About Watchful

Watchful is the only full-featured, website maintenance tool that makes it fast and easy to perform updates for both free and commercial add-ons. With automatic backups, integrated uptime monitoring, activity logging, remote add-on installation, intrusion detection and automated reporting, Watchful is an essential tool for all WordPress & Joomla professionals.

Watchful launched in 2012 and is based in Sussex, Wisconsin (USA). Our international team is split between the US, Italy, and Romania.

Meet the Watchful Team

Aris Ongaro

Senior Backend Engineer

When he's not coding, Aris enjoys cooking, walking, wine/beer tastings, and playing board games.

Francesco Abeni

Chief Technical Officer

Francesco is passionate about code refactoring. In his spare time he likes to volunteer at his local library, read, or to walk and explore.

Luca Landi

Frontend Engineer

Luca enjoys walking in the woods, tasting wine and beer, listening to music, reading books, practicing martial arts and yoga.

Matthew Philogene

Systems Administrator

Matthew is a great lover of traveling and the outdoors, and can often be found hiking in the mountains. He's also fond of cycling regardless of the conditions.

Ovi Liuta

Senior Engineer

Ovi spends his spare time with his family and tending to his hobby farm in the countryside.

Steve Burge

Strategy

An expat from the UK, Steve now resides in sunny Florida where he can mock his colleagues in the snowy Midwest. He enjoys soccer, running, cycling, and spending time with family.

Vali-Nicuşor Barbu

Support & Integrations Engineer

Vali enjoys spending time with his young family, traveling, and working out. He loves working with his hands repairing bicycles and maintain his prized BMW.

Vic Drover

CEO & Product Manager

Originally from Canada, Victor is a dual citizen now living in the USA. He enjoys cooking, golfing, coaching rugby at the local high school, cycling and most of all travel.

A brief history of Watchful

September 2012

Version 1 of Watchful launches on 3-September-2012 as a collaboration between co-founders Victor Drover, PA Vullioud, and David Pizzotti.

Support for remote backups was added at the last minute.
October 2012

The first Watchful App is released. It monitors sales in RedShop, an eCommerce extension for Joomla.
November 2012

Watchful attends it's first international event, the Joomla World Conference in San Jose, California.
February 2013

Watchful partners with malware and security firm Sucuri.
February 2013

Version 2 of the dashboard launches with tags and notes.
April 2013

The first updates for commercial/premium software are added.
May 2013

Watchful wins Best Joomla App at the CMS expo in Chicago.
January 2014

Remote installer released, allowing extensions to be uploaded and installed directly from Watchful.
June 2013

Watchful wins Innovation of the Year at the 2013 J! and Beyond conference in Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands.
September 2013

Watchful acquires competing website manager Admincredible.
January 2014

The Remote Install feature was added, allowing users to upload and install extensions without ever leaving Watchful.

The remote updater becomes a useful tool for applying custom updates, or scripts packaged as add-ons.
March 2014

Version 3 of Watchful launches. With a completely re-vamped dashboard, productivity improves dramatically.

The new dashboard also features integrated uptime monitoring for the first time.
April 2014

Two-factor authentication is released, allowing users to secure their Watchful accounts.
July 2014

Google Analytics was added to Watchful. This provided traffic and referral data to the dashboard that would eventually end up in the report builder.
August 2014

The RESTful API is released, allowing users to create their own applications built on Watchful.
May 2015

The third version of the Watchful dashboard is released. This was a complete rewrite that focused on prioritizing maintenance, dynamic interface elements and powerful filtering/sorting.

And we finally got to say goodbye to the page refresh!
June 2015

Single-sign was first released to beta-testers. This feature allowed users to be synced across multiple sites at once.
June 2015

Support for sites using Cloudflare was released to improve the accuracy of system alerts.
September 2015

Website security and best-practice scanner released. The tools check for filesystem integrity and permission, malware and more.
May 2016

Watch wins another industry award, this time for Top Joomla Service. This is the second win for Watchful at a J and Beyond event.
May 2016

Watchful became a very customizable tool with the release of our table customizer which allows users to configure the Watchful interface to suit their needs.
November 2016

The SEO Audit Tool is released to scan sites for SEO best-practices.
March 2017

Watchful becomes a multi-CMS dashboard with the addition of WordPress.
April 2017

After many years using our own dedicated servers, we finally made the jump to the AWS, the popular cloud computing service from Amazon.
November 2018

Co-founder Victor Drover becomes sole-owner at Watchful.
January 2019

Francesco Abeni returns to Watchful to take on a new role as Chief Technology Officer.
May 2019

We simplify our name from Wacthful.li to just Watchful and move our entire platform to the Watchful.net domain.
September 2019

WordPress features expands to add native backup plugins and support for Premium plugin updates.
October 2019

Automatic updates come to Watchful for the first time as a beta feature.
April 2020

Watchful acquires XCloner, the popular backup plugin for WordPress.
June 2020

The first of its kind, Watchful adds update scheduling. This feature makes it possible to schedule updates so that ay issues that arise do not interrupt free time, holidays, etc.
June 2020

Support for Joomla 4 launches. Compared to Joomla 3, Joomla 4 is in many ways a radical departure. Our early support during the alpha/beta stages of J4 gives plenty of time for testing.
November 2020

Revamp of the Watchful report builder completes a multi-step feature roll-out.