Practical guides for securing, maintaining and troubleshooting WordPress and Joomla! websites. Learn how to solve common website problems, follow industry best practices and make site management easier — with or without Watchful.
Beta testers are an important part of the development cycle at Watchful. We’ve now formalized how beta testing works. It is now called the Early Access program and it is available to all customers. What is the Early Access program? As the name suggests, the Early Access program allows Watchful 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
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
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
Recently a Watchful Premium user contacted our support team with an urgent request. An update for a custom theme had been released, but it was not yet appearing in Watchful’s updater. Was there another way to install urgent website updates across all the affected sites? Before we give the solution, Read more
If you are running a web agency or digital consultancy, you probably use multiple services that send white-label reports, notifications and other emails to your clients. Using your own email address with these services is important for white-labelling third party emails. But emails from your account sent via a third 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
Automatic software updates can speed up website maintenance dramatically. So, managing automatic updates in bulk — enabling and disabling them across many websites at once — is a critical tool for any digital agency. For instance, you may discover that a WordPress plugin breaks your sites or installs a backdoor. Read more
Keeping a close eye on your clients’ websites is an important task for any digital agency. One of the easiest ways to do this is with a custom website dashboard that displays the most critical and actionable information about the sites you manage. Below we will show you how you Read more
Web agency client reports are an excellent way to provide value to your customers. We’ve been working hard to improve the client reports at Watchful with automated custom scheduling and white-labelling being the most recent. Today we add another feature commonly requested by Watchful users: the ability to customize the Read more