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The Strategies for Boosting Your Website Traffic and Growing Your Online Presence

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Ask a marketing expert or business owner what they want most, and they’ll likely tell you “more customers.” What typically comes after customers on a business’s wish list? More visitors to their website.

There are many ways to increase traffic to your website. In today’s article, we’ll introduce you to 25 of them, including some ways to increase traffic to your website for free.

1. Advertise

This option is so apparent that we will look at it first. Paid search, social media advertising, and present advertising (try our Smart Ads Creator!) are great ways to attract visitors, develop your brand, and get your website noticed.

Tailor your paid strategies to your goals – do you want more visitors, or do you also want to increase conversions? Each paid network has its pros and cons. Think carefully about your goals before you whip out your credit card.

If you’re hoping that more visitors to your site will also lead to more sales, you must target keywords with high commercial intent as part of your paid search strategies. Yes, competition for these keywords can be fierce (and expensive), but it can be worth it.

2. Get Social

It’s insufficient to produce great content and hopes people find it – you must be proactive. Among the best ways to drive traffic to your website is to use social media channels to promote your content.

Twitter is ideal for short, concise (and enticing) links, while Google++++ can help your site show up in personalized search results, which seems to be especially effective in B2B niches.

If you’re a B2C product company, image-heavy social sites like Pinterest and Instagram can help you attract a lot of attention. Here’s more advice on how to make the most of social media marketing.

3. Mix It Up

There’s no one-size-fits-all recipe for content marketing success, despite what some would have you believe. To vary the length and format of your content to make it as appealing as possible to different readers.

Mix shorter, news-based blog posts with longer content and videos, infographics, and data-driven posts for maximum impact.

4. Write Irresistible Headlines

Headlines are one of the essential parts of your content. Without a compelling headline, even the most extensive blog post won’t get read. Master the art of headline writing.

Think carefully about your headline before you hit “publish.”

5. Pay Attention to On-Page SEO

Think SEO is dead? Wrong thinking. Optimizing your web content for search engines is still a valuable and beneficial technique. Are you making the best use of alt text from images? Are you creating internal web links to new content? What about meta descriptions? On-page SEO optimization doesn’t have to take forever and can help you increase your organic traffic.

6. Target Long-tail keywords

Have you covered your high-intent keywords and popular keywords? Then it’s time to target Long-tail keywords as well. Long-tail keywords make up a large portion of search queries on the internet. That means you’re missing out if you’re not targeting them as part of your paid search or SEO efforts.

7. Start Guest blogging

Before you say it – no, Guest blogging is not dead, although you may have heard it. A guest post on a reputable site can increase blog traffic to your site and incidentally build your brand.

Be warned, though – Guest blogging standards have changed radically in the last eighteen months, and spammy tactics can result in stiff penalties. So proceed with caution.

8. Invite Others to Guest Blog on Your Site

Guest blogging is a two-way street. Don’t just publish content on other blogs; invite people from your niche to blog on your site. They will likely share and link to their guest article, which could bring new readers to your site.

However, make sure you only post quality, original content with no spam links because Google+++ cracks down on low-quality guest blogs.

9. Go After Referral Traffic

Instead of trying to convince other sites to link to you (a tedious and time-consuming process), create content that is just begging to be linked to.

10. Post Content to LinkedIn

LinkedIn has become far more than a means to find a new job. The world’s largest social network for professionals is now a valuable publishing platform, which means you should regularly post content on LinkedIn. This can drive traffic to your website and raise your profile in your industry – especially if you have a medium to a huge following.

11. Implement Schema Microdata

Implementing Schema (or any other microdata format) doesn’t necessarily increase traffic to your site, but it does make it much easier for search engine bots to find and index your pages.

Another benefit of using schema for SEO is that it can lead to better rich site snippets, improving click-through rates.

12. Link Internally

The strength of your link profile depends not only on how many sites link to you but also on your internal link structure. When creating and publishing content, look for opportunities for internal links.

Not only does this help with search engine optimization, but it also leads to a better, more helpful experience for the user – the cornerstone for more visitors to your site.

13. Interview Industry Thought Leaders

Do you think interviews are only for the big guys in the industry? Send out emails asking to interview thought leaders in your industry and post the interviews on your blog. You’ll be amazed at how many people agree to talk to you if you ask them.

Not only will the name recognition increase your credibility and drive traffic to your website, but the interviewee will likely share the content, further increasing your reach.

14. Don’t Neglect Email marketing

Many companies focus on attracting new customers via content marketing that they ignore much more traditional methods. Email marketing can be a powerful tool, and even a moderately successful email send can significantly increase traffic.

Just make sure you don’t bombard your customers with constant emails about every single innovation in your business. Also, don’t neglect the power of word-of-mouth marketing, especially from people already using your products or services.

Even a friendly email reminder about a new service or product can help you increase your traffic.

15. Make Sure Your Site is Responsive

When surfing the Internet taking location specifically on desktop PCs is long gone, the days. Today, more people than ever are using mobile devices to access the Internet. If you force your visitors to dig and scroll through your website, you’re asking them to go somewhere else.

Even if you have a simple website, you need to make sure it’s accessible and comfortable to view on various devices, including smaller smartphones.

16. Make Sure Your Site is Fast

Have you ever waited thirty seconds for a website to load? Neither have I. If your website takes forever to load, your bounce rate will skyrocket.

Ensure your pages are as technically optimized as possible, including image file size, page structure, and third-party plugin functionality. The faster your website loads, the better.

17. Foster a Sense of Community

People want to speak their minds and express themselves on topics they care about. Therefore, building a community on your website is a great way to start a conversation and drive traffic to your site.

Implement a robust commenting system using third-party solutions like Facebook Comments or Disqus, or develop a specialized discussion forum where visitors can ask questions. However, don’t forget to manage your community to ensure minimum standards of decency are met.

18. Make Yourself Heard in Comment Sections

You probably visit at least a few websites relevant to your business regularly.

Comments don’t necessarily lead to an immediate increase in traffic, but making a name for yourself by writing insightful, thought-provoking Comments on industry blogs and sites is a great way to get your name out there – which in turn can lead to more traffic to your site.

Remember that, as with guest posts, quality, and relevance are essential – you should share with other people in your niche and not spamming links on unrelated sites.

19. Examine Your Analytics data

Google Analytics is an important source of information on almost every conceivable aspect of your website, from the most popular pages to visitor demographics. Maintain a close eye on your Analytics data and use this information to optimize your advertising and content strategies.

Take note of which posts and pages are proving most popular. Review visitor data to see how, where, and when your website traffic is coming in.

20. Get Active on social media

It’s not enough to distribute content through social channels – you also need to participate in the community actively. Do you have a Twitter account? Then participate in group discussions with relevant hashtags. Does your audience leave Comments on your Facebook posts?

Answer questions and engage with your readers. Nothing scares people away faster than using social media as a broadcast channel – use social media as it’s meant to be used and interact with your fans.

21. Submit Your Content to Aggregator Sites

First, a note: don’t spam on Reddit and other similar sites in hopes of hitting the “jackpot” of traffic because it’s not going to happen.

Members of communities like Reddit are exceptionally savvy about spam disguised as legitimate links. Still, it doesn’t hurt to submit links that this audience will find helpful every once in a while. Choose a relevant subreddit, submit your content, and watch the traffic roll in.

22. Incorporate Video into Your Content Strategy

Text-based web content is all well and good, but videos can be a valuable tool for attracting new guests and making your website more engaging. The information shows that details retention is significantly higher with visuals than with text. This means that video marketing is a great way to grab – and hold – your audience’s attention while driving traffic to your website.

23. Research the Competition

You’re at massive cons if you’re not using software like BuzzSumo to discover what your competitors are doing. These services aggregate the social performance of certain websites and content to show you at a glance what topics are resonating with readers and making the rounds on social media in particular.

Search out what people are reading (and talking about) and mimic that kind of content to drive traffic to your website.

24. Host Webinars

People love to learn, and webinars are a great way to share your knowledge with your eagerly waiting audience.

Combined with an effective social media advertising campaign, webinars are a great way to drive traffic to your website. Send out an email about a week before the event and a “last chance to register” reminder the day before the webinar.

Be sure to archive the presentation so you can view it later and promote your webinars on social media. If you’re wondering how to run a webinar, click the link for some tips.

25. Attend Conferences

Regardless of the industry, you’re in, there are probably at least one or two major conventions and conferences relevant to your business. Attending these events is a good idea – speaking at them is even better.

Even a half-decent speaking engagement is a great way to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry and get your website noticed.

Maintaining website traffic

Maintaining website traffic refers to the ongoing effort to sustain the level of visitors or users who regularly access a website over a period of time.

Here are some points to Maintaining website traffic:

1) Make Sure That Your Site Is Up-To-Date

You need a good site design that is up-to-date with the latest trends in web development. This will help keep visitors on your page longer as they can see what has changed since their last visit. You should also make sure that all of your pages have been updated within the past year or so. If not, then it may be time for an update!

2) Create A Blog On Your Website

Blogging helps you build authority online by creating content that people want to read. It allows you to share information that other websites don’t cover well enough. When someone visits your blog, they’ll often stay there long after visiting your main website because blogs tend to be more engaging than static sites.

3) Add Social Media Links To Your Page

Adding social media links will allow people who visit your site to connect with other users through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. This is an effective way to increase the number of visits to your site as it helps build relationships between your company and its customers.

4) Use Keywords And Tags Properly

Keywords are words that describe your products or services. They’re used when searching Google or Bing. Using them correctly increases your chances of being found by potential clients. For example, if you sell dog food, use “dog” and “food” as tags instead of just using one word like “dogs”. The same goes for any product or service you offer.

5) Optimize Images & Videos For Search Engines

Images and videos are great ways to attract new visitors to your site but search engines won’t rank these items very highly unless they contain certain keywords. So, before uploading pictures or video files to your site, add relevant text descriptions to each image/video file. Also, include those keywords throughout the body copy of your webpage.

6) Include Calls-To-Action

A call to action is something that encourages action from readers. CTA’s usually appear at the end of paragraphs or sentences. Examples include “Click Here Now” or “Buy Now”. These types of CTAs work best when paired with images or videos.

What is included in the Website Maintenance Services List?

We’ve already explained why website maintenance matters. Let’s look at the essential services part of the Website Maintenance Services List.

Here is the list you need to keep an eye on regarding website maintenance.

1. Scan for Vulnerabilities

Website security should be the primary reason why websites need to be maintained. Regularly scanning your website ensures that it isn’t hacked or taken over. Check for the spam messages that may have passed through your filters.

2. Repairs and Fixes

Check both internal and external links. A link checker can be run to look for broken links that frustrate the users and reduce the search engine rankings.

3. Browser Compatibility Testing

Ensure that all aspects of your site work well in the most commonly used browsers. You need to ensure your website works well for everyone.

4. Software Update

The critical software your site relies on should be updated. For example, CMSs, themes, and plugin systems. Also, upgrade non-critical software if they are worth applying.

5. Website Backups

Database backups would be automatically performed weekly and restored at least once a month.

6. Site Speed

This is a significant point to check. Use Yahoo’s YSlow or Google Pagespeed Insights to identify the issues slowing your site’s speed.

7. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

With SEO, you identify the issues that affect your site’s ranking so that you can fix them.

8. Analytics

Check the crucial metrics of your website and the trends in those metrics using the Google Analytics dashboard.

9. Functionality

Ensure that you check all the essential functions, including filling out forms, contacting people, and checking out.

10. Website Content

Updating content on websites makes them fresh and up-to-date for users and search engines alike. So, regularly review your content, fix any mistakes, and upload the updated information with targeted words in an improved style.

Well, these are the basics of website maintenance services. Businesses may go deeper into their websites based on their websites, but they shouldn’t ignore them. It’s essential to nurture and maintain your website if you want to succeed online. Maintenance ensures the web page’s performance is at its peak. It removes errors, secures the web page against attacks, and delivers the best user experience to the customers.

Why is website maintenance necessary?

Potential customers are most often searching for relevant information, quality content, and expert advice at the same time. This is when website maintenance becomes crucial. Regular content revisions will keep your website engaging and maintain a high search engine ranking.

There are numerous other reasons to keep your website updated regularly, including:

Enhances User Satisfaction

View your website from the perspective of a visitor. If the loading speed is slow and there is broken content everywhere, you will get annoyed. However, you will be pleased if the website is well-maintained, with good web design and necessary details. Your top priority is to provide an excellent user experience. Visitors will be impressed with a well-designed website, encouraging their use of your products and services. If you suggest your brand to family members and friends, they become your brand promoters.

Improves Your SEO

Google prefers websites that are well-optimized and provide the best value for their visitors. If your website’s redirection pages aren’t working, your company’s search engine ranking will suffer. If Google finds any issues on your website, you may be deindexed. Your website’s primary purpose is to attract visitors, so updating your site with relevant content, news, keywords, etc., can help keep you current.

Boosts Protection

Security is the most important thing when it comes to websites. Regularly updating your website with new features and security patches is essential for keeping your site safe and secure. Hackers may be interested in websites that haven’t been updated for a long time. If you fail to address security issues for a prolonged period, you may face downtime or even total business failure.

What does website maintenance cost?

Keeping your site consistent and working requires regular maintenance. There are many factors to consider when choosing a hosting web service, including website design, market­ing tactics, frequent software updates, and domain and storage costs.

Moreover, the platform and functionalities you select when creating a website impact its ongoing costs. The costs of using a website builder versus a content management system will be considerably different.

All domain name renewal fees, web hosting plan rates, and SSL license charges are included in website maintenance costs since they’re required to keep your website online. Next, there are the costs of email accounts, specialized tech­nical support, and eCommerce serv­ices, which vary depending on the kind of website you’re building.

Other costs such as web hosting, plugins, and search optimization (SEO) help improve the site’s operation and increase traffic. The amount of money spent on each category depends on the needs of your website, so you need to determine how much money you want to spend on each category. We’ll look at nine essential website maintenance costs to help you plan your website budget.

Before choosing a web maintenance plan:

  1. Make a list of your needs.
  2. Compare different service providers’ offers.
  3. Look at the estimated website maintenance costs for different types of websites.

The following are the critical website maintenance costs:

  • $10-$20 per year for a domain name.
  • SSL certificates are available for $0-$50 per month.
  • Web hosting services range from $2.75 to $15.00 per month.
  • Email hosting costs between $1 and $5 per month.
  • $0-$1,000 per month for technical support.
  • $0-$800/month for search engine optimization.
  • Updates to the content – $0 – $3,000 in total.
  • $0-$200/month for general updates.

You’re all prepared to keep up the excellent job with all these steps in mind!

Now that you know the average website maintenance cost, you can create an appropriate budget for website maintenance. The output is a list of sentences with paraphrasing. You should keep in mind that your costs may vary depending on the type of site that you’re running: an eCommerce site accepting payments on-site will require more SSL security, for example, than a personal blog. You may be able to get most of the services you need for free if you use a website builder. However, some basic fees will be included with your plan.

Website maintenance checklist:

Following an effective maintenance plan guarantees that your site continues serving as one of your most valuable marketing tools. We’ve created a checklist of actions to keep your website up to date-and running smoothly for your visitors.

 Here’s a comprehensive list of website upkeep tasks to keep in mind:

1. Website Maintenance Checklist every week

  • Verify for 404 errors and, if any exist, correct them.
  • To enhance SEO traffic, publish one or more blogs.
  • Check to see that all of the forms are functioning correctly.
  • Create a blog article to promote in your community.
  • Look for any broken links.
  • Plugins and software that are vital to the system should be updated.

2. Website Maintenance Checklist every month

  • Perform a security audit.
  • Check loading speed and resolve any errors as soon as possible.
  • Analyze the most important statistics.
  • Ensure that your website is visible in local searches.
  • Make changes to the material to make it more relevant.
  • Analyze the most and most negligible prevalent content on the website.

3. Website Maintenance Checklist quarterly

  • Look for any areas where you can improve the content.
  • Graphics and images should be updated.
  • Meta descriptions and titles should be updated.
  • Keep track of your website’s backups.
  • Check if popups, forms, and other features are functioning correctly.
  • Examine your website on the most widely used browsers and devices.
  • Examine the uptime logs – if it’s less than 99.9%, take action.
  • Check to see if your site is mobile-friendly.

4. Website Maintenance Checklist every year

  • Consider updating your website’s design.
  • Revise the copyright information in the footer as well as any references.
  • Domain names should be renewed.
  • Examine the content for accuracy.
  • Your best-performing blogs should be updated.

Wrap Up

The web is constantly changing, and so are the standards used by social media platforms, web browsers, and other websites. You might have heard, for example, that SSL is becoming a requirement for websites and that not having it could harm how people perceive and find your website. SSL is a great security measure for your website. Still, it’s not easy to install, and the work can usually be compensated under a regular monthly maintenance contract if appropriately managed.

A great way to supplement your monthly revenue is to offer a website maintenance service. It will not only improve your sales but will also keep your current customers engaged. Eventually, this will aid in your growth. It may require some initial investment, but you’ll be successful before you know it as long as you’ve got the larger picture in mind.

We hope that this article has helped you see how important it is to include website maintenance services as part of your website design process and to keep your website healthy in the long run.

Contact mywebmaintenance.com if you need a new website or want to upgrade your present one. Aside from website design and construction, we can also assist you with custom web development services, and even more.

We Fix, Host, & Maintain WordPress Websites

At mywebmaintenance.com we provide instant WordPress technical support. We also provide bespoke web hosting & expert management for thousands of WordPress websites. Use us for quick one-time fixes, or partner with us for ongoing WordPress website maintenance.

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Why it’s Essential to Update a WordPress Website?

Manage Website, SEO, Website maintenance, Website Security, WordPress website / By / / , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

WordPress holds a significant market share of 35% amongst all websites globally.

One of the reasons for its popularity is its simplicity, cost-effectiveness, wide range of pre-built plugins, strong community support, ease of updates, search engine optimization advantages, and other contributing factors.

In the world of web development, updates aren’t just important – they’re crucial! They’re the superheroes that keep your website safe and robust, with the power to enhance performance and security. And if you’ve ever been nagged to update your phone or computer, you know that a little TLC (Tender Loving Care) goes a long way in keeping your digital life running smoothly.

Updating a website provides clear advantages to a business. Several of these advantages include:

  • Improved visual appeal
  • Offer great content
  • To keep up with the SEO
  • CMS for editing content
  • Keeping your website fresh
  • Keep website secure
  • Increase website effectiveness
  • Change the way you do business
  • Usability
  • Enhance loading times

Check out our Article: Why is website maintenance necessary for businesses in 2023?

Updating your WordPress site is an essential task to consider.

  • The latest version of WordPress is being used by 22% of WordPress sites.
  • The official WordPress directory contains over 54,000 plugins, and new ones are added daily.

The WordPress platform is a security fortress, with regular testing and updates to keep it performing at its peak. No loopholes allowed! Unleash the power of WordPress updates! Like your trusty apps, mobiles, and computers, these updates guarantee a seamless user experience and unlock new features. So, update away and say goodbye to pesky issues! As you work your magic on your WordPress site, don’t forget that your trusty plugins need some love too! Please give them a little attention by testing and updating them.

Regular updates to a WordPress site are essential for maximizing its features, although some people may choose to avoid them as they perceive them to be unnecessary tasks.

Various Updates are available for WordPress to enhance your Website.

Security Updates

Security UpdatesAccording to Wp White Security, free automated tools can detect vulnerabilities in 73.2% of popular WordPress installations.

According to Sucuri’s investigation, a significant portion (36%) of hacked WordPress sites utilized outdated versions.

For a WordPress site to be effective, it should contain relevant information for the business and its customers. Security updates are an essential factor to consider for the safety of sensitive information. As cyber-attacks on WordPress websites become more frequent, website owners must prioritize protecting their information, details, and passwords. Implementing necessary security updates can effectively prevent unauthorized access to websites by malicious software or hackers.

Regular security updates are necessary to protect your website from potential threats from hackers and prevent any problems from affecting your visitors. Delaying these updates increases the risk of compromising your site’s security. Outdated software allows hackers to exploit vulnerabilities and gain access to your site to steal sensitive information.

Features Updates

Features UpdatesWordPress typically releases new major versions every 152 days on average.

Updating your website’s core features is essential to provide a better user experience and staying up-to-date with technology. This modernization will bring new capabilities to your website. Feature updates are not frequent but can make a significant impact on visitors. Monitoring the features during the update is essential to create the best user experience possible.

Performance updates

Performance updatesResearch has shown that even a 100-millisecond load time delay can significantly decrease conversion rates, with a drop of up to 7%.

Improvements to website performance can have mutual benefits for both the website owner and its users. Regular performance updates for your software and plugins can help to identify and resolve glitches or bugs, ensuring a smoother experience for your website visitors. Regular website performance updates can enhance the visitor experience and ensure its proper functionality. Implementing this measure can prevent visitors from encountering issues while browsing the website. If individuals are required to vacate the premises, it could potentially detrimentally affect your business.

Also, check out our Article: How to Select the most suitable WordPress Themes for your website’s Requirements.

Upgrade your WordPress site ASAP! Here are the top reasons why you should do it now!

Don’t let your website become a sitting duck for cyber attacks! Keep your WordPress updates up-to-date and stay one step ahead of potential risks. The proposed change may result in challenges for business and website users. Listed below are some reasons why updating your WordPress site may be beneficial.

Experience a new level of Excellence with our Enhanced Features!

The updated version of WordPress provides several advantages. Your website will have access to several new and improved features that can increase its strength and versatility. Previously restricted tasks will become simplified and more easily completed with the update. In version 3.0 of WordPress, users were provided with multi-site installations and custom navigation menus, while in version 3.1, the Admin bar was added for more straightforward navigation between sites.

Thanks to adding new features, WordPress development has become increasingly straightforward and impressive with each update. The WordPress 4.1 release included the addition of inline image editing, and the 4.2 updates included updates to plug-ins.

The latest stable version of WordPress, 5.2, includes updates such as improvements to accessibility and additions of new icons on the dashboard, such as Instagram and BuddyPress. The Plugin Compatibility Checks feature includes an automatic check to determine if the PHP version on your site is compatible with installed plugins. WordPress has a mechanism to prevent compatibility issues by not allowing the activation of a plugin that requires a higher version of PHP than what is currently being used by the site.

Enjoy Superior Performance

When developing websites, priority is given to user-friendliness and performance by website owners. After completing your website updates, a comparable experience will be achieved. The website maintains a steady high-performance level for all visitors, without fluctuations. An examination is underway to determine the effect of past WordPress updates on website performance.

  • We observed that websites that updated to the latest version of WordPress had improved ease of use when executing complex queries.
  • The latest version of WordPress has resulted in improved JavaScript performance for navigation menus.

Optimizing a website with quality performance is crucial for SEO. After updating the website, ensuring it functions to its full potential is essential.

Guaranteed Compatibility

Keep your WordPress website running smoothly by staying ahead of the game and keeping your software and plugins in sync! Don’t let compatibility issues slow you down – update regularly for a seamless user experience. Discovering that your new website plug-in and outdated WordPress version don’t play nice together is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole – a frustrating and time-consuming experience. Don’t let your WordPress site fall behind! Keep it up-to-date by updating the version and staying compatible with the latest and greatest plugins. Don’t be left in the digital dust! Upgrade to the latest WordPress version and experience all the exciting new features waiting for you.

Ensure that your Website is Appropriately Secured

Did you know that the web world is buzzing with WordPress fever? This open-source software is a crowd favorite, with a whopping 35% of websites worldwide rocking the WordPress platform. Unfortunately, WordPress’s widespread popularity has made it a prime target for malicious hackers. Hackers are like relentless treasure hunters, constantly scouring the source code of websites in search of coveted data to steal.

As cyber warriors, security experts bravely navigate the treacherous terrain of bugs and security fixes, fearlessly studying the intricate codes that keep our digital world safe. When it comes to security breaches, WordPress doesn’t play around. They’re like the superheroes of the web, swooping in to save the day once that vulnerability meter starts ticking. With determination and skill, the WordPress team springs into action when a report is filed, crafting a wizardly update that specifically targets the issue and banishes it for good!

  • According to Sucuri, there was an increase in WordPress infections from 83% in 2017 to 90% in 2018.

Protect your website from cyber-attacks! Upgrade to the latest version of WordPress and keep your digital assets safe and secure. Stay ahead of the hacking game by keeping up with your site’s latest WordPress themes and plugins. Don’t let those pesky hackers get their grubby little hands on your precious content! Don’t leave your website’s safety to chance – make this one smart choice and lock down your online fortress for good!

Easy Adaptability to Change

As you dive deeper into the WordPress world, you’ll become best buds with its functions and feel like a pro navigating its features. Are you afraid to take the leap and upgrade to the latest version of WordPress? Don’t be! It’s time to embrace the change and unlock new possibilities for your website. Say goodbye to mediocre website management and hello to the powerful and updated features of the latest WordPress version!

Don’t wait any longer to elevate your online presence – switch today and watch your website soar to new heights of success. By consistently refreshing your website, you’ll elevate the user experience to a new level of awesomeness. By upgrading to the latest version of WordPress, you’ll not only make your life easier, but you’ll also unlock a world of practical functionalities that’ll make your website sing like a bird on a sunny day. So don’t hesitate, make the change and embrace the endless possibilities!

Bug Fixtures

Don’t let pesky bugs ruin your WordPress experience – update your site and say goodbye to those glitches for good! Beware, fellow web developers, the presence of pesky bugs in your website is highly probable if your code contains any sneaky loopholes. Say goodbye to pesky bugs on your website with the magic of regular and effortless WordPress updates. Each new WordPress release is like a superhero swooping in to save the day by squashing pesky bugs from the previous version. Don’t let pesky project problems hold you back! It’s time to upgrade to the latest and greatest version and soar to new heights of success.

Better Experience for the Visitors

Every website aims to conquer the digital world and achieve its ultimate purpose. Whether you’re looking to rake in some cash or provide visitors with unbeatable value, your website can be expertly crafted to achieve both! In the fiercely competitive online market, captivating visitors is vital to achieving your goals. So, let’s pull out all the stops and keep those clicks coming! Revamp your online presence and exceed visitors’ expectations by keeping your WordPress website up-to-date.

Also, check out our Article: Optimize Images: What Is WebP In WordPress?

What are the Indicators that suggest a Website needs updating?

That is a straightforward solution. Upon logging into your WordPress site, the dashboard will display a highlighted screen at the top left, just below the home button, as depicted in the accompanying image. By clicking on that, you can discover the current version you are using and also the most recent available version.

wp-update

Before that.

It is recommended to prioritize taking a backup well in advance.

Can you explain the reason?

It is essential to ensure that the plugins used on your WordPress website are compatible with the latest version. A potential compatibility issue could result in your website being taken down. To solve the issue, it is necessary to either restore the previous version or substitute the plug-in with an alternative.

Say goodbye to the fear of losing your precious data! With countless free and paid plugins, you can quickly secure your backups with just one click.

Wrapping it up

Keep your WordPress site fresh and fabulous by updating it regularly – guaranteeing it will reign supreme every time. Rest easy knowing your website is fully protected and operating at peak performance without interruptions. Your website’s success depends on attracting visitors and generating business, and with regular updates and plug-ins, you’ll be unstoppable!

We’d be happy to discuss our services if you’re looking for WordPress website services to help you increase your website traffic. Contact us now.

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Quick & easy steps: How to host a website in 2023?

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Do you want to run your website? Then the first and most crucial question you must ask yourself is how to host a website (if you have already registered your domain name). However, there are numerous self-hosted platforms on the internet through which you can easily create and host a website.

Many things need to be clarified about hosting a website that says you require special knowledge or technical skills to host a website. But that’s another topic that we’ll cover in another post. For now, however, we’ll focus on the beginners who need to learn the ABCs of hosting a website and all the essential steps involved.

That is entirely untrue

With the proper guidance and approach, anyone can host their website in simple steps. Therefore, in this blog post, we will respond to all the essential inquiries of newbies about holding a site, such as How to hold an internet site free of charge? Exactly how to organize an internet site with a domain? How do I organize my very first site? And so forth.

So stay tuned and read this article till the end. This way, you will learn everything about web hosting in no time.

Let’s get started!

What does hosting a website mean?

Hosting a website means renting a unique space, such as servers or computers, where you can place your website files. This way, anyone can quickly get access to your content. In other words: Let’s say you rent a plot of land where you need to build your house and store all the necessities of life.

In this situation, the story is your Webhosting, your home is your website, and the life necessities are the site submits you have saved. This example helps you understand web hosting better.

For your website to be easily accessible to other people on the internet, you must install a special software called web server on these servers or computers. Its primary function is sending or receiving browser requests to the server.

I know that all these terms sound technical, but you don’t have to worry about it. Several online companies offer all these services at very affordable prices. To your surprise, even a few of the most well-known tech giants, like Netflix and Siemens, have their websites hosted on AWS (Amazon Web Services).

However, only a few companies can host their services on their servers. For example, Amazon, a giant e-commerce platform, has hosted its solutions on Amazon Web Provider, and Google, a giant internet search engine of types, has hosted its services on the Google Cloud System.

All this is possible because these tech giants have human resources, IT infrastructure, technological resources, and substantial financial support.

Similarly, some companies offer fully managed web hosting services for hosting websites.

Related: How does web hosting work? And what kinds of web hosting are there?

What to consider before hosting a website?

How do you host a website before we get to the topic? There are some things you require to consider before proceeding.

  1. Domain name registration
  2. The right web hosting provider

Before you host a website, you first need to register a different domain name for your website. That is the address of your website that anyone can use to access your website. For example, if you type Example.com into your browser’s address bar, you will be redirected directly to the website.

Another important point when hosting a website is choosing the right hosting provider. While there are many options, which one is excellent for you is the most critical question.

But don’t worry; we’ll show you how to choose the right web hosting provider that will meet all your website needs without leaving you out of pocket.

Related: Shared vs Managed WordPress Hosting: The Key Differences

How to host a website: Step-by-step guide

1. Decide on the type of your website

Before you start looking for a hosting website, you initially need to determine what type of website you wish to develop. Whether it is a specific blog site or an eCommerce store. Different website-specific niches have different demands and, consequently, different web hosting plans.

➢There are mainly two types of internet sites you can locate online

  • Static websites: These types of websites can be created using simple HTML codes or any website creation software. These websites are straightforward and usually consist of only 1-2 pages. The content of these websites is static; if you make any changes or edits to your website, you must upload it to the server again. These websites usually have low cost and low maintenance, but they need more functionality and offer an e-commerce option.
  • Dynamic websites: Dynamic websites are modern websites whose content can be changed in real-time. These websites are resource intensive and require fast servers and high-end security. Any edits or content updates are done on both the servers and the client. You can add additional features and functionality to make your site interactive and build a complete eCommerce store.

Both types of websites require different resources. After all, you don’t want to pay for advanced web hosting services that are not required for your simple website.

2. Select the right web hosting for your website?

Since there are various options, users can quickly become confused and choose the wrong web hosting service. However, before making concrete decisions, you should learn about the different hosting platforms available.

There are a variety of host platforms that cover all individual teams and their website requirements. The only thing you require to do is to match one of the most suitable host solutions with your website needs.

➢These are some of the hosts plans that you will typically locate

Shared Organizing is just one of the most beginner-friendly host strategies that are budget-friendly and preferred. Although all internet sites have their accounts and qualifications, the expense of running the web server is shared. In shared hosting, several sites are hosted on the same physical web server and share the readily available web server resources.

  • Virtual Private Server: It is the best alternative to shared hosting, where all websites are hosted on one powerful and fast web server. This server software application is well configured and practically split right into several areas to ensure that each internet site can work separately. This holding plan ideally matches customers who want above-average server efficiency without endangering safety and paying high costs.
  • Dedicated organizing: In dedicated holding, websites are hosted on the entire server, which results in faster, more powerful, and more secure websites that are also more expensive. This hosting plan is best suited for websites with high traffic, such as eCommerce.
  • Managed WordPress hosting: Since most websites are built on the WordPress CMS, several providers now offer a completely managed WordPress hosting solution. This web hosting is optimized for WordPress sites and manages your site without user intervention. These Managed WordPress hosting servers usually have the fastest dedicated servers, top-notch security, and various add-ons.
  • Cloud holding: These types are advanced and utilize multiple web servers to host several websites. Since the website is not organized on a solitary specialized server, the web resources can either expand or shrink depending on the website’s web traffic. Therefore, this is an efficient and cost-effective option for e-commerce or large websites with higher average monthly traffic.

What features do you need to look out for in web hosting?

Since we have already mentioned that many web hosting platforms offer different services at different rates, certain factors play a role in choosing the right web hosting.

  • Web hosting is not just about hosting your website and making it available all the time.
  • Web hosting offers more essential services like security, firewalls, uptime monitoring, expert technical support, and more.

As we have already mentioned, you must first find out precisely what your website requirements are. You can’t just decide based on the price they offer. Moreover, you can follow our tips below when choosing the right web host:

1. Check the server technology

1,691 Server Room Illustrations & Clip Art - iStock

To start with, inspect what kind of web server your host offers. Is it a complex web server, the fastest in the industry, and is it based upon innovative innovation or otherwise? The more powerful and faster the web server is, the better the internet site’s efficiency.

2. Maximum uptime monitoring

Uptime Stock Illustration - Download Image Now - Web Page, Gauge, Horizontal - iStock

Check whether the web host can offer uptime monitoring of up to 99.95% or not. This way, you can ensure that your website will always stay online regardless of any problems. After all, you don’t want your visitors to see a blank screen during your website’s downtime, which can negatively impact your search engine optimization and web traffic. Small websites with low average monthly traffic can ignore uptime issues, which are significant for high-traffic websites.

Related: Examining the Importance of Monitoring Website Traffic

3. First-class security

 

The security of a website is one of the essential factors you should not compromise. Even though it is one of the essential points that affect your Google ranking, a simple SSL certificate can make a big difference if you desire your website to rank better in SERPs. Along with other security measures, it provides your website with solid protection against various attacks like malware injections, DDoS and hacking attacks.

Related: Why Is Security Monitoring Important?

4. Bandwidth allocationBandwidth Vector Art Stock Images | Depositphotos

Transmission capacity is the capability of information or traffic that can transfer between websites, servers, and users. So if you are searching for a media-intensive site with video clips, graphics, online podcasts, or even live streaming services, you’ll need to opt for plans offering higher bandwidths. However, simple websites that contain text content with basic images and videos or use other services to store their content usually only require higher bandwidths.

5. Scalability 674 Scalability Stock Vector Illustration and Royalty Free Scalability Clipart

When considering a hosting plan for your website, you must remember the future growth of your website. Any pilot project or online business will start with a lower hosting plan with limited resources, a more efficient and cost-effective strategy than you might initially think. But eventually, your website will grow and need more than the initial resources to keep it running smoothly.

So ensure your current hosting plan offers an upgrade program to add more resources or provides a seamless migration option to another hosting service without complications and additional fees.

6. Automatic backup

Automatic Backup Abstract Concept Vector Illustration Stock Illustration - Download Image Now - iStock

Regular manual backups of a website can be a hectic and time-consuming process. Especially users who need to become more familiar with technical matters may even need to remember to make regular manual backups.

That’s why many web hosting companies now offer automatic backup systems that ensure that your website can be quickly restored in case something goes wrong. The best and most reputable web hosting companies will provide you with a regular automatic backup system so that if something goes wrong, you can keep your head clear and get things back on track right away.

7. Compensation

For small websites or blogs, downtime may be acceptable. However, online businesses or websites with high traffic can seriously impact your online sales and revenue. So, when a web hosting company offers you compensation, they will compensate the website for any losses incurred during a problem related to the web hosting or servers.

8. Check data centers 13,170 Data Center Illustrations & Clip Art - iStock

For better website speed and lower latency, hosting a website in a nearby data center is very important. So, web hosting in a nearby data center is better than hosting in a remote data center. After all, it’s about speed, and every second counts for your website experience, SEO, and online growth.

9. Manageability

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Users can manage their website and hosting plan, create backups and use add-ons. Many web hosts need better organized and offer a clean user interface or dashboard to manage your web hosting account. However, many web hosts offer cPanel by default to manage accounts, which is very popular and widely accepted as an industry standard.

So check whether or not the hosting offers you a cPanel or dashboard to manage your web host. If not, then get ready to do all the hectic manual work yoursel

10. Add-ons and additional features

Due to fierce competition, web hosting providers offer additional features and add-ons bundled with their plans. You need to check whether these plans add value to your website or not. Do they justify the price that web hosting providers charge?

11. Customer support 30,329 Customer Clipart Illustrations & Clip Art - iStock

Hosting a website is more challenging than it seems. Things are getting more challenging and more complicated, especially for beginners. There are a lot of steps involved, and a lot of processes take place in both the front end and the back end. Therefore, a dedicated team of experts is needed to assist users 24/7. The better the customer service is, the more convenient it is for users.

12. Add your domain name to the web hosting

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When you have picked a particular host and bought an appropriate plan, you will undoubtedly get a DNS name or a supposed domain name web server.

To bring your website to life, you need to change the Domain Name Server of your domain. Here’s how you need to proceed.

  • Step1: Login to your domain account page.
  • Step2: Select the domain for which you wish to alter the name servers and click it.
  • Step3: Click Domain Setups or DNS Administration, where you will discover a choice to transform the name servers.
  • Step4: Now click Adjustment to replace the existing name web servers with the brand-new ones supplied by your web host and click Save to finish.

How to select the best hosting provider

Since there are so many hosting options, it’s easy to get overwhelmed when comparing. If you lose track while reading feature lists and price plans, shift gears and take some time to read user reviews. It’s often constructive to read others’ experiences before signing up.

However, once you have a solid idea of the basics of web hosting, consider which format is most attractive to you: shared, dedicated, or another. It’s also worth making a short checklist of the most important features so that you can go through the text-heavy descriptions of the offers more quickly.

Wrapping Up

Hosting a website is more complex than it seems, but choosing the right web host for your website makes it a bit difficult. With so many web hosts offering different features and plans, it becomes difficult for any individual to make a concrete decision and choose the best one.

Lack of knowledge is a significant obstacle in choosing the perfect web host. If you can figure out what kind of website you want to host and what requirements it must meet, hosting a website is a simple task.

However, if you want to play it safe, there are many free web hosting options, or you can select the cheapest plan available to get started with your web hosting.

All the tips and steps discussed in this article will help you figure out how to host a website.

FAQ

1: How can I organize my website free of charge?

You can conveniently hold your website for free on these complementary systems:

1. WordPress.com

2. Wix.com

3. squarespace.com

4. Weebly

5. Amazon AWS

2: How can I host my first website?

1. You must first sign up for a domain that fits your internet site niche and is exceptional.

2. get an ideal web hosting plan that is economical and also meets the needs of your site.

3. Modify or change the existing name servers with the new ones offered by your Webhosting on the domain setups page.

4. install the WordPress style and plugins.

5. Beginning developing your website, and you are done.

3: Is hosting a website accessible?

The misconception is that hosting a website is challenging and requires special technical skills. But it is not valid. If you follow the right way and instructions, you can easily host your website in just a few minutes.

At mywebmaintenance.com we provide instant WordPress technical support. We also provide bespoke web hosting & expert management for thousands of WordPress websites. Use us for quick one-time fixes, or partner with us for ongoing WordPress website maintenance.

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Enhancing Your Website Security: What You Need to Know to Protect Your Data

Manage Website, Optimize Website, Security, Security Monitoring, SEO, Web Hosting, Webite Traffice, Website maintenance, Website Security, WordPress site, WordPress website / By / / , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A website is the first impression your business will have on potential customers. It is essential to ensure your website is secure so no unauthorized person can access your information or deface it.

You can take a few simple steps to increase your website’s security.

Security Is Essential For Everyone

And our research confirms that. We spoke to 425 users who chose their first web host, and others switched providers about the features they value most. 25% of all respondents cited security as their top priority.

  •  Why would someone hack me?
  • Why does it also matter if a hacker gets into my website?

Aside from losing money, a hacking attack can result in significant traffic losses, your website being blocked or crashed, and even identity theft. Your data and that of your visitors could be at risk.

This is another common concern, but luckily you don’t need scary technical skills to secure your website. These steps are easy to implement, and we’ll walk you through every part of the process.

How Do Websites Get Hacked?

How to secure your website with HTTPS? | one.com

Before we go into detail about how to prevent your website from getting hacked, we should discuss what a hacked website looks like.

While there is no set idea of what a hacked website looks like, there are patterns. And we should tell you now that if your website has been hacked, you will not doubt it since something will undoubtedly be very wrong.

Here are some typical ways hacking presents itself:

Ransomware

The hacker threatens to publish your data and block access to your website unless a ransom is paid.

Gibberish Hack

You will discover many automatically created pages filled with keywords and gibberish to make them rank on Google for keywords. When people click on them, they are rerouted to a questionable website.

Keywords Disguised As A Hack

As above, but more sophisticated at first glance, these pages look like the ones on your website because only the written content has been changed.

Japanese Keywords Hack

Creates random Japanese pages full of affiliate links to stores selling fake goods.

Malicious Code/Viruses

If a malicious code or a virus is infiltrated into your website, your website may stop working, or you will not be able to access it. It is also possible that all of your hardware may be impacted.

Denial Of Service (DoS)

Hackers use bots to overload a website with requests and crash the server it resides.

Phishing

Scammers contact your customers pretending to be with your company and use your branding in hopes of obtaining personal details.

FROM THE EXPERT

We asked Krys Lambiase, elderly product marketing manager at Endurance International Group (EIG), the parent company of web hosting giant Bluehost HostGator, to share his insights on website security with our readers and us. In this guide, you’ll find quotes and tips from Krys, but first, he reveals the most significant security risks for new internet sites.

Outdated Software Application

Website owners must stay on top of updates for WordPress and other CMS plugins and anything else that needs an update. In addition to taking care of bugs or glitches, software application updates usually include security enhancements or patches. Hackers are constantly looking for ways to capitalize on software vulnerabilities. Today, many cyberattacks are automated. Criminals use bots to scan vulnerable websites. So whether you are not up to date on software, it’s simple for hackers to determine your website prior you can do anything about it.” Now that you know what a hacked website looks like, check out these seven ways to prevent your website from becoming one

Install SSL

Setup SSL by buying a simple Secure Sockets Layer certificate is an essential first step.

  • Make your passwords unbreakable – 123456 is not enough! Use anti-malware software applications to scan for and prevent malicious attacks.
  • Maintain your website up to date – using outdated software is like leaving your back door open.

Move up

One of the easiest things to protect your website, yourself, and your users are installing a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate. You may not know it, but you encounter SSL when you surf the Internet. It is the reason for the “s” in “HTTPS” and the padlock in the address bar.

Great to know what SSL means for Secure Sockets Layer. You set up an SSL certificate on your website that encrypts the data (such as login credentials) between your website and visitors. There are different levels of SSL – e-commerce sites that process payment data, for example, should use a more advanced version.

Want to learn more? Learn more about what an SSL certificate is in our guide.

SSL encrypts the information transferred between your website and your site visitors. Google currently warns visitors when they visit a website without SSL and even “discriminates” against these websites in its search results.

SSL security is essential when accepting payments through your website, asking for credentials, or transferring files. Without it, the information is unprotected and unsafe for hackers.

Krys Lambiase highlights the importance of SSL for website security – especially in online stores.

“An SSL certificate is required on condition that you run an eCommerce store or collect visitor data such as emails on your website. This is where the importance of SSL becomes apparent. SSL certificates improve search engine optimization and prove that all the data visitors send to your website is transmitted over an encrypted channel, so hackers can’t view the data during transmission.

You do not require to be intimate with the technical details of SSL security, so don’t worry if you don’t know how it works. The most important thing is knowing your website needs SSL and how to set it up.

There are several ways to install SSL. We recommend the following three ways in particular:

Choose A High-Quality Website Builder That Includes SSL For Free

Install a simple Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate yourself. Choose a hosting provider that offers SSL for free in all packages (if you build your site with a content management system like WordPress.org). If you desire a much higher level of security, you will have to pay for an advanced SSL certificate. These differ in price and can be purchased from hosting providers or domain registrars. Unless you run a large online store or handle large amounts of sensitive data, the accessible version of SSL is probably sufficient.

For more details on how to get an SSL certificate for your website, check out our dedicated guide. In just easy steps, we’ll guide you through the entire process!

Hacker attacks are the most common cause of data breaches on the Internet, accounting for 61.9% of lost data. Greater than 8 billion records have been lost due to hacker attacks.

Use Anti-Malware Software

The good news is that anti-malware software does the hard work for you, so you don’t have to worry about the technical stuff.

There are quite a few different anti-malware programs available. This means that you can tailor your security to the needs of your website and your budget. The security services offered include:

  • Web scanning
  • Malware detection and removal
  • Firewall for web applications
  • Vulnerability patching
  • DDoS protection
  • PCI compliance

If you don’t know what this means, that’s not a problem – that’s what anti-malware software is for!

SiteLock is a world leader in website security and a popular anti-malware software often included in hosting plans.

A good website creator or the hosting provider should take care of your website security for you.

  • Free SSL
  • Hack protection
  • Automatic backups
  • DDoS protection

These are the security basics for your website and the features you should look out for when choosing a hosting provider. Regardless of whether your provider has built-in tools or offers additional free tools will provide you with welcome extra security.

Excellent website security begins with a good web host, as explained:

“Webhosting is the foundation of your website. They help you obtain online and often provide additional tools for your website to create a website with the look and feel you want. Quality website hosting providers have protocols to protect WordPress and other content management systems they host, such as automatic security patches and updates. The hosting provider is responsible for maintaining their servers and performing the necessary security monitoring. ”

Make Your Passwords Unbreakable

Passwords go to the top. They’re so familiar to us that we sometimes forget how important they are. It’s easy to overlook that your password is often all that stands between a hacker and your personal information.

Passwords are an essential step and one of the easiest things you can change to increase the security of your website. Spend 20 minutes today strengthening your passwords, and you’ll be on your way to a more secure website.

Of small businesses surveyed said their company had been affected by an attack that misused employee passwords. The typical cost of each attack was just over $380 thousand!

A survey by the UK’s National Cyber Security Center analyzed the most commonly used passwords of accounts that have been attacked worldwide. A list of the ten most frequently hacked passwords was then compiled. If you use any one of the following passwords, you should change them (and change them now)!

  • qwerty
  • Password
  • abc123
  • password1

Instead of using easy-to-guess phrases, here’s what you should do instead:

  • Combine three random, unrelated, but memorable phrases.
  • Use a randomly generated sequence of characters.
  • Don’t use recurring passwords – use a password manager to manage all passwords.
  • Make your password long.
  • Never utilize personal information in your password – that’s the first thing hackers will try!

There is a seemingly endless list of password tips; you should combine some of these tactics to create uncrackable passwords. Once you have your new bulletproof passwords, be careful with them – don’t share them, even with friends, and change them regularly (about once a quarter).

Keep Your Website Up To Date

To the top, We are not talking about posting the latest gossip or keeping your visitors up to date on your latest product. This is about the imp of keeping your website software up to date.

If you are using a website contractor, you don’t have to worry about this because most builders will handle software application updates and security issues for you. However, if you’re using a platform like WordPress, you’ll need to stay up-to-date and make updates as needed.

You need to perform updates for your core WordPress software and any plugins you have installed. If you do, everything can become updated and vulnerable to bugs, glitches, and hackers with malicious code.

If your website needs to be updated, it can have dire security consequences. So it can’t hurt to keep an eye on updates. Fortunately, you can automatically set these updates in your dashboard, but it’s still worth keeping an eye on it and ensuring everything runs smoothly.

Get Started Today With mywebmaintenance.com

If you’re looking for web hosting providers to help you provide web hosting & expert management for thousands of WordPress websites, we’d be happy to discuss our services. Contact us now for web hosting services and to see how you can get started.

Migrating your WordPress website: what you need to know

Hosting, Manage Website, Optimize Website, Security, Website Security, WordPress site, WordPress website / By / / , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Are you planning to move your WordPress website to a brand new hosting provider? Many companies are faced with the choice to migrate their website to another hoster because they have problems with their current provider, who they may be fed up with!

Of course, no one wants to worry about switching WordPress web hosts. We all want 100% uptime, great load times, and an affordable solution, all in one package.

But unfortunately, the world of WordPress hosting doesn’t work like that, and the perfect scenario is almost impossible. Suppose you are unsatisfied with your present web hosting provider. In that case, you may have already experienced some of the following five reasons why businesses migrate their WordPress website to a new host.

1. Too Much Downtime

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All providers on the market guarantee 99.99% uptime. But how many of these companies can back up those words with actual uptime and peak WordPress performance?

Your website is a vital component to the success of your business, and that’s why you need a hosting service that offers stable uptime that will protect you from any loss of revenue or customers. There are several reasons why downtime can harm your bottom line:

Missed opportunities: If you’re in eCommerce, you can lose many sales opportunities, and if you’re in B2B SaaS, you lose product registrations and leads.

Damaged reputation: Downtime can easily damage your company’s reputation. First impressions count, and so do second ones. So if users want to access your website but experience downtime, that’s a big problem that could keep them away.

Wounded SEO: Depending on the duration and intervals of downtime, your SERP ranks could be affected. Repeated website downtime will give Google enough reason to push your website down in the rankings.

Consequently, anything shorter than 100% uptime means a drop in traffic and revenue. There is no room for downtime or website errors for a quality hosting provider and a reliable web experience.

2. Terrible Customer Service

Is there anything more disappointing than not being able to reach a customer service representative when you need to resolve an issue? Your business could depend on whether you can resolve the glitch, error, or problem quickly. There could be numerous difficulties if your web hosting experience is miserable. When problems occur, you require to be able to get in touch with a customer service representative right away.

Before choosing a hosting provider, you should at least check if the customer service team is up to the task! It would be best if you ensure that will solve all your problems before you decide on a provider.

To evaluate the quality of your hosting provider’s customer service, you require to analyze the following aspects:

Feedback time: How much time does the current holding company require to respond to your request? If you encounter a roadblock with your WordPress website, time is precious, and there is no excuse for not responding to your call. A fast response time is something you shouldn’t even negotiate.

Resolution time: If the hosting team are expert, the resolution time shouldn’t be more than a few minutes. Every second is crucial, and if your website doesn’t load properly, customers might churn. So, if you are stuck with a hosting company that takes too long to respond to your requests, you should cut your losses by switching to a new company.

Expertise: If you receive a quick response to your inquiry, but it’s unclear and doesn’t provide a practical option, then that response is no help! Make sure that you work with an employee trained to answer and solve any of your hosting queries.

A good hosting provider will offer you every kind of support, from a ticket system to live chat and email to phone and video calls – 24/7/365! Having multiple assistance choices at any given time can resolve critical issues quickly and with additional preventive measures.

3. Slow Loading Time

1,638 Slow Loading Photos Stock Photos, Pictures & Royalty-Free Images - iStock

Internet sites tons time is crucial to the success of your company. A delay of just one second can cost a company. Whether you’re producing content or selling a product on your site, fast data transfer can distinguish between acquiring brand-new clients and shedding them to your competitors.

Your hosting solution can make a significant distinction when it comes to the performance of your WordPress internet site. A modern SSD drive can read data much faster than a traditional hard drive, it may be much more costly, but the efficiency is well worth it. For this reason, you should choose a robust hosting provider with the latest infrastructure and solid-state drives.

Durable WordPress organizing carriers additionally use VPS environments or cloud networks to dedicate more resources to each client, resulting in faster loading of pages and databases. If the hosting infrastructure is designed for speed, the provider should make extra efforts to optimize the speed of your website additionally.

Caching helps your website deliver content faster while reducing the load on the web servers. A powerful hoster will offer you a caching system with plugins and add-ons for your static files and databases.

4. Poor Security

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Today’s technology has changed every industry, and one of the most significant issues is cybersecurity. Suppose you have a WordPress website that is not adequately secured. In that case, you are in for an absolute nightmare with stolen data, website glitches, and other malicious intentions that could harm your business.

Your WordPress web hosting plays a significant role in your WordPress website’s safety, security, and upkeep. The wrong host selection will result in inadequate protection of your build and all other websites hosted on the same server.

Despite WordPress’ robust core, you may need additional layers of protection for your website.

One of the essential steps for better WordPress security is automatically updating the core, themes, and plugins, which is, fortunately, an option in almost every hosting plan.

Suppose you’re working with a professional WordPress development agency. In that case, your development team will most likely provide an additional layer of monitoring to ensure that automatic updates don’t override any site features.

Other useful features for online security are automatic backups and SSL certificates. SSL certificates are crucial because they can encrypt communications between servers and browsers. Furthermore, SSL certifications gradually contribute to your search engine position, improving your position in SERPs.

Besides automatic updates and SSL certificates, an excellent hosting plan includes regular scans and solutions for malware and viruses, web firewalls, and protection against DDoS attacks.

5. Missing Features

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The host is a service that you have to pay for. So, to make an informed decision, you need to understand the features that each hosting package offers you and the impact that these features will have on your WordPress website.

It’s great to have all the essential features for your hosting package, but wouldn’t you like to get more for your money? There are features that you may have to do without, such as:

Great server location: Server place is just one of the most critical elements that affect the speed of your WordPress website. Usually, a website will load faster if accessed from a geographically close location to the server location.

A plethora of useful plugins: Do not look for a more significant number of plugins – seek plugins that you can benefit from! Ensure that your organizing service offers you plugins that increase your website’s security, improve your search engine optimization and simplify the monitoring and maintenance process.

Performance-oriented architecture: You deserve nothing less than breakneck speed and performance for your WordPress website! It would be best to have a web host that guarantees optimal use of modern technologies for maximum speed and efficiencies, such as Nginx, MariaDB, PHP7, LXD containers, and a minimalist hosting stack customized for WordPress.

Sandbox setting: With the sandbox or hosting a setting, screening and optimizing an improved variation of your WordPress website is a much more effective process, ensuring no downtime or other inconveniences on your live site. The sandbox must provide access to an SSH connection, at least SFTP, the database, and other files. If you run into problems, you have the time to fix them or find alternative solutions.

Server Space: Your current hosting plan may have worked well initially, but as your traffic increases, you will need to switch to a hosting plan with enough server space to support this growth. So, when comparing different hosting plans, you should choose one that offers the most storage space at the most affordable price.

Payment plans: With web hosting, you usually get what you pay for, but sometimes a comprehensive plan isn’t even necessary. How can you tell if you’re paying excessively? If your plan has many features, some of which you never use, or your website is still small, but you’re hosting it on a server with more storage than you need, you should reconsider your options.

The bottom line is that you must never settle for the cheapest solution for WordPress hosting. Check thoroughly what features are offered and if the company provides you actual advantages over other hosting providers.

Choosing A Managed Hosting Provider 5 Best Managed WordPress Hosting in 2022 Compared (Pros & Cons)

Once you have selected the attributes you need, you should choose a new hosting partner for your WordPress website that can handle heavy traffic, withstand security attacks, and provide an excellent foundation for your content.

A managed hosting service monitors and maintained every technical aspect of your WordPress website. The number of websites that have switched to managed hosting has increased over the past 8-9 years, and along with WordPress websites, this is the predominant way to manage businesses online.

The Top Four Advantages Of Using A Managed Hosting Provider Are

Better website security: Managed-to-host services offer unparalleled security compared to other types of WordPress web hosting. A managed provider offers the highest level of security, daily backups, malware scans, and updates that prevent hacker attacks on your website.

Uptime monitoring: Speed and performance directly impact search result rankings. Most managed-to-host providers offer 24/7 website monitoring, so you don’t have to worry about your website’s performance at any point in time.

24/7 support: Managed hosting providers have trained experts who know the technical details of the platform and how to solve common and complex problems.

Customizable solutions: Most managed hosts can support almost any niche, from educational blogs to e-commerce websites and everything in between. Will certainly customize the option to fit your company’s needs, not the other way around.

If you pay a bit more for a high-quality hosting provider, you will get additional security layers, 24/7 support, and regular malware scans. A top-notch hosting plan also includes top-notch caching plugins and CDN access, measures that can significantly impact the speed of your website.

At My Web Maintenance, We’re passionate about WordPress website design, hosting, and maintenance. We offer website design, web hosting, and maintenance solutions for your business to help grow your online presence.

Grab Your Free Professional Website Security and Performance Optimisation Audit for Your Website Now!

Examining the Importance of Monitoring Website Traffic

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There are over 1.3 billion websites worldwide, and everyone is looking for visitors.

So the competition is fierce, and that’s one of the reasons marketers and businesses invest in SEO, PPC, and social media campaigns to drive website traffic. However, you won’t see any progress or marketing ROI if you don’t track your traffic volume.

Free tools, such as Google Analytics (GA), provide a wealth of information about your website visitors and their actions. This post is about why tracking your traffic is so important.

1. UNDERSTAND YOUR DATA

You can only know your traffic data and analytics through website monitoring. You can obtain a report on your traffic sources, keyword volume, number of pages viewed, and countries with the highest traffic. This data is crucial for decision-making regarding SEO campaigns and customer experience.

Most importantly, you can determine your conversion rate and understand your customers’ journey to optimize essential things. This way, it’s much easier to identify your visitors’ problems that prevent them from taking the actions you want them to take.

Solid marketing today is based on actionable data and consumer preferences. Google Analytics gives you the data you need to analyze your website’s performance and usage, increase traffic, and improve the visitor experience.

2. GET TO KNOW YOUR CUSTOMERS

Your website traffic helps you understand what visitors are doing on your website, what they are looking for, and what drove them to convert.

You can improve your services and products when you regularly know what visitors are searching for. You can create purchaser profiles for your potential customers with your customer data. You can define your perfect persona by age, location, salary, and interests.

With GA, you can determine where most of your visitors come from. Location demographics will provide you with a list of countries with more visitors. This way, you know who and where to target to ensure consistent website traffic.

3. DETECT AND FIX ERRORS

Tracking your traffic also helps you identify potential website errors, such as replicate URLs, duplicate tags, web spam, and broken URLs. These are a few issues that affect your traffic and website performance on various browsers and devices.

If you observe a sudden drop in traffic, there is a possible reason. Besides search engine updates, it may be website hosting issues, 404 errors, or slow website speed. Fixing these issues can potentially lead to an increase in web traffic.

Google Analytics also sends notifications to your dashboard when there is an issue with your account setup and website accessibility. These can be redundant hostnames where your website receives data from different hosts. You will also be notified if your conversion rates drop.

4. KNOW THE PERFORMANCE OF YOUR PAGES

With an analytics tool that monitors your site’s traffic, it’s easier to monitor the performance of your pages. You want to find out which pages are ranking well, which can be improved, and which are not ranking at all.

If you know the content that keeps visitors on your site for a long time, you’ll also know what kind of information visitors want. This way, you can create content that quickly engages visitors. Also, you can add internal links to these posts to promote other pages and posts on your site.

Information about pages that perform the worst is also essential to make changes and improvements. They provide insight into how visitors arrive and depart from these pages. You can also identify the possible reasons for the high bounce rates on the worst-performing pages.

One reason may be that the content doesn’t offer what visitors want. It can also be because your web content is technical and complex for most visitors to understand. Conducting a content analysis will assist you in identifying problems and taking the right actions.

5. CHECK YOUR SHOPPING CART ABANDONMENTS

If you run an e-commerce website, you have every reason to track your website traffic, especially if your buying cart abandonment rate is high. With the Goal Funnel in GA, you can set up a goal if you have a multi-step checkout process.

This way, you can determine the points at which your visitors abandon the checkout process. For example, if you notice many visitors abandoning the checkout page, you need to determine why. It may be the total cost of the order, payment options, shipping costs, or an unfriendly design.

When you find out the reason, you can more easily optimize your payment process by eliminating the unpleasant points for your visitors. Review the information you ask for during checkout to see if it triggers purchase anxiety. You also need to eliminate any unnecessary steps.

6. IDENTIFY WHEN YOUR WEBSITE IS BUSIEST

Your content strategy and campaigns need to consider when your website is most visited. With GA, you can break down your traffic by day of the week and time of day to get a more accurate look at traffic during peak hours.

That will help you determine when you should release new content or expand your campaigns to get the most visitors. Knowing this information is key to your marketing success, publishing content that can be shared, and improving your conversation rates.

3 Tools You Should Use to Track Your Website Traffic

You need to know where your visitors are coming from, what they’re interested in, and what their browsing habits are. That way, you can target and effectively adjust your website content, SEO, marketing, and advertising strategies as your business grows. 

1. GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Google Analytics is the king of all site monitoring tools – a free web analytics tool offered by Google that assists you in analyzing your website traffic. Evaluating your advertising strategies, optimizing SEO, digital marketing, etc., is essential.

Knowing how many individuals visit your website by age or location, where they come from, and what pages they visit is very helpful in figuring out who your primary target audience is on the internet.

Google Analytics is placed on your website with a tracking code that needs to be entered under the “Website Settings/Third Party Vendors” tab in Showit and an embedded code that needs to be placed in your custom head HTML section.

2. HEATMAP

This feature is good. Heatmap shows you exactly where visitors are clicking and how often. While Google Analytics shows you which pages are visited, Heatmap shows which parts of the page are clicked.

3. GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE

Google Search Console shows me what people search for when they type something into Google. It is an excellent tool for search engine optimization – it shows you what people are searching for and how they phrase their search queries. Focusing on these keywords when writing your website copy, naming your images, and writing meta titles and descriptions would be best.

Google Analytics and Google Search Console send monthly updates via email, and Heatmap constantly runs in the background of your site (you can turn the results on and off if you don’t want to see them as often). Use all three applications to track traffic to website, and also recommend them to all clients!

As long as you have a website, tracking and monitoring your traffic is essential to see how visitors engage with your content.

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How does web hosting work? And what kinds of web hosting are there?

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Understanding web hosting is an essential part of building your online presence. Whether you want to start building websites professionally, are looking for someone to build your website for you, or want to know how it works, answering the question “What is website hosting?” is an essential first step.

These days, creating a website is easier and more accessible than ever before, but you need to know the basic principles involved.

To demonstrate how hosting works and illustrate what new users need to know before they start, we’ve put together this comprehensive guide to web hosting basics. First, we’ll cover how it works, followed by a look at some of the best web hosting services with pointers on what you should expect from a provider.

What is web hosting?

Definition of web hosting: It provides a secure place to store online content. The code, images, videos, and text that make up a website need to be stored somewhere. Without a stable digital storage location, none of us could permanently access content on the Internet. That makes hosting one of the essential parts of developing an online presence for everyone, from large corporations to small personal accounts.

Web hosting allows users to store content off-site, reducing the cost of local storage and the associated physical footprint. It also makes building a genuinely permanent web presence more straightforward, with built-in benefits like backups for security and support.

Some web hosting is done locally on PCs or servers, but more often, cloud-based third-party providers are used. You should find a wide range of free and paid options when looking for a hosting service.

How do I start with a website?

To develop a website, you need to coordinate several steps, and choosing a web hosting provider is just one of them.

Register a domain: You buy this from a domain name registrar like Domain.com, Bluehost, HostGator, GoDaddy, or Google Domain, to name a few. The domain is the same despite who you buy it from, but the prices vary depending on the services and additional options. You choose a unique name to make it easier for people to remember your IP address (which is just a string of numbers). It’s much easier to remember “HP.com” than “50.32.247.170”.

Nameserver (DNS): The nameserver is the middleman that points your website visitors to the correct IP address. Often the same company provides both your registrar and DNS service, but you can choose a different DNS if you like. Some standard providers are Cloudflare, OpenDNS, CleanBrowsing, and Google Public DNS.

Web hosting: The actual files that make up the website reside on a server managed by your web hosting company. Again, this can be the same company as your registrar and DNS server, or you can hire a different company for this part of the process. Below, we will introduce you to some reputable hosting companies in more detail.


How does web hosting work?

Web hosting services provide stable and secure storage. While web hosting is more than simple data storage, it is a central part of its functionality. Hosts store data on hardware called web servers, allowing online users easy maintenance and access.

Without sufficient host capacity and proper maintenance, websites can behave erratically. It results in a more time-consuming process for your website visitors, affecting your company’s sales and depriving your audience of information.

Self-hosted

There are ways to set up your web servers with PC software, but the cost can be higher than a dedicated site and provider. That’s why most users rely on a third-party provider that can guarantee certain features and services 24/7.

Companies may host their website to keep everything on-site, which involves significant investment in servers and staff. That makes sense for large companies. However, third-party web hosting is a much more budget-friendly solution for small and medium-sized businesses.

Benefits include constant accessibility for users, better protection from hackers, routine maintenance, and technical support for you when unexpected problems arise.

Types of web hosting

With the advancement of technology, different types of web hosting have been introduced best to meet the different needs of websites and customers. These include:

  • Shared web hosting
  • Dedicated hosting
  • VPS hosting
  • Cloud
  • Reseller

Let’s take a look at the most popular web hosting services.

Shared web hosting

Most web hosting companies offer shared hosting. Shared hosting means a website is hosted on the same server as many other websites. It’s cheap and easy to set up, making it a good solution for new websites that don’t expect a lot of traffic in the short term. It is best suited for personal and small and medium business websites.

Anyone serious about digital advertising or running an online business should carefully consider their shared hosting options and ensure your provider can offer services like Namecheap’s business SSD hosting, specifically designed for e-commerce websites. Shared hosting is also unsuitable for large websites with a lot of traffic. These websites require a dedicated server that hosts appropriate resources to ensure adequate website performance.

VPS Hosting

With virtual private servers (VPS), also known as virtual dedicated servers (VDS), a virtual server appears as a dedicated server to each customer, even though it serves multiple websites. The primary difference between shared hosting and VPS is that customers have full access to the configuration of the VPS, which is much closer to dedicated hosting. For this reason, VPS hosting is considered the stepping stone between shared hosting and acquiring a dedicated machine.

VPS is often utilized by smaller websites and organizations that want the flexibility of a dedicated server without the high costs.

Dedicated hosting

Dedicated hosting (sometimes managed hosting or dedicated server) provides entire servers for rent. This type of hosting is comparatively expensive compared to shared hosting plans; for this reason, it is only used when a website has a lot of traffic or when more server control is required.

Dedicated hosting offers more than providing a single website with complete server equipment in a data center. It offers more options for server self-management. That is a more flexible arrangement, allowing complete control over the server, its software, and security systems. However, at the same time, you must have the technical know-how to manage the platform yourself.

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is the newest hosting type on the market, which has become very popular in recent years. This hosting runs over many interconnected web servers that provide an affordable, scalable, and reliable web infrastructure. Cloud hosting plans usually offer an unmeasured, reliable bandwidth and infinite storage space for unlimited domains, which explains why many large companies rely on the cloud. It’s an effective way to run a website with resource-intensive applications or a large amount of content like images, but it can be much more expensive.

Reseller hosting

Reseller hosting is a type of web hosting in which the account holder can use the disk space and bandwidth allocated to him to host a website on behalf of a third party. In this case, the original hosting account holder is the “reseller.” Reseller hosting is beneficial when the purchased disk space is not needed, and some of the allocated resources can be shared with another party. Sharing disk space, bandwidth, CPU, etc., provides a recurring revenue stream.

Hosting providers offer reseller hosting strategies to accommodate entrepreneurs interested in this business technique. You can design hosting packages for your websites or clients that provide the resources allocated to the reseller hosting account. Purchasing a reseller hosting plan is also helpful for anyone who owns multiple domains.

How to choose the best hosting provider

Since there are so many hosting options to consider, it’s easy to get overwhelmed when comparing them all. If you begin to glaze over when you’re reading feature lists and reviewing pricing plans, take it down a notch and spend some time looking at user reviews. It’s often constructive to read others’ experiences before signing up.

However, once you have a solid idea of the basics of web hosting, you should consider which format is most attractive to you: shared, dedicated, or another. It’s also worth making a short checklist of the most important features so that you can go through the text-heavy descriptions of the offers more quickly.

At mywebmaintenance.com we provide instant WordPress technical support. We also provide bespoke web hosting & expert management for thousands of WordPress websites. Use us for quick one-time fixes, or partner with us for ongoing WordPress website maintenance.

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Web Efficiency Monitoring – Definition, Tips, and Top Web Monitoring Tools

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Today, many businesses have a significant digital footprint, and some rely heavily on their web applications to deliver value to their customers and generate revenue. In this competitive digital environment, it’s not enough to make sure your website is available 24/7. It would be best to optimize your websites regularly to provide a better experience. Slow pages or pages that are not optimized for mobile devices can increase bounce rates and impact your search engine rankings. This article will teach you how to monitor your website’s performance and speed up with the best web performance monitoring methods and tools.

WHAT IS WEB PERFORMANCE MONITORING?

Web performance monitoring refers to practices and tools that allow you to monitor your web application based on various metrics and technical parameters that affect page load speed and customer experience. Most web performance analyzers assist you in checking website status or uptime and track critical indicators such as page size, time to the first byte, broken links, database performance, CPU usage, etc. By regularly monitoring your web applications, you can identify lingering, hidden or cyclical issues and better prepare for unexpected spikes.

Web performance monitoring devices can also help you improve your web pages’ “perceived performance,” making them appear to load faster than they are. “Lazy loading” (the gradual loading of images or other elements as the user scrolls down a page, rather than loading the entire page at once), used on modern, image-heavy websites, is an excellent example of optimizing perceived performance. Modern web performance monitors also assist you in tracking user experience or UX-related cues, such as page load spinners, click and hover interactions, animations, scrolling, etc.

HOW FAST SHOULD YOUR WEBSITE LOAD?

When it comes to page load speed, several reports and guides, including this one from Google, recommend optimizing pages for mobile devices as a high priority. According to Backlinko, which gives one of the most up-to-date statistics, the average loading time of a website on mobile is 87% higher than on desktop. It also states that.

“The average loading speed (fully loaded) of a web page is 10.3 seconds on desktop and 27.3 seconds on mobile.”

The other essential signs measured by Backlinko are as follows:

  • TTFB (Time to First Byte): 1.2 secs (desktop computer) and also 2.594 seconds (mobile).
  • Rate Index: 4.782 seconds (desktop) and 11.455 seconds (mobile).

It should be noted that the overall size of the page has a significant impact on the loading speed. It would be best to consider compressing images and text to reduce the page size using Gzip.

THE MAIN FACTORS AFFECTING WEB PERFORMANCE

Server performance

The performance of a web server directly affects the performance of your website. Whenever a browser pings your server, it asks the server to load or transmit data to your website. If your server is unhealthy, it will take longer to process these requests. In many cases, your hosting provider is responsible for server maintenance. If your website uses shared hosting and regularly struggles with resource issues, you should consider switching ISPs or choosing a higher plan with more CPU, RAM, and storage space. If you host your website yourself, you can check out this guide to web server monitoring.

Server location

Businesses spread across multiple locations need to ensure that their website performance remains consistent. However, if your site is hosted in one region (e.g., California) but receives traffic from other regions (e.g., Europe), the user experience will differ. In other words, the same page may load faster in the US than in Europe. You can consider implementing a CDN (content delivery network) in such cases. A CDN is a network of added server nodes distributed worldwide to provide faster response times and lower latency. These nodes typically cache static content from your website, including CSS and Javascript files, images, and other components.

Site size

The widespread availability of high-speed broadband and 4G mobile networks has enabled businesses to provide a better experience for their customers with rich multimedia content. Most customer-facing websites today contain high-resolution images.

As a result, the standard physical size of web pages has also risen. However, the increasing weight of pages can take longer to load. All images and components must be optimized or compressed wherever possible to ensure that your web pages load faster. Besides compression, there are other techniques to optimize page size. For example, you can use any streaming service instead of hosting video content on your servers.

Scripting or code-related issues

As websites develop, code density and complexity also increase. Every primary website is built with thousands of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript code lines. Often, multiple scripts are executed in parallel. In such situations, unexpectedly large numbers of web server calls can lead to increased latency. In addition, multiple threads accessing the same shared code or files can lead to “race conditions” that can leave a website vulnerable to security threats.

If the third-party service is down or more heavily loaded, processing your site’s requests will take longer. In many cases, third-party scripts can also affect your site’s performance because calling a remote server to run or load a script takes extra time. By following application development best practices (e.g., minifying JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files, browser caching, etc.) and ensuring that all scripts are appropriately optimized for speed and security, you can avoid such issues.

Faulty CMS plugins

One of the advantages of using content management systems (CMS) is that they offer numerous plugins that keep your development teams from reinventing the wheel. While these plugins save a lot of coding time and effort, they can also introduce performance and integration issues. Plugins developed with older technologies or inefficient database queries can lead to higher load times. In addition, free plugins are rarely updated and may have unpatched security vulnerabilities. Development groups should consider limiting the use of plugins as much as possible.

WHAT MAKES MONITORING WEB PERFORMANCE DIFFICULT?


Complex web architectures

It means that modern application architectures are significantly different from earlier times. Most enterprises are reshaping their traditional LAMP and MEAN stacks to leverage microservices and containers. These applications require analysis of a large amount of data from multiple sources for troubleshooting. Traditional web monitoring tools for availability and performance are not equipped to handle this complexity.

Lack of proactivity

Another major challenge most organizations face is that their teams often become accustomed to traditional processes and tools that provide a reactive method for web performance management. In other words, teams are prepared to respond to a problem but lack the tools and strategy to predict and prevent such problems from occurring.

Lack of intelligent alerting

“Alerting fatigue” is no stranger to IT administrators in large enterprises. Most traditional tools require a lot of time and effort to define baselines or understand how their site behaves in different situations. Even when alerts are configured accurately, problems can often go undetected because they fall below certain thresholds.

5 BEST PRACTICES FOR MONITORING WEB PERFORMANCE

  • Monitoring website uptime statistics
  • Monitoring errors
  • Monitoring key transactions
  • Monitoring application dependency
  • Monitoring metrics using the RED method

1. Monitoring website uptime statistics

Best Website Monitoring Services You Should Consider Using

One of the first things you require to check is whether or not your website is online and available to your users. One way to check the website status is to use an HTTP ping monitor that pings your website in specific periods. As long as you get the 200 response code, you can ensure that the website is available. You can also analyze the ping response times to detect any problems or spikes.


2. Error monitoring

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Whenever your application encounters problems, it generates errors. here are five categories of HTTP error codes (identified by the first digit of the code):

  • 1xx: Informative
  • 2xx: Success
  • 3xx: Redirection
  • 4xx: Client error
  • 5xx: Server error

HTTP error 500, one of the most common errors, indicates that a web server has internal problems that cause errors when processing requests. It doesn’t say much, but if the error code keeps appearing, you should look at troubleshooting.

3. Monitoring key transactions

Specific web requests or transactions can be critical to your business operations. These requests vary depending on the type of web application. For example, an e-commerce application is significantly different from a banking application. Accordingly, the services, APIs, and plugins used for these transactions are also different. You require to identify these critical transactions and monitor them effectively.

You can monitor genuine user transactions with statistics showing the percentage of successful transactions and the time to complete them. If you see a sudden drop in the success rate, you can conclude that there may be a problem. Error logs let you determine the exact nature of the error. You can also monitor transactions synthetically by using servers to simulate real-world conditions. This approach is helpful for proactive planning and problem resolution.

4. Monitor application dependency

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As organizations introduce more and more new features for their web applications, monitoring their performance in the live environment is essential. Application dependency issues often arise when applications are moved from the production and test environment to the production environment. Modern tools that support “distributed tracing” can help you identify the root cause of such issues in a microservices environment.

5. Monitoring metrics using the RED method

The RED Method: key metrics for microservices architecture

Several tools provide out-of-the-box web performance metrics. In addition, teams add their metrics. In principle, all these metrics must help them overview the entire environment by providing an aggregated view of their environment. However, this technique can also lead to information overload. They need to shortlist some critical metrics to assess the usability and health of the application quickly.

RED Metrics is a widely accepted technique for monitoring the three most crucial web performance metrics:

  • Rate – requests offered by the application per second.
  • Errors – the percentage of requests in which an error occurs
  • Duration – time is taken to complete a request.

You may still require additional metrics from databases, external APIs, and other deeper analysis and troubleshooting sources. Nevertheless, if your application is running well, you don’t need to monitor all of these metrics all the time.

THE 8 BEST TOOLS FOR MONITORING WEB PERFORMANCE

  • GTmetrix
  • WebPageTest
  • SolarWinds Pingdom
  • PageSpeed Insights
  • Uptrends
  • Dotcom Monitoring
  • Site24x7
  • Uptime Robot

1. GTmetrix

GTmetrix is among the most popular commercial devices for monitoring website performance. It provides a wide range of features for detailed testing and analysis of a web application.

You can get a free performance report for your website to quickly assess how GTmetrix can help you measure your web performance. As you can see in the screenshot above, key indicators such as PageSpeed scores (Google), YSlow scores (Yahoo), full load time, and total page size are displayed upfront. These scores are calculated based on more than 25 servers in seven regions worldwide, which can help you better assess the user experience in the target regions.

You can also obtain a detailed and in-depth overview of resource usage and monitor metrics like TTFB, First Paint, RUM (Real User Monitoring) Speed Index, etc., with various charts and visualizations. Another exciting feature is the page loading video, which can help you accurately identify problems from the user’s point of view. The only downside of this tool is that it can be a bit daunting for first-time users, as it is not easy to identify the most critical parameters for monitoring a website’s performance.

2. WebPageTest

If you are searching for a free tool to measure website performance, you can try WebPageTest. Since it is an open-source tool, it is one of the most customizable web monitoring tools. Although it is a free tool, it offers options to select different browsers and server locations to get detailed insights into the user experience.

The tool takes a bit more time to run tests, but it provides you with enough options to identify issues that affect your website’s speed accurately. It also provides waterfall charts that allow you to monitor the time taken for each request in a visual way. A simple rule of thumb for analyzing waterfall charts is to check their width; a more comprehensive chart indicates a slower loading website. Moreover, you can also create custom metrics according to your monitoring needs.

3. SolarWinds Pingdom

SolarWinds® Pingdom® is another powerful tool that provides a much simpler yet practical and faster evaluation of your website. It monitors website uptime statistics, page speed, transactions, and actual users (RUM) with servers in more than 100 locations worldwide. The tool also supports synthetic monitoring. With Pingdom Website Speed Test, you can perform a free website test.

It will give you a quick summary of the test results with recommendations on improving page performance. You also get a tabular summary of response codes, content size by content type/domain, and content type/domain requests. You can also examine file requests by load, order, wait, DNS, status code, and other options.

Pingdom’s main advantages are its intuitive user interface, making it easy for new users to get the most out of the tool. It’s easy to set up email/SMS notifications with Pingdom, and it also integrates seamlessly with notification services like Slack and Pagerduty. You can also install the Pingdom mobile app, which connects to the uptime monitoring service and helps you monitor your site’s uptime on the go. 


4. PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights from Google can be an effective tool for monitoring your website’s performance. However, teams mostly prefer it focusing on search engine optimization (SEO). When you run a test, you’ll get a concise summary of various parameters with options to drill into the topics that interest you.

You can examine various on-page and back-end elements of your web application and check how they affect loading speed and response times. The tool helps you monitor the quality of various primary components and provides recommendations on how to optimize different elements. The tool is ideal for tech-savvy marketing teams and even helps developers get familiar with Google’s web guidelines and recommendations.

5. Uptrends

Uptrends is a developed player in the web monitoring space. It offers a very intuitive dashboard to track various load times, errors, metrics, and waterfall graphs. You can run tests with multiple browsers from more than 200 sites worldwide.

The tool also lets you test website performance on mobile devices. The bandwidth throttling feature simulates slower mobile networks (2G, 3G, etc.) to test how your website performs under such conditions. However, to monitor transactions and APIs and enable multi-browser testing, you need to sign up for a Business or Enterprise subscription. Accurate user monitoring is also limited until you subscribe to more expensive plans.

6. Dotcom monitor

Dotcom-Monitor offers comprehensive web performance monitoring features, including availability tests, transaction monitoring, performance metrics, alerts, event logs, and mail server monitoring. These features can help you get a detailed insight into each user’s web journey and ensure a better experience with continuous optimizations.

Like other advanced commercial devices, it also offers waterfall graphs and video playbacks to monitor different loading times and browsing patterns. The tool also provides a wide range of integrations to help you get the most out of your existing operational setup. A significant highlight of the product is the historical trend analysis and reporting feature, which permits you to predict future performance results based on key metrics.

7. Site24x7

Site24x7 is another effective website performance monitoring solution that offers famous and advanced features such as website defacement monitoring, SOAP web services, REST APIs, etc. With this service, you can obtain a detailed view of website uptime statistics and the performance of your web applications using test servers spread across more than 90 locations worldwide.

You can also track essential performance metrics with user-friendly dashboards and receive timely alerts to respond to and troubleshoot issues in real-time quickly. While the solution is suitable for end-to-end monitoring, the initial setup can be challenging, and fine-tuning alerts and notifications requires significant effort.

8. Uptime Robot

Uptime Robot is a simple website status checking tool. With the paid version of this device, you can automatically ping your website every minute to check the status of your website. If you receive a 200 response code, your website is available. In case of an error code, the tool performs several checks and finally triggers an alert.

You can get these alerts via SMS, email, or other services like Slack, Telegram, etc. Unlike other devices mentioned in this article, it does not offer recommendations or other advanced options for troubleshooting web performance issues. However, the accessible version of this tool can be a perfect option for smaller organizations that need a simple tool to monitor website uptime.

This article explains that website performance can be affected by various factors, including numerous components such as images, CSS, JavaScript, underlying hardware, and network issues. Modern web monitoring tools can assist you in tracking various metrics and performance indicators to stay on top of your website’s performance. 

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Managing websites with WordPress

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We’re going to set up WordPress to be more suitable for use as a Content Management System. Just before our experts get going, our experts should perhaps inquire what we mean by this WordPress. As many people know, it started life as a piece of software built for blogging, indicating that it was made to do what blogs do – writing and editing posts, commenting, etc.

Over time, however, WordPress has grown and changed a lot, including the fact that it now supports various features. It currently supports numerous features, making it less of a pure blogging platform and more of a tool to create websites with rich content and complex content.

Types WordPress can also be used to publish content multiple times. This means that you can write a piece of content once and then display it in different places without duplicating it, saving time and energy for website editors and making WordPress more CMS-like.

Some Approaches And Methods

There are some approaches and methods that may be put to use – and those are what we’ll concentrate on in this blog post – we’ll start with a brand new WordPress installation. We’re not going to go through the steps leading up to this point. There are many blogs that we’ll discuss how to do that, but we’re at the stage where we’ve run a new installation, and we’re just going to log in now that we’re looking at the dashboard.

Well, first of all, make a few simple adjustments before we get into the details, a little bit more standard, WordPress is installed with a sample post and a sample page, the first thing we’re going likely to do is to get rid of those, while we’re in the pages section, we’ll create two new pages later.

You may need to change or remove them depending on your particular site, but you will need them 99% of the time. So it’s worth doing this now, so first we’ll create a home page by clicking “Add New Page” and calling it “Home” to publish it immediately, and then we’ll add a page called “News,” which we’ll also post in the “Edit Page” screen.

You may have noticed that WordPress displays this box, suggesting that we change the permalinks. This is a good idea because the default setting, which consists of a question mark and a number, is not very user-friendly for either users or Google, which we’re going to change now.

You can either click on this “Change, Permalinks” box here, or you can go to “Settings, Permalinks” and do it there. We’ll choose the month and the name “Save Changes,” and that’s done, now we’re going to point WordPress to the two pages that we created.

We’re going to do that in Settings and Reading, so we’re going to select a static page. It’s going to be the one we created called Home, and our posts page, the one called News, and we’re going to click Save.

So what have we done here? For a blog, you would typically have the list of posts as the home page here. Since we’re thinking of a website with a separate home page on the News page, we’ll tell WordPress to show a static page for the home page and have a separate page that lists the blog or news articles again change that later.

If needed, we take a quick look at the front end to check. Here is our website and you will see. We have a home page and a news page, although obviously, we don’t have any posts yet. You may have noticed about the home page because we have a comment box displayed here at the bottom of the pages for some pages.

That may be what you want, but for the vast majority, it’s likely that you’ll only want comments on posts or news articles and not on the pages themselves, and it’s worth it because now we’re going to populate our site with pages. It makes sense to turn off the comments feature by default, build it outside, and then turn it back on later for new posts.

So let’s go back to our dashboard. We’ll do this in the settings discussion, and then there’s a box here that says: permit individuals to submit comments on brand new posts. 

Therefore we’ll disable that scroll down click save changes now that we’ve disabled, that any new pages that we create won’t have the comments box on them. Still, the two pages that we’ve already created also, so we’ll just quickly change that to go into pages all pages, and we’ll use the quick edit option here, and we’ll disable that.

Allow comments on each of the pages that we created. We’re going to go back to the front end and refresh it, and you’ll see that the comments box is gone.

WordPress Themes

Now we’re ready to go into a little bit of detail. Before we do that, we need to familiarize ourselves with two essential concepts in WordPress. The first of these is a WordPress theme. This is the web. The description of a theme is the analogy of a car. If the core WordPress software is the engine and transmission, then the theme is the body and exterior. WordPress themes are widely available.

If you do a Google, you will certainly find hunt thousand. Some are free, some are paid, or you can create your theme from scratch. A quick word of caution here, it’s generally best to stick to trusted sources for WordPress themes, as some infamous sites offer free themes with a Nasty Virus.

An excellent place to look is the official WordPress theme directory. All of these themes have been checked and vetted, so let’s go here to Appear Themes and go to Install Themes at the top.

This search here will go away and use the official directory. So if we try, this will return all the themes in the WordPress directory that match the keywords, and you can see the variety of themes displayed here. We’ll select one of them: Randomly click install, it will take a minute to download, and then we will activate it.

This theme immediately goes to the front-end of our website, and when we refresh, you’ll immediately see that this rather flashy but very different theme is active. If we go back to our 2020 theme, which is our original one, and activate it, a refresh will come back to the live site, and you’ll see that we’re back to where we were. Themes can also make WordPress work differently.

The WordPress core software is not changed and should not be changed. Themes can change the front-end functionality or the way the dashboard looks and works. The beauty of WordPress themes is that they are, or should be, self-contained in terms of all the CSS.

All of the individual files that make up part of the website are in the themes folder – let’s take a quick look at that now, so let’s go over and look at our WordPress Directory. 

Here, inside of WP Content, you’ll see a themes folder, and inside of that are the themes that are available to us, the one that we just downloaded child’s play is all in this directory. This is where we covered the basics of themes.

Templates

Let’s talk about templates, so what is a template? Well, think of it as another layout. For example, a simple site might have a homepage template where the content takes up the entire width of the page or a subpage template that has a navigation bar on one page, or a gallery template to showcase projects or products, and so on.

We’re not going to worry about what our templates look like today, but we will look at a powerful way to use WordPress to populate different templates with different content in WordPress. 

Templates are primarily individual files within our theme, folder and once you’ve added a template and given it, some code tells WordPress that this is a template. This blog post will create templates using the default 2020 WordPress theme, but I will follow best practices by doing what I call a child theme.

To avoid any 2020 updates overwriting the changes I make, the child theme is not covered in this blog, but again, you can find lots of information on the web on how to do this. So first, I’m going to select my child theme under Appearance Themes.

So that’s this one that I created earlier, and I click activate. If we go back to the front-end, you’ll notice that absolutely nothing has changed. All I’ve done is tell WordPress to use the same theme as before.

Only now can I safely make some changes to it without overwriting it with your text or code editor, opens your theme folder, and creates a new file there. It can have any name as long as it doesn’t conflict with any of the WordPress files.

Now we will tell WordPress that this is a template file. To do this, we’ll paste the following code above and also paste the default, header, and footer sidebar code. Our next step is to use the custom fields built into WordPress.

These have been part of WordPress for some time and allow developers to add additional content to any page or post. The problem has been that these are not as user-friendly as they could be. Until today, it was not configurable on a per-template basis, which meant that if you created a custom field on one page, it was visible on all of your pages. 

We will install a powerful plugin called advanced custom fields that will allow us to display fields on a per-template basis to help us with that. It still uses WordPress‘s native custom fields but overlays a user-friendly interface on top of them. It’s a free plugin, but there are options to expand the field types by paying for premium fields.

After installing and activate the plugin, you will undoubtedly see the Custom Fields option here in the left menu, so let’s go to Custom Fields. We’re going to add a new field group and call it Personal Details.

Now we’re going to add three fields: a biofield, which we’re going to make into a WYSIWYG field, a job title field, which we’re going to leave as plain text, and a mugshot as well, this one we’re going to make into an image, and now here’s the perfect thing about the advanced custom fields, which is that you can display these fields depending on a variety of conditions in this field.

Here you may decide to show or even conceal these fields depending on whether it’s a page or a post, whether it’s part of a specific post category or post type, and so on. We’re interested in now showing these fields only when users are editing a page that uses the Staff Details template. To do that, we’ll select “Page Template is the same” and then our Staff Detail Template. 

Before we leave this screen, we’ll also scroll down and check the box next to “Hide on screen” to get rid of our default WordPress “What you see is what you get” field later. You’ll find that you’ll want to do this depending on your particular scenario. Still, we’re going to hide it, for now, so we’re going to click “Publish” and create a new staff member, so we’re going to go to “Pages,” “Add New.” This time we’re going to select “Staff Details” from our template dropdown on the right side here. 

You’ll notice that the edit page is dynamically refreshed when we do this and now shows the three fields we just created, so the biofield up here, a rich text field, a single line of text, and the job title, and our image field. So we’ll add “Jane Smith,” we’ll enter a bio, we’ll enter a job title, and we’ll select an image, and then we’ll click publish, and the staff page on the front end of the website doesn’t show anything yet, but we’ll change that now.

First, we’re going to click back into our custom field, a space that we created, and we’re going to make a note of those field names. So we have Bio Job Underline Title, and Mugshot Advanced Custom Fields created as you go, but you can edit them if you need to. We’ll jump into the personals template and now go put in some code with those in mind.

Advanced custom fields provide some functions, but the ones you’ll use most often are the Get Underscore field and the Underscore field. The former gets the data from your specific field, and the latter displays it. The way you do this is entirely up to you and your programming preferences, but I’m going to fetch the data here at the top of the page and then display it a bit further down.

Now that I’ve got my code in, I’ll click save, go back to our staff page and update it, and it’ll display our three content items precisely as we expect. I have now added another Staff. Member page John Jones with various details filled in published it and you will see. 

As expected, we have the same template but different content populating that template. We’ve only looked at the basics here, but hopefully, you can see how we can now start to create blocks of content that can be assigned to specific templates.

Navigation Menu

This basic functionality can be extended in all sorts of ways. Finally, before we wrap up well, let’s take a look at the main navigation menu. WordPress supports two types of menus. The first automatically add items to the menu as pages are added, and that’s the type we’ve seen so far on our primary site. The second is more manual but allows editors much more control over what these menus display.

We will now use this second option to switch to these appearance menus, assuming our theme supporter can add and activate a custom menu. Choose a menu name, such as top navigation, create the men, select it for our primary menu, and click Save Now. If we go back to our site’s front-end and refresh again, you’ll see that nothing at all is displayed in our primary navigation. To change that, select the items you want, click Add to Menu, and drag and drop them into the order you want.

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