The website maintenance blog at Watchful covers all things WordPress including hosting, software, updates, backups and agency life.
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…
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…