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    Archive Your Instagram Photos on a WordPress Site

    Archive Your Instagram Photos on a WordPress Site Instagram has become one of the indispensable tools for marketers worldwide. Everything from hiring influencers to hawk their wares, to posting stories about how things get made or how they got where they are, if it can be expressed as a photo, Instagram is it’s home. Recent articles in marketing journals have flat out stated that Instagram is the social network.  But Instagram, like all other social media networks, is ephemeral. Content has a very short shelf life on social media and given the time that it takes to craft great Instagram…

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    Tools for Running a Successful Service Business Online

    Tools for Running a Successful Service Business Online Table of Contents Handling Leads Invoicing and Estimates Maintenance Agreements Support Management Mindset There are a lot of things that go into running a service business online beyond finding clients and building things for them. You’ve got to manage contracts, invoices, estimates, proposals, and more. You need to keep clients informed on progress, collect payments, and follow up on those payments that are invariably missed. On top of all of that, you need to have some sort of repeatable process to make projects run smoothly and keep getting in new work. In…

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    Webinar On Building a Website with WordPress

    Webinar On Building a Website with WordPress Table of Contents Questions about WordPress site setup Questions about security  Questions about plugins and themes Questions about posts, pages Questions about transfers Miscellaneous questions Last week we had the webinar “Building a Website with WordPress” where we explained how to easily set up a WordPress site with SiteGround. We received many questions and below, you can see answers to those we didn’t have time for during the webinar. Also, if you’d like to watch the recording, here’s the video of the webinar session. Questions about WordPress site setup Q: Before this webinar,…

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    Podcast Hosting with WordPress on SiteGround

    Podcast Hosting with WordPress on SiteGround Table of Contents Podcasts and Website Hosting Building Your Podcast Website with WordPress on SiteGround  How to Create a Podcast Website in 3 Simple Steps 1. Set your WordPress site and choose your theme 2. Choose your podcasting plugin for additional features 3. Add relevant podcast website content Ready, Set, Go! If you’ve ever considered launching a podcast, this is an excellent moment. The world is in lockdown, which means not only that you probably have more time on your hands, but other people do as well, therefore, are willing to spend more time…

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    When Do You Need to Hire a Programmer

    When Do You Need to Hire a Programmer Table of Contents Three Scenarios Alice Bob Mary Seriously, It Depends UPDATE: In case you’d like to learn more about what goes into planning, building, and deploying a website, we strongly recommend that you watch our “Web Developer AMA (Ask Me Anything) webinar”. In this webinar, our panelists – popular experts Cal Evans, Michelle Schulp, David Bisset, and Mario Peshev – will answer various web development questions and share their own experience on the topic. You can also listen to our podcast episode “Do I REALLY need to hire a developer” where…

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    Webinar About How to Set Up Your Site on the SiteGround Platform

    Webinar About How to Set Up Your Site on the SiteGround Platform Table of Contents Questions about SSL Questions about website transfers Questions about subdomains Questions about WordPress and plugins Questions about domains Questions about email Questions about Site Tools Questions about site creation Miscellaneous questions Last week we had the webinar “How to set up your website on SiteGround platform,” where we showed how to install WordPress or other CMS of choice, transfer a site, point a domain, and more! If you’d like to watch the recording of the webinar, simply click the video. Below, you can also find…

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    Website Challenges 2020: Have You Addressed Them Yet?

    Website Challenges 2020: Have You Addressed Them Yet? Table of Contents Cybersecurity is The Biggest Challenge Improving Website Speed is The Second Biggest Challenge Handling Site Growth is Also In the Top 3 Challenges Monitor your site’s normal growth Be Prepared For the Unexpected In our annual survey, we asked our clients what the biggest website challenges they foresaw encountering in 2020 were, wondering what we could do to help you overcome them. Now that the year is almost halfway through, it’s time to revisit what we’ve done so far to address those challenges and share some insights on how…

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    Faster CPUs, More Data Centers, Bigger GoGeek Plans

    Faster CPUs, More Data Centers, Bigger GoGeek Plans When we migrated our infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform a few months ago, we knew this was not just a one-time event but the base for continuous improvements for our customers. Today we are happy to announce that thanks to this move, we are able to perform a massive upgrade to faster CPUs, we have two more data center locations and our GoGeek plan offers more space than before.  40% Faster Processors  We will update all processors used to host our clients on the Google Cloud infrastructure. The new N2 CPUs perform…

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    164

    Accessibility in Our New Client Area and Site Tools

    Accessibility in Our New Client Area and Site Tools Table of Contents High Contrast Themes in Both Interfaces Keyboard Handling  Screen Reader Support What’s Next? Help us Make our Product Even More Accessible As you probably know, we have recently introduced our new, in-house built interfaces for hosting account and website management. One thing we are truly proud of in both Client Area and Site Tools design is the attention paid to web accessibility. We have invested seriously in implementing multiple features that make our service easier to use for everyone, including people with different levels of motor or visual…

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    Custom Hosting Packages and Roles for your Clients

    Custom Hosting Packages and Roles for your Clients We are excited to introduce two newly released functionalities for our Cloud hosting plans working with Site Tools – the options to create Hosting Packages and define Client Roles. The Hosting Packages feature allows you to tailor the resources allocated to each of the sites hosted on your cloud, while the client role allows you to specify which site management tools will be available to your clients.  Customize the hosting resources of your clients  You can specify what resources each package has access to. With the new Hosting Package feature you can…

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    164

    What’s New in WordPress 5.4

    What’s New in WordPress 5.4 Table of Contents Two new blocks More Coloring options  Fullscreen Editing  Improved navigation and accessibility What’s next Passing the mic to you On March 31st, the latest version of WordPress was released, number 5.4 and named after Nat Adderley, an American trumpet player, continuing the tradition of naming WordPress releases after jazz players. I had the honor to be involved once again as the release co-lead, in the role of coordinator. This was possible with the support of SiteGround, donating my hours to the project. By now, depending on the settings of your auto-update function…

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    188

    Winning Two Stevie Awards for Customer Service and The Hard Work Behind It

    Winning Two Stevie Awards for Customer Service and The Hard Work Behind It Table of Contents Complex Recruitment Process Long and Heavy Training Timely feedback and management support Client Ratings And Easy Escalation Path Optimizing Customer Service Channels Tuning in to What Our Clients Say Year after Year We’re thrilled (and humbled) to announce that SiteGround won the People’s Choice vote and the Silver award in the jury vote for Customer Service Department of the Year in Computer Hardware & Services categoryin the 14th annual Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service. “The Stevies” as they’re known, are one of…

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    Even faster WordPress sites with our Speed Optimizer plugin (formerly SiteGround Optimizer)

    Even faster WordPress sites with our Speed Optimizer plugin (formerly SiteGround Optimizer) Table of Contents Stop render-blocking JavaScripts from slowing down your site Avoid unnecessary video loading with our new lazy load options Use the latest and fastest web image format – WebP Load Google Fonts without slowing down your website Test your site speed with Google Pagespeed  During the past few years, the SiteGround Optimizer plugin has become an essential part of the SiteGround WordPress hosting product. We’re constantly adding new features and improving existing functionality to make your WordPress sites faster. Now, we would like to tell you…

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    Moving to Google Cloud

    Moving to Google Cloud Table of Contents What are the advantages of Google Cloud? Easier scaling and resource management Distributed storage for high data redundancy State-of-the-art network for faster sites Multiple opportunities for new data center locations  100% match with renewable energy We are excited to announce that we have started using the Google Cloud platform to host part of our infrastructure.  We are constantly researching possible new data center options so that we can offer the newest technologies and the highest level of speed and reliability at convenient geographical locations to our clients. During the last year, we have…

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    90

    Moving to PHP 7.3 and Managed PHP Updates

    Moving to PHP 7.3 and Managed PHP Updates Table of Contents How is the Managed PHP update different than what we did before? Making the new PHP version AVAILABLE on all servers Making the new PHP version the DEFAULT choice on all servers How does the Managed PHP work? Managed PHP service switched on by default in our interfaces Manual management option Email notification before the planned change When will we switch to PHP 7.3?  An update of our default server PHP version is planned for February 26, 2020. We are going to move forward to PHP 7.3. The version…

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    We moved from Static Cache to NGINX Direct Delivery

    We moved from Static Cache to NGINX Direct Delivery With the launch of our new Site Tools-based infrastructure we have opened a wide range of opportunities to further improve the loading speed of the websites hosted on our servers. The first change we have already introduced to everyone using Site Tools is the replacement of the Static Cache with a new NGINX Direct Delivery. We no longer serve images, CSS, JS files, and other static content from the server memory, but we use NGINX for direct loading of these files from the SSD instead. This improves browser caching for your…

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    ​How to use social media to get traffic to your shop

    ​How to use social media to get traffic to your shop Table of Contents Review last year’s Black Friday campaign Start planning earlier Get more creative Choose the best products to promote Save time and use social media tool to schedule and post Ecommerce has definitely gained huge popularity in the last few years.  In fact, holiday eCommerce sales reached a total of $126 billion last year — up from $108.2 billion in 2017. That’s a 16.5% increase in online sales! Most people do not feel like going to crowded malls anymore. They prefer shopping online and finding the largest…

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    Santa’s Got a Bag Full of PHP 7.4 Goodies

    Santa’s Got a Bag Full of PHP 7.4 Goodies PHP 7.4 is already available on all SiteGround servers and we have invited our great friend Cal Evans, who is also one of the most admired people in the PHP community, to share which are the best things in the new PHP version.  It’s that time again. Time for Santa to hitch up the ElePHPants that power his sleigh and deliver that present all good developers have been waiting for, the newest release of PHP. I took a quick peek in Santa’s bag and here are my top three features coming…

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    How to Maintain a Fast eCommerce Website

    How to Maintain a Fast eCommerce Website Table of Contents Creating the foundation Setting a baseline Building for the future A real world example of naive bespoke development The code before and after Before: After: Be wary of copy and pasting code Scaling well to maintain speed Whether you’re adding functionality to your website through a plugin, a theme, or carrying out bespoke development, it’s important to review any changes you make and the impact they have on your site performance.  For any website, but especially for ecommerce, performance is extremely important. Your website speed has an impact on how…

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    10 Design tips to maximize sales this shopping season

    10 Design tips to maximize sales this shopping season Table of Contents 1. Shop on any device 2. Save items for later 3. Add items to the cart 4. See what’s in the cart 5. Change the number of items in the cart 6. See how much the purchase will cost 7. Get the items when they’re needed 8. Check out 9. Know what happens next 10. Get in touch If you sell products or services online, you know that a well-designed site is crucial for success. You have probably put a lot of thought into the look and feel…

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    How to monetize digital content

    How to monetize digital content Table of Contents Why sell digital content? Marketing your digital product (before you have it) ESTABLISH YOURSELF AS AN EXPERT BUILD YOUR MAILING LIST CREATE QUICK WINS NURTURE THE LIST Selling your digital product WHAT SHOULD YOU SELL?  WHERE SHOULD YOU SELL? HOW SHOULD YOU SELL IT? Go forth and create! “If you build it, they will come.” The now eternal words that were ominously whispered in the popular 1988 movie Field of Dreams was great advice for the cornfields of Iowa. It even worked for companies like Google and Facebook, whose incredible appeal attracted…

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    Contributing to Open-Source: Insights On the Latest Major WordPress Release

    Contributing to Open-Source: Insights On the Latest Major WordPress Release Plenty of work happens behind the scenes of a regular website. But even more work is needed for the maintenance and development of a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress – the software that powers 34% of all websites on the web. New WordPress versions are released regularly to provide new functionality, security improvements, and all types of fixes. In the case of WordPress, which is an open-source software, a big part of the work is thanks to the voluntary support of dedicated individuals and companies within the WordPress community. …

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    Creating Holiday-Themed Landing Pages

    Creating Holiday-Themed Landing Pages Table of Contents What is a landing page? What is the Difference Between Landing Pages and Product Pages Effective Approaches to Boost Conversions on Holiday Landing Pages Focus on What’s New or What’s Special 2. Use holiday-themed imagery Use holiday language and colors Connect navigation and relevant content Craft Compelling CTAs Link social media and ads  Speeding up your landing page Simplify Checkout It’s never too early to start thinking about the holidays. If you are planning to offer website visitors seasonally-themed promotions or just want to add a festive landing page, now is the time…

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    8 Tips to Boost Holiday Sales and Conversions

    8 Tips to Boost Holiday Sales and Conversions Table of Contents 1. Run a giveaway 2. Plan your email newsletters 3. Perform partner outreach 4. Create deal roundups 5. Optimize your onsite messaging 6. Send gifts to your top customers 7. Provide excellent customer service 8. “End of Year” and “Best of Best” blog posts Q4 is one of the most profitable times for businesses. Thanks to Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas, people are spending a ton of money in the last three months of the year. In fact, according to statistics from eMarketer, holiday retail sales…

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    Top 5 Best Black Friday Email Campaigns Examples For Your Online Store

    Top 5 Best Black Friday Email Campaigns Examples For Your Online Store Table of Contents 1. Abandoned Cart Recovery Emails 2. Welcome emails 3. Order Confirmations 4. VIP and loyalty emails 5. Personalized offers Conclusion This isn’t exactly a groundbreaking revelation—but Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are an enormous, critical time of year for eCommerce businesses. One study found Black Friday generated 3.6 times more eCommerce orders than the average day, and Cyber Monday generated 3.1 times more. And with that, BFCM is also peak season for email marketing. There’s an increase of more than 50 percent in email…

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    Three ways to speed up your ecommerce website

    Three ways to speed up your ecommerce website Table of Contents 1.Enable caching Caching with SiteGround 2.Optimize your images Using the SiteGround Optimizer for images 3.Optimize your front-end code How to minimize code with SiteGround  Everyone knows how important Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the Christmas shopping period are to businesses, both online and offline. To help ecommerce webmasters make the most of this season, we’ve partnered with experts in the web industry and will be sharing informative and inspiring content over the next couple of weeks. To kick things off, let’s talk about one factor often overlooked in preparation…

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    Webinar About the New Client Area and Site Tools

    Webinar About the New Client Area and Site Tools Table of Contents Questions about addon domains:   Questions regarding the File Manager:   Questions regarding backups:   Questions regarding our Reseller program: Questions regarding Joomla!:   Questions related to the switch of the interfaces:   Miscellaneous questions: Last week we featured our new Client area and Site Tools in a webinar. We share the recording in this post together with the answers of all questions to which we could not reply during the live show. A lot of users’ questions were answered by Nikolay and I during the live webinar.…

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    187

    The Technologies Behind Our New Client Area and Site Tools

    The Technologies Behind Our New Client Area and Site Tools Table of Contents The Challenge 1. Speed and Advanced UX 2. Scalability and Security The Solutions 1. Single-Page Applications with React and Redux 2. RESTful APIs and Microservices 3. JSON Web Tokens 4. Orchestration and messaging 5. Prometheus/Grafana for Observability Conclusion We recently announced the launch of our new Client Area and Site Tools. Our COO spoke about it from a business perspective and how important this project is for our future growth. I would like to give you the technical perspective and why we see these new interfaces to…

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    The art of networking: Tips for meaningful interactions offline

    The art of networking: Tips for meaningful interactions offline If you were to ask an IT expert about networking, they might ask what’s your IP address? Jokes aside, working in tech often means interacting with people behind a computer screen, which makes real-life meetings that much more special. As the WordPress Community Manager at SiteGround, it’s my job to attend events around the world and to take some of that online connectivity and apply it to offline community building. Even though I have a ton of fun, there’s a business side to attending events too. I highly recommend individuals and…

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    Powering good, one website at a time

    Powering good, one website at a time Our customers use SiteGround to host a wide variety of projects, but some of our favorites are non-profit websites that use the internet to make the world a better place. That’s why we’re proud to support events like do_actions, annual hackathons held in cities around the world where participants from the WordPress community come together to build websites for local organiзations. On May 25, it’s Caceres’ turn to hold their do_action and we’re pleased to attend and sponsor. Better websites for non-profits around the world In Montreal, Canada, Rotterdam, the Netherlands and now,…

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