The website maintenance blog at Watchful covers all things WordPress and Joomla including hosting, software, updates, backups and agency life.
Beta testers are an important part of the development cycle at Watchful. We’ve now formalized how beta testing works. It is now called the Early Access program and it is available to all customers. What is the Early Access program? As the name suggests, the Early Access program allows Watchful Read more…
Each year I participate in the Scenic Shore 150, a 2-day bicycle ride to raise money for blood cancer research and patient services. After some encouragement from colleagues, I decided to share the 2022 charity fundraiser with all Watchful users. I hope you’ll join my team virtually! What is the Read more…
Google has announced that Universal Analytics (UA) will be sunsetted on July 1st, 2023 with Google Analytics 4 (GA4) becoming the new standard. In preparation for this shift, we are making changes to our website traffic reports. What are website traffic reports? At Watchful, website traffic reports are used to Read more…
Websites with frequently changing content often require a specialized backup process. Typically, multiple site backup schedules are used to make sure files, media, comments, transactions, blog posts and other content are backed up regularly. Watchful can now help schedule these specialized backup procedures by allowing up to three different backups to Read more…
Managing a user on a WordPress site is a pretty simple task. You log into the backend, click Users from the left hand menu, select the desired account and modify their details as needed. But if you have to manage WordPress users across many sites, it can be time consuming Read more…
Managing access to a large number of WordPress sites can be time-consuming and tedious. Single sign-on for WordPress is a new feature automatically included in all Watchful Premium plans. Single sign-on for WordPress makes short work for anyone managing users on multiple WordPress sites. What is user management in WordPress? Read more…
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…