We’ve got a whole bag of goodies for you this month, including monitoring items, site access, security, databases, and improvements to the MyKinsta dashboard—wait, why am I listing them here? Wouldn’t you rather get right to it and read more about them so you can start putting them to work for you? Me too.

Let’s dig in.

To help prevent unauthorized account access, we temporarily lock MyKinsta logins after multiple failed attempts. The more failed attempts, the longer the login is locked. 

If you lock yourself out (hey, it happens to all of us), we’ll send an email that includes a link to a login page that bypasses the lockout. You’ll still need the correct username/password and the two-factor authentication you chose (email or app) to log in.

You can now permit additional SFTP users to access directories outside of /public.

If you were unaware that you could add more SFTP users, now you know! Get over to MyKinsta > WordPress sites > site name > Info, scroll down to the Additional SFTP users section, and click the Add new user button. 

Pro tip: When adding an additional SFTP user to a directory outside of /public, the directory must already exist. If it doesn’t, adding the new user will fail.

If you’ve ever used our database hosting service, you may be familiar with the Database Studio feature. It lets you browse, query, and edit a database in MyKinsta. If that sounds like something that would help you manage your WordPress site’s database, good news—it’s now available for WordPress.

To see it in action, go to MyKinsta > WordPress sites > site name and look for the Database Studio link at the bottom of the left navigation.

Database Studio is not intended to replace phpMyAdmin since it doesn’t import or export data. But it does cover many other database-related tasks you might perform, such as querying and editing, and it’s all done from the comfort and safety of your MyKinsta dashboard.

One of the side effects of supporting older versions of PHP (you know we now support older PHP versions, right?) is making sure they work well with more up-to-date tools and technologies. If you use PHP 7.4 and our Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool, you know those two did not always get along.

But the time for rejoicing is here, because APM is now compatible with PHP 7.4. The APM tool is at MyKinsta > WordPress sites > site name. Click the APM link in the left navigation.

Want to switch to a legacy version of PHP or opt out of automatic PHP version updates when they happen? The key to your happiness lies here: MyKinsta > WordPress sites > site name > look for Tools in the left navigation, then scroll down to the PHP settings section and click the Change button. 

You can go back in time to PHP 7.4, but no further. Friends don’t let friends run PHP 5.6.

If you’ve ever built a user interface, you can imagine our challenges in presenting the mountain of information necessary to manage your sites. That’s why we never stop working to improve MyKinsta and make it more intuitive, streamlined, and generally more straightforward to use.

Today, I want to show you a recent minor visual change that you may have already seen but didn’t even notice: any data in MyKinsta that can be edited or copied with a click of an icon now has a grey background.

You'll see this used most on the Site Information page:

That’s pretty much the definition of a minor change, but it helps your eyes parse all of the data on the Site Information page, demonstrating that even a small change can make our day-to-day lives just a little bit easier.

I hope it also demonstrates that all of us here at Kinsta sweat the details every day because we understand that no improvement is ever really “minor.”

Because knowledge is power, we’ve added a new WordPress updates overview section to the entry page of your MyKinsta dashboard.

The default view shows the number of plugins with updates available, vulnerable plugins, and available theme updates:

If you use the Automatic Updates add-on, you’ll also see a history of the latest automatic updates:

If you don’t use our Automatic Update service but want to try it, go to MyKinsta > WordPress sites > site name and click Plugins and themes in the left navigation. Then, click the Change button in the Automatic updates section to activate the service. Automatic updates is a paid add-on.

I mention it because I want the best for you. And it’s an awesome add-on. If your sites use a lot of plugins, I dare say it’s indispensable.

The Kinsta API is expanding yet again. Here are the new and updated API endpoints:

• Reset a site
• Get list of verification and pointing records for the site domain
• Get list of domains by company ID
• Get/create/update/delete domain records
• Extend Get site environments endpoint with wordpress_version field
• Get list of available regions

Deprecated fields and their replacements: The fields worker_number and worker_memory are now deprecated on the Change PHP allocation settings for a premium staging environment endpoint. You can use thread_count and thread_memory in their place. 

We will remove the deprecated fields in about a month.

Speaking of application monitoring, if you have a Blackfire real-time website monitoring account and have been waiting for a future opportunity to use it to analyze your Kinsta-hosted website, that future is now!

If you don’t know, Blackfire is a monitoring tool that provides detailed information about your site's performance. It allows you to identify issues you can address to optimize your site’s load times. It’s similar to our Application Performance Monitoring (which is free to use; go to MyKinsta > WordPress sites > site name > APM) or New Relic, which we also support.

They’re all great tools since they give you specific insight into processes or methods that may negatively affect your website's performance or speed. They take the guesswork out of troubleshooting your site and are significant time (and frustration) savers. If you’ve tried troubleshooting a slow site before tools like these were available, you know how valuable they are.

As with any website monitoring application, while Blackfire is doing its work, your website’s performance could be affected, so you should only use it when actively diagnosing performance issues.

And yes, it’s ironic that performance analysis applications can affect site performance, but there’s no way around the fact that observing something changes the behavior of the thing being observed. Heisenberg warned us about that. 🔬

If you use our Automatic Update service to keep your plugins and themes up-to-date, you’re familiar with the update emails the service sends. Now, you can receive a weekly summary email every Friday listing successful and failed updates.

To opt in to the weekly summary email, click this link and scroll down. If you prefer the scenic route, go to MyKinsta, click your name in the upper right corner, choose User settings from the dropdown, click Notifications in the left navigation, then scroll down to the Kinsta Automatic Updates section. There, you can toggle on or off the emails for Weekly updates, Successful updates, and Failed updates.

At the risk of repeating myself, if you don’t use automatic updates but want to try it, go to MyKinsta > WordPress sites > site name and click Plugins and themes in the left navigation. Then, click the Change button in the Automatic updates section to activate the service. Automatic updates is a paid add-on.

I told you it was a whole bag of tricks this month—well, okay, I said goodies, but maybe neither of those is a fitting description. They’re tools, right? I should have said something about a toolbox or “hammering home” a fix. But here we are. I’ll try to come up with something more clever next time, but I don’t want to make any promises.

Please do join us next time for another thrilling episode of the Kinsta Feature Update newsletter. You’ll be the hero of that one, because you’re the hero of all our newsletters. Thanks for being here with us as we forge ahead together into the bright future.