
- Letter of engagement Approved 28 Mar
Whitmore Legal's portal, as their client sees it.
WordPress runs a large share of professional firms' websites, and there are plugins that will bolt a client area onto it. They work. They also make your marketing site the custodian of your clients' most sensitive documents, and they make you responsible for patching the thing that protects them.
FirmHello connects to a WordPress site with a link or a subdomain and keeps the documents somewhere built for them. Your WordPress install goes back to being a website, and nothing in your plugin list is standing between a client's tax return and the internet.
The cost of doing it with a plugin
Your uploads folder becomes a document store
Client files sitting on shared hosting, frequently one misconfiguration away from being directly addressable.
A plugin is a permanent patching duty
Membership and file plugins are a known target. The protection is only as current as your last update.
Plugin conflicts take the portal down
A theme update breaks the login page, and the thing that broke is the way your clients send you documents.
You inherit somebody else's roadmap
If the plugin is abandoned, your client portal is abandoned, and migrating it is entirely your problem.
Connecting it to a WordPress site
-
Step 1
Add the login to your menu
A standard WordPress menu item pointing at your portal address. No plugin installed and nothing to update.
-
Step 2
Or use a subdomain
One CNAME gives you portal.yourfirm.com alongside the WordPress site, separately hosted and separately secured.
-
Step 3
Match the brand and stop worrying about it
Your logo and colors on the portal, and no line in your plugin list that you have to keep an eye on.
What wordpress sites use most
Every featureYour brand, your domain
A portal that reads as part of your WordPress site without being part of your WordPress install.
Audit trail
Access logging and per-client permissions that a general-purpose membership plugin is not built to provide.
Client vault
Documents in storage designed for them, not in wp-content on shared hosting alongside your theme files.
Request lists
A checklist of what you need from each client, which is the part plugins almost never do.
Approvals on the record
Approvals recorded properly, without a second plugin and a second subscription to keep patched.
Intake forms
An intake form you can link from any WordPress page to open a client record and their first request.
If you would rather stay in WordPress
When a plugin is the right answer
If you are sharing non-sensitive material with a handful of people and you already maintain the site attentively, a plugin is a reasonable and cheaper choice. We would rather say so.
When it is not
Identity documents, financial records, medical information, anything privileged. The blast radius of a plugin vulnerability is your whole client list.
Moving off a plugin
Export what the plugin holds, import it into the client vaults, and replace the login link. Nobody has to learn a new website.
Client documents are the most sensitive thing a firm holds
So the portal is built to hold them properly: encrypted, access granted one client at a time, and every action recorded. Nothing travels as an email attachment.
How FirmHello is built- Encrypted in transit and at rest
- TLS 1.3 on every connection and AES-256 encryption for stored documents, with keys managed separately from the data they protect.
- Access is per client, not per firm
- A client can only ever load their own space. Staff access is granted per client, so a junior can be given three files and nothing else.
- No documents in email
- Notifications tell a client that something is waiting and link them to the portal. The material itself never leaves it as an attachment.
- Complete audit trail
- Views, uploads, downloads, approvals and permission changes are all recorded with actor, time and IP, and the log is exportable.
- Retention you control
- Set how long documents live per client or per matter, and hold or purge on request, so the portal matches the retention policy you already have.
- Hosted in your region
- Choose United States, Canada, the EU or the United Kingdom, and your firm's data stays in that region.
Questions from wordpress sites
Why not just use a WordPress membership plugin?
You can, and for low-sensitivity material it is fine. The trade-off is that your clients' documents then live on your web hosting, behind code you are responsible for patching, and your portal shares a fate with your theme and your other plugins.
Do I need to install anything in WordPress?
No. The integration is a menu link or a DNS record. There is no plugin, so there is nothing to update and nothing to conflict.
Can it be on my own domain?
Yes. A subdomain such as portal.yourfirm.com takes one CNAME record and sits alongside your WordPress site.
What if my site is hosted somewhere restrictive?
It does not matter. Nothing runs on your hosting, so hosting limitations, PHP versions and plugin policies are all irrelevant.
Can I migrate documents out of an existing plugin?
Yes. Export from the plugin and we will help import them into the matching client vaults before you switch the link over.
Related
Where to go next
Every page on the site, grouped by the question it answers.
- File sharing
- On your website
- WordPress sites — you are here
Ready when you are
Tell us which plugin you are using and we will tell you what moving off it looks like.
No card and no sales call. If you would rather tell us about your firm first, use the longer form.