Blog

Downtime & Memory Management

Over the last week, we've had intermittent downtime across several websites. We identified the problem as a shortfall in memory when Mailpoet runs background processes. Our solution was to double the swap file size, creating a memory-to-CPU ratio that should prevent memory exhaustion. We're still watching this closely, but the results thus far look stable. Keep up with our blog or sign up for our Newsletter to stay informed about what we're doing to...

We’re adding MailPoet!

We're adding MailPoet Premium to our website plugins and list of third-party software. This is also going to replace our use of the WP Forms SMTP plugin, which required us to make use of the default email addresses on Rackspace for your domain to send out emails from the website. Instead, emails from your website will be sent through the MailPoet sending service. Their sending service is also designed around email marketing, which brings...

Maintenance Update – Feb 2023

This blog post provides information about the ongoing updates of our services concerning the functioning of the websites under our management. We are providing this update due to advancements in the software we use and changes we make because we are always getting a little better at what we do. Please contact us if you have any questions about the information in this blog post. Your website or websites are now running PHP 8.2...

Wrapping Up 2022

This year we began with a blog about revamping our services on all managed websites. Some of those changes were followed by a secondary change, and some went very well. This blog post recaps what the revamp was all about and what the results were when the dust settled. But, of course, we will always be in a state of improvement, so these blog posts are never intended as a conclusion but more of...

Statcounter

Managing Statcounter

Statcounter is the software we use to track website visitor statistics. We use Statcounter over other analytics solutions because they comply with privacy laws worldwide, combined with valuable and actionable visitor data. You can find more information about Statcounter and useful links on our Performance page. Since we rolled out Statcounter to all managed websites, we have noticed that not every client finds a need or use for this software. We are making Statcounter...

Devices

Improving Mobile Load Times

In this blog post, we are talking about load times on mobile devices. One thing that may not be immediately obvious is that when it comes to visual appeal and functionality, you often have to choose between these two factors and strike the right balance. Of course, you want the site to look good, but the extra images and Javascript animations make the total size of the data that must be transmitted to the...

Maintenance Update for August 2022

During the month of August, we moved all managed websites over to new Virtual Machines. The reason for this move is that some websites were experiencing downtime. We attributed the downtime to running out of disk space on each instance, which were set at 10GB. When we looked at the space being taken up, it was due to excessive logging by MySQL and Google Cloud related software. The configuration that created this scenario was...

Cloud

Update to the Great Revamp of 2022

If you've been keeping up with our blogs, you know that we recently migrated to WP Engine for our hosting. While WP Engine did fix a lot of the problems we had with GoDaddy Managed WordPress Hosting, moving to WP Engine brought new problems. WP Engine is moving to a new network layer of security that comes with features that aren't really features for us. One feature, Cloudflare Polish, strips metadata from images to...

BlogVault In - Termageddon Out

BlogVault In, Termageddon Out

I looked over Termageddon and another competitor and for now I am going to continue creating basic Privacy Policy and Terms of Service pages myself. While I am not an attorney, I care about our website visitors. I found that Termageddon provided very thin and obscure information and that other plugins are overwhelming in their legalese. There are legal criteria for these terms and policies that include notifying users about the information you are...

Analytics

New Website Analytics

The liability landscape for privacy and tracking has been unstable for a while now and will continue to be for some time. As a result, we have had a zero-collection policy for anything that could be identifiable or personal information and have strong notification and agreement protections in place for form submissions. Unfortunately, this left us ditching Google Analytics, and since then, we have been using a plugin with less capability, WP-Statistics. However, that...

Hosting

Hosting & Security

Update: We have since moved our hosting to Google Cloud. Read the update. We addressed improved security in a separate blog post. Read the update. We are moving from GoDaddy hosting to WP Engine Secure WordPress Hosting on a dedicated server. Having a dedicated server means that your website will not share computer hardware space with other websites as it does now. Instead, we will have dedicated resources, and as a result, your website...

Business Listings

Business Listing Updates for 2022

Bing Places and Bing Webmaster tools were hobbled with dysfunction until the middle of this past year and were not available for reliable functionality. Now Bing Webmaster Tools has had a significant facelift and is as useful as Google Search Console for diagnosing potential SEO and performance improvements. We sent emails about looking for your Bing postcard in the mail. The postcard will have a PIN that we need to complete verification to manage...