The website maintenance blog at Watchful covers all things WordPress and Joomla including hosting, software, updates, backups and agency life.
With the recent challenges imposed by COVID-19, it’s not surprising that the number of people earning an income from independent work in the U.S. rose 34 percent in 2021 (see below). But making the switch to freelance web development full-time is not an easy decision. To successfully make the switch, Read more…
Given the near-universal prevalence of sitemaps across the web, the question “Do I need a website sitemap?” seems largely redundant. Surely, the answer must be “yes” since most sites have one! As it turns out, this is one of the many persistent SEO myths on the internet. It’s right up Read more…
Last week at JDay USA 2022 I had the pleasure of interviewing my friend and colleague Steve Burge. Steve has been actively using Facebook and email to engage customers for over a year and in this interview he tells us how and why he did it. Here’s the interview. But Read more…
One of the things that sets Watchful apart from other WordPress maintenance tools is our support for Premium WordPress plugin updates. Update support for the following paid plugins/plugin suites is now live: GiveWP add-ons Formidable Forms WP Staging PRO Advanced Ads Pro Updates for GiveWP add-ons GiveWP is a powerful Read more…
There is only one way to safely update plugins on your WordPress site: make sure that you have a recent backup handy before you start! Today we released a new update fresh feature for the bulk updater. Update fresh will cut maintenance time significantly while giving you the confidence to Read more…
JDay USA is nearly here and we’re super excited to participate again this year. We love sponsoring this event, and once again we’ll host website development experts in our virtual sponsor booth. I’ll also be giving a talk on using Cloudflare to improve the performance of your website. Cloudflare has Read more…
At Watchful, we do our best to produce a quality, intuitive application for website management. And when a customer finds a bug, we do our best to fix it quickly. Sometimes these fixes lead to an improvement or feature in the platform. Below is a recent example of this process Read more…
Updating to the latest version of Joomla is perhaps the single most important way to keep your website safe. The latest supported versions of Joomla are the 3.10.x series and the 4.0.x series. All Joomla users should be running one of these two major versions. In August of 2021, Joomla Read more…
Building a modern website requires a large set of skills and expertise in many softwares. Given the costs that can be involved in purchasing numerous suites of software, it’s not surprising that an ecosystem has developed around the production of free tools for web designers and developers. Below you’ll find Read more…
We have been monitoring the most popular WordPress plugins in the Watchful platform for the last 2 years. For each plugin, we measured its usage on thousands of websites and calculated the change in 2021 compared to 2020. Our analysis shows that page builders —like Elementor and WPBakery — and Read more…