About Watchful
About Watchful
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.
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.
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November 2012
Watchful attends it's first international event, the Joomla World Conference in San Jose, California.
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February 2013
Watchful partners with malware and security firm Sucuri.
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February 2013
Version 2 of the dashboard launches with tags and notes.
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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.
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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.
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August 2014
The RESTful API is released, allowing users to create their own applications built on Watchful.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 justWatchful
and move our entire platform to theWatchful.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.
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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.
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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.
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November 2020
Revamp of the Watchful report builder completes a multi-step feature roll-out.