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How Do Visitors Find Content On Your WordPress Blog?

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When used as a blog, WordPress’s home page shows a reverse chronological (most recent first) list of articles. Readers scroll through the list, clicking on posts they find interesting. But WordPress also has several other ways for users to find posts. Understanding how they work will help you provide a better experience and increase the likelihood that user will stick around to read more posts.

Aside from the home page, the most common way for a user to browse the posts on a WordPress site is the archive page. Different themes display content on the archive page in different ways, but the most common organizing principles are by date, by theme, and occasionally by tag. Archive pages organized by date don’t need much explaining: typically readers click on a month and are taken to a list of posts published in that month, a more compact version of the home page.

WordPress Taxonomies

Categories and tags deserve a little more explanation. Both are part of the taxonomy (naming) system that WordPress makes available. Categories are broad “sections” into which posts can be organized. A fashion blogger might have categories for articles called: “fashion shows”, “designer spotlights”, “fashion news,” and so on. Categories are broad themes and each post has one category. Categories show up in various places in the WordPress interface, most notably on archive pages and in navigation menus.

Tags are similar to categories: the major difference is that a post can have as many tags as the site owner wants. Tags are usually used to indicate more specific themes within a post. Our fashion blogger might have tags for “shoes”, “manolo blahniks”, “kitten heels”, and “everyday wear”. You’ll notice that all of these tags might be relevant to a single post in any of the categories discussed above.

WordPress Search

I’ve left the most obvious way to find content until last. WordPress includes a fairly powerful search box, which will help readers find specific content. While WordPress’ search functionality is adequate, many WordPress site owners choose to replace it with a more configurable alternative. Relevanssi is a plugin that replaces the default search box with a more capable tool that sorts results by relevance, can do fuzzy searching, and can display search suggestions similar to Google’s.

As you can see, WordPress provides a multitude of tools for helping readers discover content, but they require some input from bloggers. If you take the time to properly tag and categorize posts, the site’s archive pages, navigation, related posts, and search functionality will be much more effective.

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November 2017’s Best Magento, CMS, and Design/Development Content

06 December 2017
by: admin
in: Craft CMS,Magento,Uncategorized,WooCommerce,Wordpress
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Tis the season! We hope you’re ready for the holidays and your site is fully optimized for the coming rush. Still unprepared? Check out this month’s roundup. Get to it before the weather turns frightful! If you’re looking for the same great articles the rest of the year, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.…

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Own Your eCommerce Platform With Magento Or WooCommerce

05 December 2017
by: admin
in: eCommerce,Magento,Uncategorized,WooCommerce
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Since it was founded 12 years ago, Etsy has grown into the leading marketplace for handmade and vintage items. Thousands of creatives and makers have built businesses on Etsy. But there’s a risk in relying exclusively on Etsy to market and sell products, a risk that’s common to all platforms of its type. You don’t control the platform and you don’t set the rules. Ultimately, all platforms are managed to serve the interests of their owners and the investors, a situation that often creates tensions and conflicts with users of the platform.

This is a problem for eCommerce merchants and publishers alike, who eventually find the constraints of their chosen platform limiting. As Etsy seller Lisa Jacobs found:

“As I started to grow, though, I came up against some limitations. What makes sense for Etsy as a whole (all shops look alike and are run the same) started to irritate me.”

Owning the platform you use to sell gives you control over your eCommerce business. When you control the platform, you decide what your store looks like and how it functions, how products are displayed, the extensions you install, and the promotions you run.

Alternatives to Etsy

The best way to reassert control over your eCommerce store is to choose an eCommerce application hosted on specialist eCommerce hosting. The application provides the eCommerce functionality and the hosting provides the bandwidth and infrastructure. Platforms like Etsy combine both aspects of online retail, but by keeping them separate store owners gain more control and the ability to migrate to a different hosting platform or eCommerce application should the need arise.

It’s best to choose a specialist eCommerce hosting provider to ensure that your store benefits from the optimal hosting environment and superior performance.

Magento

Magento is a dedicated eCommerce application capable of supporting everything from small stores to the largest enterprise retailers. Many of the biggest independent eCommerce brands choose Magento because it provides everything they need to build a world-class eCommerce experience. Magento itself includes a comprehensive set of features, and Magento retailers can extend their store with any of thousands of free and premium extensions.

Magento is available in two versions: Magento Community Edition, which is free and full featured, and Magento Enterprise Edition, which is suitable for larger stores and includes additional features and support.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the leading eCommerce plugin for WordPress, the world’s most popular content management system. WordPress is flexible enough to provide an uncompromised eCommerce experience with WooCommerce, and if you’re already familiar with WordPress, you’ll have no problem getting to grips with WooCommerce. Almost 30% of eCommerce stores run on WooCommerce, and it has a large ecosystem of extensions that add enhanced functionality.

Etsy is a solid platform for new eCommerce retailers, but if you need more control and flexibility than Etsy can provide, Magento and WooCommerce on world-class hosting provide everything you need to build a stunning, mobile-friendly, and flexible online retail store.

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eCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce

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What Makes A Theme SEO Friendly?

Photo by Papaioannou Kostas on Unsplash

WordPress themes can make a big difference to the search engine optimization of a WordPress site. For the most part, any well-written theme is SEO-friendly, including the majority of free themes. In fact, some of the best-selling premium themes aren’t so great for SEO because they’re overloaded with features and offer poor performance.

Choosing a theme solely on its purported SEO capabilities isn’t wise. There are many other factors that should influence your choice of theme, but once you have settled on the ideal theme for your project, it’s sensible to consider whether it’s going to provide the best foundation for future search engine optimization.

Performance

As I have already implied, the performance of a WordPress site is taken into consideration by Google and other search engines. All else being equal, a faster site will rank better in search engine results than a slower site. Many factors contribute to site performance, including WordPress hosting, caching, and the use of a content distribution network, but the front-end provided by a theme can cause performance problems, especially if it’s poorly performance optimized and has excessive page weight.

Before you choose a theme, run its demo page through performance testing tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom Tools to get a sense of how much attention its developer has paid to performance optimization.

Validity

Although code validity is less important than many other factors, it’s beneficial to choose a theme that is coded well and that is guaranteed to load properly on browsers and search crawlers. You shouldn’t expect perfection, but it’s worth taking the time to run themes through a code validator.

Mobile-Friendly

Mobile-friendliness is a key aspect of modern search engine optimization. Google will not rank pages in mobile search results if they aren’t optimized for mobile devices.

Any WordPress theme worth considering will include responsive design, but mobile friendliness includes more than basic responsive design: Flash should be avoided, typography should be of a reasonable size, and pages should not be overly large.

If you want to know whether a theme is mobile-friendly, check out Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

Structured Data Support

Schema.org is a standard structured data format that can be used to give extra information to search engines about the content on a page. Rich snippets on search engine results pages depend on Schema.org markup and so does the display of items on many social media networks. The more information you can provide to Google, the better the display and ranking of your pages is likely to be. If you’re unsure whether a theme supports structured data, ask the developer.

It’s important to understand that although a theme contributes to SEO-friendliness, it’s one factor among many. A great theme is worthless if the hosting is slow or the WordPress back-end is improperly optimized. You may want to consider installing a caching plugin and an SEO plugin in addition to choosing an SEO-friendly WordPress theme. And, of course, you should opt for performance-optimized managed WordPress hosting.

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Eight Exceptional WooCommerce Extensions For Your New eCommerce Store

01 December 2017
by: admin
in: eCommerce,Uncategorized,WooCommerce,Wordpress
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Photo by qimono on Pixabay

We recently introduced WooCommerce hosting to our range of performance-optimized eCommerce hosting plans. WooCommerce is the perfect eCommerce platform for retailers familiar with WordPress or who want to take advantage of the simplicity and power of one of the most popular online retail solutions in the world.

Just like WordPress, WooCommerce benefits from a large ecosystem of plugins (called extensions in the WooCommerce world) to enhance and augment its basic features. I’d like to take a look at eight plugins I think new WooCommerce users should be aware of. The extensions are a mixture of free, freemium, and premium plugins that showcase the strength of WooCommerce as an adaptable and versatile eCommerce solution.

WooCommerce Subscriptions

WooCommerce Subscriptions adds advanced subscription support to WooCommerce stores. Subscription-based eCommerce is increasingly popular because subscriptions provide retailers with predictable long-term income and increase the revenue associated with each conversion.

WooCommerce Subscriptions offers multiple billing schedules with automatic payments, built-in renewal notifications, and detailed reports.

WooCommerce Memberships

As the name suggests, WooCommerce Memberships provides site-wide membership plans that can be sold, granted to specific customers, and used to create members-only areas of a store.

Google Product Feed

Google Shopping is an effective marketing channel for many eCommerce retailers, in spite of its recent tussle with the EU. For Google Shopping to accurately represent an eCommerce store’s products, store owners must provide a feed of product data to the Google Merchant Center. The Google Product Feed extension is the easiest way to supply Google with the information it needs.

Smart Coupons

Smart Coupons is the leading coupon solution for WooCommerce. As you’d expect, customers are able to buy coupons for themselves or as gifts, and redeem those coupons on checkout. Smart Coupons is also capable of automatically generating coupons in scenarios specified by the store owner.

MailChimp For WordPress

MailChimp For WordPress isn’t strictly speaking a WooCommerce extension; it’s a WordPress plugin that is fully compatible with WooCommerce and is well worth a look for any eCommerce merchants that use email marketing.

MailChimp for WordPress can add opt-in forms and other email harvesting tools to WooCommerce store, and the details will be synced right to your MailChimp marketing lists.

Product Enquiry For WordPress

This is a simple plugin for eCommerce retailers who want to be responsive to their customers’ questions and requests for information. The Product Enquiry extension includes widgets that allow customers to make an enquiry or request a quote. Requests are sent straight to the store’s owner or sales team by email.

Advanced Woo Search

Any store that sells more than a few products should invest in a world-class search experience, and it doesn’t get much better than Advanced Woo Search, which provides fast, accurate, smart ordered search results to your customers.

WooCommerce Discounts Per Payment Method

This is a simple plugin that does one job: displaying and applying discounts depending on the customer’s chosen payment method.

I’ve only looked at a small number of the available WooCommerce extensions and WordPress plugins that can be used to enhance your WooCommerce store. If experienced WooCommerce users have favorites of their own they’d like to highlight, don’t hesitate to give them a shout in the comments below.

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eCommerce, WooCommerce, WordPress

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What’s Wrong With Security By Obscurity For WordPress?

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We instinctively hide the things we find valuable. It makes sense: if thieves and other bad actors can’t find our valuables, how can they take them? In the digital age, we act on the same instinct. A common security precaution taken by WordPress site owners is to move the login page to a different location; if hackers can’t find the login page, they can’t launch a brute force attack against it. Hiding things, moving them, making it difficult to figure them out — these are examples of security by obscurity.

When I talk to WordPress hosting clients about security, the concept of security by obscurity comes up all the time. Among the common misconceptions I hear is the belief that owners of low-traffic sites don’t need to worry about security — their site is obscure, so it’s inherently secure. In fact, automated scanners regularly check through a large proportion of the web’s IP space looking for vulnerable sites. An insecure site is likely to be hacked even if it’s never had a single visitor. Criminals like sites with large audiences, but they also like any vulnerable site with storage and bandwidth.

An example of the application of security by obscurity from more sophisticated WordPress site owners is changing the default Administrator username because they know criminals will target it.

But there’s a problem with relying on security by obscurity: all it takes is for someone to find what you’re hiding and it’s game over. If your website has a security vulnerability, you might reason that because it’s difficult to find, there’s no point putting in the effort to fix it. If few people visit your site, why update it regularly; even if there is a vulnerability, who is going to be looking for it? If your site is a blog and there’s no obvious financial motive to compromise it, can’t you just cross your fingers and hope for the best?

Security by obscurity does nothing to fix the underlying problem. You might want to continue to use an abandoned WordPress plugin, but if you simply hope that no-one notices you’re using a vulnerable plugin, you’ve done nothing to mitigate the underlying issue. It’s a time-bomb that could go off at any moment.

But as renowned security expert Bruce Schneier points out, “security by obscurity sometimes works.” Security by obscurity isn’t bad per se, but it should be a small part of a site’s security processes. Deleting the “admin” user and choosing a less easily guessed username will make your site a little safer from automated attacks and attacks by inexperienced criminals, but implementing two-factor authentication solves the problem.

Moving your WordPress site’s login page to a non-standard location is likely to confuse bots and reduce the number of brute-force attacks your WordPress site has to cope with, but installing a rate limiting plugin will — for the most part — make life much more difficult for brute force attackers while preventing bots from consuming your site’s resources.

Security by obscurity should not be relied on to keep WordPress sites safe. It should be in the mix, but obscurity is no substitute for security best practices.

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Security, WordPress

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Do Retailers Need To Switch From Magento 1?

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Magento 2 was released almost two years ago and we’ve offered Magento 2 hosting since day one. But many Magento eCommerce retailers have a long history with Magento 1 and aren’t eager to switch, although the process of upgrading isn’t onerous.

I’d like to take a look at some of the reasons retailers should consider moving to Magento 2, and whether those who prefer to stick with Magento 1 are likely to face problems in the near future.

Why Upgrade To Magento 2?

Magento 2 was a long time in the making. Its developers learned a lot of lessons from their years building and supporting Magento 1, lessons that profoundly affected the development of Magento 2. Magento 2 is an eCommerce platform for the modern web.

Enhanced Performance — A lot of attention went into making Magento 2 as fast as it could possibly be. Improvements to Magento 2 include considerably more performant indexes, better Varnish integration, and full-page caching.

An Improved Shopping Experience — For Magento 2, the shopping experience was streamlined, providing a more intuitive interface, a simplified checkout experience, and enhanced capabilities for mobile shopping.

More Efficient Admin Experience — The admin panel is now fully touch-friendly, allowing users to manage their stores from phones and tablets. Additionally, the admin panel is now more logically and intuitively organized, cutting down on the complexity of carrying out everyday store maintenance operations.

Easier Updates — Updates are an essential part of Magento security, and Magento 2 makes it easier than ever to install updates, move between versions, and install the Magento application.

That’s just a fraction of the features available in Magento 2. Retailers who have upgraded to the most recent version of Magento have found the gains to be well worth the move. Magento 2 is the future of the Magento project, and retailers will have to upgrade at some point, but is moving to Magento 2 urgent?

Users of Magento 1 Enterprise Edition don’t have anything to worry about. Support for Magento 1 Enterprise Edition was originally scheduled to end three years after the release of Magento 2. But, earlier this year, Magento announced that it has no plans to end support for Magento 1 Enterprise Edition. Support — including security updates and bug fixes — will continue for the foreseeable future.

The situation is less clear for Magento 1 Community Edition. It’s likely that support for the community version of Magento will end in the near future. However, because Magento 1 remains so popular, it’s possible that the Magento Community will fork the project and continue to provide support. Nevertheless, if your company depends on Magento Community Edition, it’s probably wise to at least make plans to upgrade.

Magento 2 is a fantastic eCommerce application, but if you prefer to remain with Magento 1, it’s unlikely to cause serious problems for the foreseeable future. Hostdedi Magento hosting customers can choose between Magento 1 and Magento 2 when setting up their hosting account, and we continue to support both versions.

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Six Of The Best Magento Educational Resources

As eCommerce platforms go, Magento isn’t challenging to get to grips with, but there is a learning curve. In this article, I’ve collected some of the best Magento educational resources. Each of them has helped me in the past, so hopefully you’ll find them useful too.

Magento U

If you are looking for an in-depth introduction to building and managing a Magento eCommerce store, Magento U should be your first port of call. Magento U was created by the folks behind Magento, and it offers top-class training from some of the most experienced Magento experts in the world.

Magento U has courses to suit almost every role in the eCommerce industry, including retailers, designers, developers, and marketers. Courses take a variety of forms, from traditional class-based teaching and online training from a certified Magento professional to on-demand instructional resources. Magento U is also the best way to gain official Magento certifications.

If you’ve tried Magento U before and found it wasn’t your cup of tea, you might want to take another look. The experience recently underwent a significant redesign, with a simplified user interface, improved course tracking, and more reliable media streaming.

Magento Books

If you prefer to learn at your own pace from books, there are plenty to choose from. I’m going to highlight a couple of the Magento-focused books that I have found particularly valuable.

Learning Magento 2 Administration is a comprehensive guide to running a Magento store that covers everything from product creation to search engine optimization in an easy-to-digest style. If you’re new to Magento (and to eCommerce) this is the book for you.

For those who want to dig deep into Magento’s code and learn how to build custom Magento sites and extend Magento’s core functionality, the Magento 2 Developer’s Guide is a great place to start. It covers the basics, before moving on to more complex topics, including back-end and front-end modification and data persistence.

MageStore

MageStore offers a series of Magento tutorials that focus on the practicalities of managing a busy Magento store. Written by experts who know what they’re talking about, the range of topics reflects issues that will arise for many new eCommerce merchants. Among my favorites are Automating Your eCommerce Store To Save Time And Money and How To Create A Magento 2 Widget.

Magento Stack Exchange

Stack Exchange is an essential resource for anyone who uses Magento. Stack Exchange is a question-and-answer site, but unlike many such sites, Stack Exchange has excellent moderation and high standards. If you have a question to ask about Magento, the chances are that someone on the Magento Stack Exchange has a detailed answer.

Before you post your own question on Stack Exchange, I’d encourage you to use Google and the Stack Exchange search to find out if anyone has asked the same question already.

The Magento Developer’s Cookbook

The Magento Developer’s Cookbook from Firebear Studi is one of my favorite sources of practical solutions to Magento development problems. It’s not a tutorial, but a collection of code snippets that solve problems many developers and Magento users encounter. If you’re having trouble figuring out how to add a particular bit of functionality to a Magento theme or extension, take a look at the recipes in the Magento Developer’s Cookbook.

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Don’t panic Black Friday is here!

23 November 2017
by: admin
in: CraftCommerce,eCommerce,Magento,Uncategorized,WooCommerce
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For the past 10 weeks, we’ve been offering tips and techniques to help gear you up for the holidays. Hopefully, you’ve already adopted some or all of these measures to make sure your site stays alive and kicking for the upcoming season.

If you haven’t yet, then don’t panic. After this weekend, you still have options for

Holiday-proof your site with a CDN

If you use a popular web applications like Magento, WordPress, or something comparable, we’ve made this easy for you. Expand your geographic reach by setting up copies of your server assets worldwide. It won’t matter if your visitor is from London, San Francisco, or Sydney. Your CDN routes those visitors to a copy on a local data center that stores copies of your site’s key assets, accelerating their experience.

Use live chat to boost sales

Live chat is like the salesperson we all wish worked in every physical store. It’s there when your visitors need it, without being overbearing or hard to ignore if they prefer to browse on their own.

Get your holiday social media strategy ready

Customers expect to visit your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages to research your products, connect with other customers, and find exclusive promotions. For store owners, it’s the best opportunity of the year to grow your audience and increase your engagement with customers on social media.

We hope you have a great Thanksgiving and a fantastic season!

Save big on hosting with our own Black Friday sale! Use code BF17 to save 80% your first month on a new hosting service.

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CraftCommerce, eCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce

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GitHub Introduces Security Alerts For JavaScript Projects

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GitHub’s has introduced Security Alerts for JavaScript and Ruby-based projects, with more languages coming soon. The alerts use GitHub’s dependency graph feature, which was introduced last month to provide a visual display of the dependency hierarchy of compatible projects.

JavaScript projects in particular tend to have lots of dependencies, and, until now, there has been no easy way to check for security vulnerabilities in individual dependencies — projects have to trust the software they depend on. As JavaScript becomes increasingly important to the WordPress ecosystem, a tool like this will make it easier to build safe integrations.

Open source projects build on the capabilities of other open source projects. WordPress, for example, depends on Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, among many others — all open source projects that WordPress uses to provide functionality that would otherwise have to be re-created from scratch. The web wouldn’t be what it is today without the ability to reuse code in this way.

However, security vulnerabilities in software can put every user of that software at risk, including other projects that depend on it. The JavaScript ecosystem is massive, with tens of thousands of small modules, each of which might depend on other modules, which depend on other modules, and so on down the line.

As any JavaScript developer knows, even a simple project with a couple of dependencies installed with NPM (the Node Package Manager) can pull in hundreds of dependencies. How does a developer know there isn’t a security issue with one of those packages?

The truth is that they don’t know. They trust the system to find and fix vulnerabilities. Outside of strict government and corporate software projects, no one has the time or the money to check the security status of every library used by their software.

GitHub’s Security Alerts are an attempt to address this problem automatically. GitHub knows about the dependency graph (the tree of packages a project depends on) and can cross reference that information with vulnerability databases. GitHub’s Security Alerts use the National Vulnerability Database of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The feature is turned on by default for public repositories, and will email project administrators when a vulnerability is discovered. It can be turned on by administrators of private repositories if they so desire.

There are already projects that promise to do something similar to GitHub’s Security Alert for JavaScript, including the proprietary Snyk and the open source Audit.js project. But GitHub’s scale — many popular open source projects are hosted on GitHub — gives it an advantage. And although we’ve focused on JavaScript in this article because of the WordPress connection, GitHub is in a good position to roll out the same tool for many different languages, including, eventually PHP.

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Security

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