Your WordPress Sites Shouldn't
Keep You Up at Night

Domain Name Management Best Practices

Do you know where your domain is? Having a domain name for your business is obviously important. It's how customer find your website, and often it's used for branded email. So having a solid domain name management strategy is something every company

A Better Way to Run WordPress: Why We Changed Cinch

If you've seen our new logo, you've seen the surface-level change we've made to Cinch. This post is about what's underneath it and why it matters to our customers. The website wasn't a redesign. It was a rethink. Our previous site did

Extreme WordPress Housekeeping for Performance

Alt title: How I cut GIGABYTES off a WordPress database One of the things we care about here at Cinch is website performance. We provide our customers support and guidance on how to keep a website fast, as well as managing some

WooCommerce 2.7 release delayed, version changing to 3.0.0

We were expecting a brand new, major release version of WooCommerce to be released today (2.7), but in a post on the WooCommerce Dev blog, it looks like it's being pushed back a few weeks, likely April 4th. Critical bug found Pushing

Deny Public Access to wp-cron.php

We wrote a post a while back on how to set up server side CRON jobs for WordPress. We set these up for our hosting customers who request them - and also on high traffic sites to help with server loads. It's

Get Notified When a User Removes an Item from a WooCommerce Subscription

We recently had a customer remove an item from a subscription by going into their account, choosing the subscription and deleting an item. We manage multiple websites for this customer, but one of their sites was recently sold and he no longer

Remove WooCommerce Marketing Hub Menu Item

WooCommerce 4.1.0 was released yesterday and among the various updates, there's now a new Marketing tab below the Analytics menu item. This is a new addition to WooCommerce, which they are dubbing the Marketing Hub. Taking a look at the new section

GoDaddy acquires ManageWP

GoDaddy acquired the popular WordPress management service ManageWP, which will remain a standalone service. ManageWP customers will have to wait and see if the service deteriorates. Cinch maintenance clients need not worry about any of this, as we don't use ManageWP. The

WooCommerce set default product category

If you're looking how to set the default product category in WooCommerce, you might think to look for a setting somewhere. After all, setting the default post category is found in Settings > Writing. But it's even simpler to set than that.

Troubleshooting WooCommerce email deliverability

One of the most troubling issues that crop up from time to time with our customers is when email notifications stop getting delivered. This is especially concerning for our WooCommerce customers who rely on email notifications to communicate with their customers and

Protect Your Website from Malware Spread through Ad Networks

Malware, or “malicious software,” is software designed to inflict harm to a website, digital device or network with a range of vicious strategies. Malware is a catch-all term for a range of programs designed to inflict harm on a digital device or

Secure your site or alienate your visitors

How to force WooCommerce to install missing pages

When WooCommerce is first installed, a welcome screen is presented to assist in configuring the settings to get up and running: While this setup process is helpful, sometimes you just want to get straight to it and hit the skip button. All of

Uptime Monitoring of WordPress Sites

You have a business to run and a life to live – one that doesn’t include constantly checking your WordPress site for problems. Websites and servers do go down from time to time, however, and not knowing there is an issue can

How to get your website support issue fixed fast

It happens to all of us. You log into your website and something has gone terribly wrong. All you see is a white screen, or a strange error message keeps popping up. The first instinct is to reach out to your support

Managed WordPress Hosting

The world of managed WordPress hosting has exploded in the last few years. On one end of the spectrum, you have inexpensive, mass-market shared hosts like GoDaddy, Network Solutions, BlueHost and SiteGround. On the other end, complicated do-it-yourself dedicated systems. Cinch, however,

WooCommerce.com adds live chat support

Getting support on WooCommerce.com extensions has steadily improved over the last few years. The ticket system has been upgraded and the response times have slowly gotten better. But as much as it's improved, WooCommerce.com support has always been slow. Even now I

Server Failures and Why You Can Trust Hosting a Site With Cinch

There are tons of places you can host your WordPress or WooCommerce powered website, from huge companies like GoDaddy to small independent companies like us. And while it's easy to think of web hosting as a relative commodity, there are big differences.

The human security factor: Passwords

Hardening WordPress—the steps taken to tighten up security to prevent a malicious intrusion into your website—can seem daunting to the typical user. Luckily, one of the simplest things you can do to harden WordPress is also one of the most effective: use

Comprehensive WordPress Plugin Audit

WordPress plugins are awesome. For little to no cost and with the simple click of a button, these quick and easy downloads can add new features to your website and help increase its overall functionality. As WordPress experts, we’re not ashamed to