The website maintenance blog at Watchful covers all things WordPress and Joomla including hosting, software, updates, backups and agency life.
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…
Cloudflare is an incredibly powerful tool. When a visitor to your website makes a request to view a page, Cloudflare is the first to intercept it. If your website is a busy intersection in a big city, Cloudflare is the the officer directing traffic. In their role as gatekeeper to Read more…
How much do websites cost? This metric is one of the most common tools that potential clients use in the early stages of selecting a vendor. And this is the question that is answered in every proposal you deliver. But to answer this question we must consider many variables. This Read more…
Version 4 of Google Analytics launched recently. We’ve followed the progress carefully as traffic and other site data appear in the client reports at many web agencies. But for a host of reasons, updating to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) requires careful consideration even now, nearly 5 months after its initial Read more…
If you work at a digital agency or build websites for a living, you may feel like it’s difficult for web developers to relax during the holidays. At Watchful, we believe that maintaining a health work-life balance is more important than constantly working. That’s why we’re scheduling some downtime over the Read more…
For most of the last decade, managed website services have exploded across the hosting industry. And if you own or manage a website, you’ve probably heard of popular managed hosting vendors such as WP Engine, Pagely, and CloudAccess, to name a few. Managed hosting has a lot of benefits for Read more…
Managed website services have exploded across the hosting industry in the last decade. And while they are clearly suitable for many sites, managed WordPress hosting has a number of potential drawbacks that agencies should carefully consider. If managed WordPress hosting is not a good fit for you, or simply outside Read more…
Here at Watchful, we help Joomla users manage tens of thousands of Joomla sites. This gives us a lot of insight into the world of Joomla extensions and provides a unique view of Joomla trends. Each autumn we analyze data across the entire Watchful platform to look for trends and Read more…
The building block of any web agency is the trust bestowed upon it by the client. A client trusts your agency to deliver secure websites and online services, but it goes far beyond that: most clients automatically assume that your web agency security is also top-notch. After-all, the client is Read more…