The website maintenance blog at Watchful covers all things WordPress including hosting, software, updates, backups and agency life.
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
As part of JDay USA, Watchful hosted an Ask Me Anything session focused on website maintenance. We invited a panel of Joomla and WordPress experts to help answer your questions. The session was a great success. The questions and discussion points covered a broad range of topics well beyond simply Read more
Watchful includes a built-in backup monitoring system that keeps an eye on the age of your website backups. And when a backup passes its useful “shelf life”, stale backup notifications can be sent by email. Stale backup warnings are also placed in convenient places throughout the Watchful platform to help 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
ke many communities, Joomla users pine for the return of live events. And we grew tired of Zoom conferences many months back. A new and innovative event called Joomla Day USA will be held on April 23-24, 2021 that hopes to address both issues. It is a refreshing and exciting Read more
Aside from all of the uncertainty and change brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 has been an eventful year for Watchful in terms of new features and improvements in the platform. This was especially true for some of Watchful’s core features such as updates, backups and reports. But we 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