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