A quiet month. Everything was updated except one plugin, which we held back because its update broke the homepage on phones. The site was down for 9 minutes when your host restarted its network overnight. There were no security incidents, and pages loaded a little faster than in July.
- Uptime99.98%9 minutes down, 1 incident
- Updates23applied, 1 held back
- Backups31 of 31restore tested in 11 minutes
- Security0incidents, 1,284 login attempts blocked
Updates
Each update was applied to a staging copy first, checked with before-and-after screenshots and a test of the forms, then applied to the live site.
| What | Version | Result |
|---|---|---|
| WordPress | 7.0 → 7.0.1 | Applied |
| Northbridge theme | 2.4.0 → 2.4.1 | Applied |
| Contact form plugin | 5.9 → 6.0 | Applied |
| SEO plugin | 25.6 → 25.7 | Applied |
| Slider plugin | 6.7 → 7.0 | Held backBroke the homepage slider on phones in our visual check. Waiting for the author’s fix. |
| 18 other plugins | Minor updates | Applied |
Uptime
12 August, 02:14 to 02:23. Your host restarted its network during planned maintenance. We checked the site as soon as it came back. Nothing for you to do.
Backups
- A backup every night at 02:00, copied off-site and kept for 30 days
- Restore test on 14 August: the whole site restored to staging in 11 minutes, with the homepage, forms and admin checked
Security
- 1,284 login attempts blocked, most of them against the username “admin”, which doesn’t exist
- No unexpected file changes
- A former staff member’s administrator account removed, with your go-ahead
- SSL certificate renews automatically on 18 October
- Domain registration renews on 3 March 2027
Speed for real visitors on phones
- Largest Contentful Paint
- 1.9 s Good, down from 2.1 s
- Interaction to Next Paint
- 140 ms Good
- Cumulative Layout Shift
- 0.03 Good
Google Search, last 28 days
- Clicks from Google
- 4,210 Up 6% on July
- Times shown in Google
- 96,400 Up 4% on July
- Pages indexed
- 142 No change
- New “not found” errors
- 3 All redirected to the right pages
Small jobs done
- Opening hours updated on the Contact page (2 August)
- New team member added to the About page (9 August)
- Quarterly results PDF uploaded and linked from News (21 August)
Needs your decision
We recommend replacing the slider plugin. It hasn’t had a meaningful update in 14 months, and this month’s update broke the homepage on phones. A simple block built into the theme would do the same job with nothing extra to update. It takes about two hours. Reply to this email to go ahead.
Coming up
PHP 8.2 stops getting security fixes on 31 December. We’ll test Northbridge on PHP 8.4 on staging in October, and switch the live site in November once everything checks out.