https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights Practical lessons from real digital projects: websites, platforms, vendors, and the operational side of digital leadership. en-au Thu, 22 Oct 2026 10:23:00 +1100 https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/php-security-flaw https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/php-security-flaw Thu, 22 Oct 2026 11:00:00 +1100 On 21 October 2026, the PHP team released urgent fixes for two critical security flaws in PHP, the software behind about 7 in 10 websites. If your website runs on WordPress, Craft, Drupal, Joomla or Magento, it runs on PHP, and its server needs updating. If it's on Shopify, Wix or Squarespace, the platform looks after its own servers, so there's nothing for you to do. https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/managed-wordpress-hosting-vs-shared-vps https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/managed-wordpress-hosting-vs-shared-vps Fri, 16 Oct 2026 17:14:00 +1100 Managed WordPress hosting services run the server and look after WordPress itself: updates, backups, security and support from people who know WordPress. Shared hosting gives you space on a server you share with other sites and leaves most of WordPress to you. A VPS gives you a server of your own and expects you, or someone you pay, to run it. Shared is fine for a simple site that someone keeps up to date. Managed is worth paying for when the site brings in enquiries or sales and nobody on your team owns the updates. https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/outsourced-web-development-australia https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/outsourced-web-development-australia Fri, 16 Oct 2026 17:14:00 +1100 Outsourced web development means paying an outside team to design, build or look after your website instead of employing developers yourself. It works when three things are true: the job is written down clearly, someone on your side owns the decisions and checks the work, and the contract gives you the code, the accounts and a clean way out. Where the team sits matters less than those three. https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/website-seo-design https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/website-seo-design Fri, 16 Oct 2026 17:14:00 +1100 Website SEO design means making the search decisions in a redesign at the scoping and design stage, not at launch: which pages exist, what their URLs are, how they link to each other, how the headings are structured and how fast each template loads on a phone. Most of the search traffic lost in a redesign is lost in those decisions, weeks before anyone writes a redirect. https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/website-maintenance-cost-australia https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/website-maintenance-cost-australia Fri, 16 Oct 2026 17:02:00 +1100 Website maintenance in Australia costs about $30 to $199 a month for most entry-level care plans, $99 to $399 for a mid-tier plan and $189 to $999 for the top tier, based on 13 Australian providers' published prices checked on 16 October 2026. The price alone tells you little: some plans include hosting and some don't, several entry plans include no support time at all, and only two providers say what happens to the time you don't use. https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/what-does-an-ai-consultant-do https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/what-does-an-ai-consultant-do Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:51:00 +1100 An AI consultant works out where AI and automation will save your business real time and money, and where they won't, before you spend on tools or builds. The work is diagnosis first: map how work moves through the business, rank what's worth automating, then decide whether to build, buy or leave it alone. https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/taking-over-a-craft-cms-website https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/taking-over-a-craft-cms-website Tue, 13 Oct 2026 11:00:00 +1100 Taking over a Craft CMS website means getting every login and account into your business's name, checking how up to date the site and its add-ons are, making sure the hosting and backups work, and understanding how the content is set up, all before anything changes. It takes from a few days to 2 weeks, depending on the site and how much access you already hold, and most takeovers involve no downtime. https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/core-web-vitals-assessment-failed https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/core-web-vitals-assessment-failed Wed, 07 Oct 2026 07:19:00 +1100 You put your website into PageSpeed Insights, and before any of the scores, there it is in red: "Core Web Vitals Assessment: Failed". Then you scroll down and the performance score underneath is 70-something, or even in the green. So which one is right, and does the red one actually matter? https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/ai-business-development-manager https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/ai-business-development-manager Tue, 06 Oct 2026 14:51:00 +1100 Someone in a sales meeting this quarter has said the words "AI BDM" with a straight face, and half the room quietly wondered whether their job just changed. The pitch is seductive: an agent that researches prospects, writes the outreach, qualifies the inbound and keeps the pipeline warm, all without a salary or a lunch break. Some of that is real. Some of it is a demo that falls apart the moment it meets your actual sales motion. https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/ga4-tracking-audit https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/ga4-tracking-audit Tue, 06 Oct 2026 14:51:00 +1100 Here's a question worth sitting with: when did your GA4 numbers last match your CRM? https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/server-side-tracking-explained https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/server-side-tracking-explained Tue, 06 Oct 2026 14:51:00 +1100 Your conversions "dropped" 30% overnight. Nothing changed in the market. Your sales team is just as busy, the phone still rings, the pipeline in your CRM looks healthy. But the dashboard says demand fell off a cliff. So which number do you believe? https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/when-to-replatform-to-shopify https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/when-to-replatform-to-shopify Tue, 06 Oct 2026 14:51:00 +1100 Most Shopify replatform projects don't start with a strategy. They start with a bad week. A checkout outage during a sale, a security patch that broke three integrations, a developer quote for a "simple" change that came back at six weeks and five figures. Someone in the room says "we should just move to Shopify," everyone nods, and a decision that will shape your operations for the next four years gets made on frustration. https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/fractional-cto-cost-australia https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/fractional-cto-cost-australia Sun, 05 Jul 2026 20:05:00 +1000 Somewhere between $4,500 and $15,000 a month, and the difference is almost entirely how many days you're buying. That's the short answer. The rest of this article is the maths behind it, what moves the number, and the honest comparison against just hiring someone. https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/fractional-cto-vs-full-time https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/fractional-cto-vs-full-time Sun, 05 Jul 2026 20:05:00 +1000 Every business that considers a fractional executive is really weighing three options, not two: engage fractional, hire full-time, or keep limping along with nobody owning the function. All three have a price. Only two of them print it on an invoice. https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/keep-website-project-on-track https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/keep-website-project-on-track Fri, 19 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +1000 Most website projects do not fail in a dramatic blow-up. They drift, one reasonable-sounding decision at a time, until the build that was meant to launch months ago still is not live, the budget is long gone, and nobody can quite say how it happened. https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/future-of-digital-agencies https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/future-of-digital-agencies Tue, 09 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +1000 Spend ten minutes looking and you would conclude the digital agency market is finished. It is crowded, commoditised, and everyone promises the same things. I do not think that is the real story. The real story is quieter and more uncomfortable: the way almost every agency charges for its work is about to stop making sense, and most of them have very good reasons not to admit it. https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/agency-gone-quiet https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/agency-gone-quiet Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:43:00 +1000 You engaged the agency with confidence. The pitch was strong. The account director was sharp. The timeline was tight but workable. Six months in, responses are slower. Updates are vague. The launch date has shifted twice. The weekly stand-ups now spend more time on process than progress, and the status report is doing a suspicious amount of work with the word "tracking". https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/ai-automation-for-business https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/ai-automation-for-business Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:43:00 +1000 Most business owners are currently stuck in the "Chatbot Phase" of AI. They use ChatGPT to draft an email or brainstorm a few ideas, and while that is useful, it is barely scratching the surface of what the technology can do. https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/clickup-for-agencies https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/clickup-for-agencies Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:43:00 +1000 There is a specific kind of panic that hits a digital agency when its production team grows from three people to nine. https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/craft-cms-vs-wordpress https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/craft-cms-vs-wordpress Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:43:00 +1000 Most people reading this have heard of WordPress. A lot fewer have heard of [Craft CMS](/platforms/craft-cms). WordPress powers somewhere around 43% of all websites. Craft sits at well under 1%. By the numbers, this isn't a contest. https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/fractional-cmo-vs-head-of-digital https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/fractional-cmo-vs-head-of-digital Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:43:00 +1000 A fractional CMO is a senior marketing executive who leads your brand, marketing strategy and marketing team part time, on a monthly retainer, usually across two or three businesses at once. You get a chief marketing officer's judgement and accountability for a fraction of the hours, and the cost, of a full-time hire. https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/ga4-migration-broken-analytics https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/ga4-migration-broken-analytics Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:43:00 +1000 Universal Analytics stopped collecting data on 1 July 2023. Most Australian businesses migrated to GA4 under time pressure, with a vendor or in-house team running a one-to-one port rather than a re-implementation. The result, almost everywhere: GA4 setups that technically work, but don't measure what the business thinks they're measuring. https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/how-to-choose-digital-agency https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/how-to-choose-digital-agency Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:43:00 +1000 The pitch is always perfect. The account director is sharp, the case studies are stunning, and the timeline is tight but "completely achievable". You walk out of the meeting feeling confident that you've found the right partner. https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/n8n-vs-zapier-vs-make https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/n8n-vs-zapier-vs-make Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:43:00 +1000 Most people enter the world of automation with Zapier. It is the "entry drug" of the industry: it is intuitive, it connects to everything, and you can have your first "Zap" running in five minutes. https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/sharepoint-intranets-why-they-fail https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/sharepoint-intranets-why-they-fail Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:43:00 +1000 The pattern is almost identical across every enterprise business: the company buys Microsoft 365, discovers they have "SharePoint" included in the licence, and decides to build an intranet. https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/website-audit-cost-australia https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/website-audit-cost-australia Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:43:00 +1000 If you search for "website audit" online, you will find a thousand agencies offering a "Free SEO Audit". https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/website-health-check-explained https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/website-health-check-explained Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:43:00 +1000 Most business owners can feel when their website isn't pulling its weight. Traffic has flatlined. Form submissions are down. The design looks tired next to a competitor that launched last year. Something is off, and the longer it sits in the "I'll deal with it later" pile, the more it costs. https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/website-revamp-vs-rebuild https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/website-revamp-vs-rebuild Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:43:00 +1000 It is a conversation that happens in almost every boardroom: "The website looks a bit dated. Should we just give it a refresh, or is it time to start from scratch?" https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/wordpress-seo-developer-checklist https://anthonykeal.com.au/insights/wordpress-seo-developer-checklist Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:43:00 +1000 There is a common myth in the mid-market that "SEO is handled" the moment a developer installs Yoast or RankMath.