The SiteGround academy provides a wide variety of tips, tools, and resources related to WordPress, web performance, website optimization and site security.
As a WordPress Maintenance and Support Specialist at FixUpFox, I manage ecommerce websites on a daily basis. There are a few common mistakes that I see when people are starting up new ecommerce sites that I’d like to go over. Fixing these mistakes before your site is launched means that you’ll be presenting a better experience to potential customers, leading to higher conversion!
Continue reading “The 6 Crucial eCommerce Design Mistakes You Must Avoid”
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 to start.
The goal of a holiday landing page for your organization or business website is typically to convert. This is even more important for eCommerce sites. To boost your conversions, start with a focus for a holiday landing page that aligns with popular search terms for the season that fit the context of what you do. Use that page to help drive conversions that match your goals.
Download our free Holiday Marketing Guide featuring content from SiteGround and our partner experts in ecommerce, email marketing, web design and code optimization to help your business in any holiday season.
Landing pages are targeted standalone web pages, designed to convert customers for a specific offer. They serve various purposes, such as generating leads, collecting email addresses, conducting market research, or capturing direct sales. The key to their effectiveness lies in eliminating barriers to conversion. By removing distracting elements like navigation menus, visual clutter, and competing offers, landing pages guide visitors toward a quick and seamless checkout.
Product pages are part of a larger catalog on your website and offer dynamic features like sorting, filtering, and various interaction options. They usually display the site’s header, footer, and navigation, allowing access to multiple areas of the site. Additionally, product pages may showcase related products or suggestions for items frequently bought together.
On the other hand, landing pages are static, devoid of header and footer navigation, and free from sidebars promoting other products. They focus primarily on a single offer and aim to simplify checkout processes. Often, the offer and checkout are consolidated on the same page or streamlined through a single checkout page.
For businesses with a limited number of service-based packages, landing pages can replace product pages entirely. However, stores offering a vast array of shippable products or digital downloads should reserve landing pages for targeted advertising campaigns.
Not sure how to turn that idea into a great landing page for the holidays? We at Design Shack have a few tips to help you get started and make the most of the upcoming season.
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 crossed the $1 trillion mark for the first time in 2018 and holiday ecommerce sales were responsible for $126 billion.
But, your business can only take advantage of this awesome opportunity to generate sales if you’re prepared for it. That’s just one of the lessons we’ve learned after years of Q4 planning.
Check out these 8 tips to boost holiday sales and conversions.
Download our free Holiday Marketing Guide featuring content from SiteGround and our partner experts in ecommerce, email marketing, web design and code optimization to help your business in any holiday season.
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 for the high-traffic shopping season: your website’s speed.
Your site’s performance and load time play a big role in the experience your customers have on your site. Website visitors can end up spending quite a bit of time on your site, browsing, comparing options, and checking out. Every extra second it takes to load images and complete actions on your site causes friction and can prevent customers from completing their orders.
Luckily, there are several quick and easy customizations you can implement to improve your website. Read on to see three ways we recommend for any website owner looking to increase their site’s performance and their sales this season.
Continue reading “Three ways to speed up your ecommerce website”
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.
Continue reading “The art of networking: Tips for meaningful interactions offline”
When it comes to running a business online, you have a lot more to think about than just your website. Sure, you have to be concerned with ongoing maintenance, including proactive protection like daily backups and site security. But you also have to keep up with client orders and support, invoicing contractors, and keeping paperwork up to date. Your website may be the hub for your business, but there’s more that needs to be done besides keeping it updated. This takes time, and can quickly become overwhelming. We’re going to briefly cover a few things that you can try to save some time while managing your online business.
Continue reading “Time-saving Tips for Managing an Online Business”
Building a strong online presence is key to growing your small or medium-sized business. It all starts with launching your website but goes on with managing it effectively, generating traffic, and growing your audience and customer base. Whichever stage of the online journey you’re in, we have tons of tried-and-true practical tips on how to set up your online presence for greatness this year – both from our team and from guest authors.
The second installment of our Successful Online Presence for Small Businesses series is a guest post by Mike Hale, the owner of a boutique digital marketing and website development agency. He also happens to be one of SiteGround’s WordPress Ambassadors. He’s written an intro to growth hacking where he shares practical tips that can help your business succeed, faster.
Continue reading “What Is Growth-Hacking and How Can It Help Your Business”
When troubleshooting a slow website, there are a few helpful metrics to determine the causes and solutions. One of those metrics is the Time To First Byte (TTFB), a measurement used by all site performance benchmarking tools. It’s an important metric to measure how fast your website starts loading in a specific location or with a particular combination of settings. Understanding TTFB can help you get a better grasp of how website speed works, what’s slowing down your site, and how to fix it.
TTFB measures the time elapsed between the moment a web user makes an HTTP request, like loading a webpage, to the time the first byte is received by the client’s browser. Many use this reading as a rudimentary way to test server speed and while this works, it’s only half the story. If the website you’re trying to load uses a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress, the server must do all the CMS computations required to produce content. The PHP service must load your MySQL database, get the content, calculate the appropriate HTML output, and return it to the website visitor.
If you have a slow CMS, all those steps can take time and you may receive bad TTFB results like 1-3 seconds or more. That doesn’t necessarily mean your hosting server is slow or experiencing issues. More often than not, it means you have too many plugins or extensions, you’re not using a caching system, or you’re using an old PHP version. Of course, it is a totally different story if you are measuring a static HTML page with a slow TTFB. Then, you may want to start your investigation from the server itself, as there are no other factors impacting the performance of your site.
Dynamic Caching is like having your local barista remember your order instead of having to repeat it every time. Because they already know your drink, they can start making it as soon as you walk in, serving it to you that much faster. Caching works in a similar way by storing the data required to serve a webpage for the next time.
Our Dynamic Caching uses NGINX as a reverse proxy. This means that all the computing from your PHP and MySQL services is stored in the server’s RAM. When a visitor gets a cached response from us, it’s like they’re loading a static HTML page — only faster! It’s faster because the content is served from memory and not from the server’s hard drive. Although SSDs are super fast, nothing compares to the server RAM when it comes to speed.
If you have the Dynamic Caching on and still have slow TTFB, there are two things to check:
Not all pages can be fully cached. Checkout pages, carts, and logged in users have special circumstances. That doesn’t mean the TTFB has to be slow. The first step is making sure you’re using PHP 7.1 or above. We have opcache enabled by default for it and WordPress and other CMS apps work dramatically faster. Next, you can use our Memcached service to improve the time your app takes to get data from the MySQL server. Last but not least, check the plugins you’re using. How many are you using, are they high-quality, and what load do they cause to your page rendering process?
Caching tends to camouflage poorly built websites by masking development problems. If your site loads quickly without cache, this means it has good code and is “healthy”. You shouldn’t rely solely on our Dynamic Caching or your own caching plugins to have a fast website.
As mentioned above, TTFB is seriously affected by the networking speed between the server and your browser (or the tool you’re using to test your speed). Using a CDN can improve your site speed if it has endpoints near your geographic location. Note, however, that if you have a CDN like CloudFlare enabled, you’re measuring the TTFB between your browser and the particular CDN endpoint serving your request and not between you and the SiteGround server. If the CDN hasn’t cached your content yet, it has to call the SiteGround server first, get the data, distribute it and then serve it to you. That may cause further delay before the first byte is received.
To get around this, make sure you have caching enabled for your CDN and check whether it has an endpoint close to your geographic target. It’s worth experimenting with different CDN providers in case your visitors are in a part of the world that’s not covered by your current one.