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Navigate Your Website to Success: Your To-Do List for Stronger Security

website security to do list

On your journey to a more successful online presence, there’s one essential step you should never neglect – website security. At SiteGround we’re constantly updating your security arsenal with out-of-the-box security technology and additional features. But there are a few extra steps you can take to protect your site so that when your online business gathers speed, you and your clients have ultimate peace of mind.

Your Ultimate Website Security Improvement To-do List:

Website threats take many forms and constantly evolve: phishing, malware, ransomware, DDoS attacks, identity theft, customer data leakage, and even human error. To protect your website on multiple levels,  we’ve compiled an extensive but easy-to-follow list with actionable tips. Complete each step to make sure your website is rock-solid against potential threats.

1. Choose a hosting provider that safeguards server infrastructure

💡WHY: Choosing a secure web hosting provider is the first step towards a secure website. A good hosting provider would protect your website on various levels, starting with their servers’ infrastructure security. Some essential and effective security measures on server-level include a network traffic firewall, Web Application Firewall, DDOS protection and more. All these help filter bad traffic and block brute-force attacks, denial of service, malware injections, and others.

❓HOW: When choosing or switching to a new hosting provider, research their hosting infrastructure and security measures provided. Check their website for security tech info or better yet, contact them directly with specific questions.

At SiteGround, we not only provide all essential security measures, but we go the extra mile. Instead of making them operate stand-alone, we have built a Central Security System that ensures all our servers are protected at all times by constantly gathering and analyzing data from all individual server security systems, and distributing smart security rules, applied to all machines. At SiteGround, your website is safe with:

  • 24/7 server monitoring system that checks the server status every 0.5 seconds, far more often than standard monitoring systems in our industry. On top of detecting and fixing current issues, it also foresees and prevents a variety of problems automatically.
  • Smart web application firewall system on server-level that monitors the traffic and prevents hackers from exploiting the most popular CMSs and their plugins. Our Security Team constantly creates new custom security rules and adds them to our smart WAF to protect sites hosted with us out-of-the-box. 
  • Powerful AI anti-bot system that stops malicious traffic before it reaches our customers’ websites, blocking between 25 and 30 million brute-force attempts per hour across all our servers.
  • Daily geographically distributed backups, stored in a data center location, different from the one hosting the live account, and Premium Backup service that provides up to 60 additional backup copies of our clients’ websites and allows downloading all backups to our clients’ local machines.
  • The latest software versions, such as the default PHP 8.2 and the latest MySQL 8 that are used on all SiteGround servers. It’s important that your software is up-to-date at all times, because older software versions inevitably become vulnerable to hacker attacks with time.

2. Protect your data with an SSL certificate

💡WHY: Having an SSL certificate on your website is a must and an industry standard. Here are some of the main reasons why you should have one – an SSL certificate secures sensitive information, such as credit card numbers, IDs, passwords, messages, etc. by encryption; verifies your website’s identity; and ensures that your website meets the requirements of search engines which flag unsecured sites.

❓HOW: As a website owner, you can get a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt, for example, or you can ask your hosting provider whether they offer SSL certificates. 
As a SiteGround client, you get free Standard and Wildcard SSL certificates with all our hosting plans, for all your websites. Мanage your active SSL certificates easily from your Site Tools control panel – just go to Site Tools > Security > SSL Manager. Once logged in, you can also switch from the free Standard SSL to the free Wildcard SSL (for medium-sized websites), or upgrade to the Premium Wildcard SSL (for large business websites).

3. Enforce strong and secure passwords

💡WHY: The password for logging in to your website admin panel is one of the first things that hackers will try to crack. If your password is weak, such as your name, or your date of birth, for example, hackers would need just a few attempts to guess it successfully and get access to all your website information. That’s why it’s crucial to use strong and secure passwords for your login.

❓HOW: To have a strong and secure password, make sure you use long passwords, with numbers, uppercase and lowercase letters, special characters, numbers, etc. Never write it down (neither physically, nor electronically), but keep it in a secure password vault management system. And remember to update them regularly, since if you use the same one over and over again, it will get vulnerable at some point.

4. Use 2-factor authentication

💡WHY: Even with the hardest to guess passwords, there’s still a possibility that it can be compromised. This could be due to a human error, or a brute-force attack, where hackers use different combinations to guess your password – on a huge scale, hundreds of thousands of attempts per hour, for example. 

❓HOW: To further strengthen your login, implement 2-factor authentication (2FA). It requires one additional step to be completed before anyone can access your data. That’s one more layer of authentication – a temporary dynamically generated code on your phone or email. The 2-factor authentication feature is a click away in the free SiteGround Security Optimizer plugin for WordPress websites.

5. Stop brute-force attempts

💡WHY: Brute-force attacks by bots are a severe global issue for any website nowadays. They cover a huge scale of multiple websites on one or more servers, making it a very serious issue whether your site is big or small, business-critical or just an online portfolio. A brute-force attack is a hacking technique that uses trial and error to guess and crack your passwords, login credentials, and encryption keys, on a massive scale. A successful brute-force attack can cause huge financial losses; steal personal information, such as bank details, confidential medical information, etc.; and many other damages.

❓HOW: There are multiple measures that you can take in order to protect your site from brute-force attacks. These include having strong passwords, limiting the login attempts to your website admin panel, monitoring IP addresses for anomalous behavior, using CAPTCHAs, creating a unique login URL for your website admin panel, and others.

All of the above aside, your choice of web hosting provider plays a crucial role in securing your site against brute-force attempts. At SiteGround, we have developed a sophisticated AI anti-bot system that blocks millions of brute-force attempts per hour. After the system’s latest upgrade, it filters 95% more of the malicious queries by constantly learning from thousands of brute-force attempts per day and adding a traffic validation functionality that minimizes the number of brute-force attacks. SiteGround clients benefit from this advanced system by default, no action needed on their part.

6. Monitor your website traffic closely

💡WHY: As a website owner, you can sometimes notice specific patterns or suspicious traffic coming to your website. Imagine that you monitor abnormally high traffic from a country you’re not targeting, you receive too many spam comments on your blog from а  specific location, or any other unusual behavior from a certain geographical region.

In such cases, it would be useful to be able to stop the traffic from that location, as many times it might turn out to be malicious. Stopping the traffic from a specific country could also benefit your business, if, for example, legal requirements prevent you from providing your service in that country, or there are heavy taxation requirements, and others.

❓HOW: To monitor your website traffic, you can use different network security tools that alert you of potential malicious activity in your network, or you can also set up alerts yourself, whenever you encounter login attempts or suspicious activity from certain IP addresses. 

SiteGround clients can easily block specific IP addresses or whole countries and stop traffic from countries that are not relevant to your business or online presence. If you are a SiteGround client, control your website traffic in Site Tools > Security > Blocked Traffic.

7. Keep your inbox clean from spam messages

💡WHY: Dealing with multiple emails is part of our daily work routine nowadays. Yet, when there are a number of spam messages in your inbox by the hour, the task becomes even more tedious and annoying. You have to manually process each email and mark as spam those that sneaked into your inbox. But there’s more to spam than simply a cluttered inbox – it’s dangerous, because it can be the main source of phishing and other hacker attacks. It goes the other way round, too.

Spam messages can negatively affect not only the receiver, but the sender as well. If another user on your server has sent uncontrolled spam, then there’s a chance that your entire server address will get blacklisted. This will affect you when you try to send an otherwise legitimate email, which might not get to the recipient simply because it’s coming from an already compromised server address.

❓HOW:  First and foremost, make sure to not delete spam messages from your inbox, but rather mark them as spam, so that your spam filter will know not to let any more messages from this address into your inbox. Second, if you can tell that the message is spam, even before opening it, then delete it without clicking on it, or downloading anything. Such messages can contain malicious software! Other rules to follow in order to avoid spam, include keeping your email address as private as possible, unsubscribing from email lists, or simply using a third-party spam filtering service.

SiteGround clients enjoy an in-house built Spam Protection solution that keeps both incoming and outgoing spam away. Our solution not only efficiently minimizes the amount of spam messages delivered to your inbox, but it also constantly learns from your email reading behavior and actions to add even more custom rules for spam messages. As a result, our system blocks 12 Million spam emails from even reaching your mailboxes every day, while 600,000 get filtered directly in the spam folder. It also extremely efficiently detects and stops outgoing spam messages from our servers, giving you an extra layer of security.

SiteGround clients have our built-in Spam Protection features enabled by default, but can also easily control them via an easy interface to allow and block senders. They simply need to go to Site Tools > Email > Spam Protection and directly tell the system how to treat a certain sender by adding an email address or an entire domain to their block/allow lists.

8. Scan your website for potential threats regularly

💡WHY: Hackers invent new and smarter ways to “hijack” websites, by the hour. Your website can get infected with malware in numerous ways – compromised login credentials, corrupted or outdated software, infected or fake plugins and themes, and many others. If your site gets infected with malware, this can have serious consequences on your whole business,  not only on the website itself.

❓HOW: Your best bet against malware is constant monitoring. However, as a website owner, you have many other responsibilities in regard to your website. You simply cannot monitor it for suspicious behavior on your own 24/7. But your hosting provider can and should. 

With SiteGround, our clients can activate Site Scanner – a security add-on that crawls your websites daily, warns you of potential malware and other security threats, and provides tools for reaction if your sites are under attack. Here’s how Site Scanner protects your websites.

9. Boost your WordPress security

💡WHY: WordPress is the most popular CMS platform in the world, and as such, it’s also a preferred target for hackers. Even though all of the above tips apply to WordPress as well, there are a few extra things you can do to make sure that your WordPress website is fully secured against malicious threats.

❓HOW: We have identified some important, yet easy-to-follow tips to help you take special security care of your WordPress website:

  • Keep your WordPress version and plugins up-to-date

It’s important to keep your WordPress version and plugins up-to-date with their latest possible versions, because hackers use any vulnerability or backdoor to get access to your website’s files, sensitive information, etc. Simply log in to your WordPress admin and go to Settings or plugins to check if there’s a newer version.

At SiteGround, we automatically update all WordPress sites hosted with us to the latest stable WordPress version, as well as the free plugins, depending on clients’ settings in their Site Tools > WordPress > Autoupdate.

  • Review your user roles and permissions

Make sure to review and clean up inactive users or limit access for certain users only to the information and resources they require for that specific role. For example, let the administrator level accounts only for the people responsible for the technical aspects of your site, but give edit access to your blog only to users that manage content or users on your site.

  • Avoid common usernames

Remember that your WordPress login consists of your username and password. However, all WordPress installations by default come with the user “Admin” which means that hackers already know one of the two pieces of your login information. That’s why it’s important to change your username to a custom one.

  • Limit login attempts

Another way a hacker would try to crack your username and/or password is to try and guess them on the login form with numerous consecutive attempts. What you can do is limit the number of consecutive unsuccessful login attempts by blocking their IP for a certain period of time after they reach a set amount of attempts. With the free Security Optimizer plugin by SiteGround, you can activate this feature with a click of a button.

  • Clean up unused or outdated plugins and themes

Unused or outdated plugins and themes, including deactivated ones, also open the backdoor for hackers to get to your website. To avoid that possibility, simply delete any unused plugins and themes on your website.

  • Add an extra layer of security with a trusted plugin

With the free Security Optimizer plugin available for all WordPress websites, you get all the security features you need to protect your WordPress website. Its user-friendly interface allows you to enable a variety of safety features with a few clicks – from hiding your WordPress version, locking and protecting system folders, to hardening different aspects of your login security, as well as monitoring visits, bots, etc. in a detailed activity log.

10. Back up your website regularly

💡WHY: Even if you’ve taken multiple security measures, unexpected events still happen – an update might go wrong, you can accidentally break something on your site, or any other unforeseen circumstances can require you to revert to an older version of your website. Just like an UNDO button in real life. That’s why it’s a must to keep several backup copies of your website in order to revert any mishaps in due time.

❓HOW: There are two main ways to back up your website – manually and with a third-party backup service. If you want to back up your site yourself, you need to log in to your web hosting account, locate the directory with your website’s files, use an FTP client to download this directory on your local computer and store it in a safe place. This is useful but can be impractical because you never know when mistakes will happen – so having an automated backup is crucial.

At SiteGround, we know how often backups can save an emergency situation with your website. That’s why we have a sophisticated system for creating and keeping backups of your website automatically. We generate a backup of your website every day and store each for up to 30 days. What’s more, we keep these backups in a data center location different from the one hosting the live account, which is an extra layer of security for your data, in case something affects your whole data center. SiteGround clients can easily manage backups from Site Tools > Security > Backups. 

For the ultimate peace of mind of our clients, we have recently launched our new Premium Backup service that provides clients with automatic backups made every hour, on-demand backups for a full backup of their sites (whenever they need it), 7 additional automated daily backups on top of the ones included in their plan, and allows for ​​downloading all backups to their local machine.

premium backups siteground

11. Keep an eye on your website security status regularly

💡WHY: Even if your site is secured and backed up, you still need to check its security status regularly. It’s important to know how secure your site is and whether the security level has changed – keep an eye on how many attacks have been mitigated, or find new ways to further protect your site from incidents.

❓HOW: To check your website security status, you can use a free open-source web security testing tool. There are many such tools available online. If you’re using WordPress, you can also run a security scan with various free plugins to scan your website and detect vulnerabilities. After you check the status of your website security, it’s important to analyze the results and take measures where necessary.

SiteGround clients receive free monthly security reports, delivered straight into their inboxes. In these reports, they get a summary result of their site’s security check, along with actionable advice on how to reduce the risk of malicious attacks, if there are any weak areas identified. All this information is compiled in a user-friendly format, and the feature is enabled by default for all our clients. To manage their preferences for the reports for any of their websites, they simply need to go to their Client Area > Click on User Avatar > Notification Preferences and click the pencil icon next to Monthly Security Reports.

Wrap-up

A website is the most important and valuable digital asset you have, so you would want to make sure that it’s as secure as possible, time after time. By constantly reviewing and implementing new security measures, you ensure your site’s at maximum security level. This way your business, your visitors’ information, and your reputation will be safe during any business season.

Quick Cheat Sheet

website security tips by siteground
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New: Premium Backup for Ultimate Peace of Mind

premium backups

Your website is the backbone of your online presence, representing countless hours of hard work, financial and marketing investment. At SiteGround, we understand the paramount importance of protecting this valuable asset. Knowing from experience that every website should have backups to restore from, over a decade ago, we introduced automated daily backups for every site hosted at SiteGround. Building on this foundation, later on we launched geographically distributed ones at no extra cost for our clients.

And now, we’re happy to introduce our newest Premium Backup solution designed to ensure that you can quickly create, restore and download from multiple backups of your website in any situation.

What is the new Premium Backup service?

Our Premium Backup service is a comprehensive solution that provides up to 60 additional backup copies of your site and allows downloading all your backups to your local machine. And that’s on top of the daily backups every SiteGround site comes with! 

Read more about the new Premium Backup:

Automatic Backups Made Every Hour

SiteGround’s Premium Backup includes hourly backups strategically created in the last 48 hours. This way you can easily restore a recent, up-to-date version of your website and  prevent data loss.

Hourly backups are a must-have for most websites, but especially for those whose content or backend are often updated, receive online orders or are using a lot of plugins for different functionalities. In case of an accident, an update gone wrong or anything that results in your website not looking or performing as expected, having a recent backup to restore from is absolutely crucial. Having multiple hourly backups enables you to easily locate the one you need to restore from and in just a few clicks specify whether you need a specific file, email or your whole website restored in an instant. 

On-demand Backups at Your Convenience

With our Premium Backup service, you get 5 on-demand backup slots for a full backup of your site, whenever you need it. If your plan already has on-demand backups included, those 5 will be added as additional slots you can use to create even more backups at different times. 

Introducing a big change? Testing a new design? Want to capture a version of your website that you may want to return to later? You can do all of this safely with an on-demand backup. Just log in to your Site Tools, name your new backup and once created, you can easily download and restore from later. 

Extra Daily Automatic Backups for Extended Coverage

When it comes to backups, the more the merrier. With our Premium Backup Service you get 7 additional automated daily backups on top of the ones included in your plan. This makes a total of up to 37 backup copies on shared hosting plans and 14 backup copies on Cloud. With an extended backup coverage you have more options to restore from and a larger period covered so you can rest assured that even older versions are safely stored and available for download. 

Convenient Restores and Backup Downloads

Our new premium backups also allow you to easily restore files, emails, databases, or your whole website. What is more, you can even download any backup to your local computer, where each downloaded backup contains the website’s files, emails and databases.

The download option adds one more layer of security allowing you to keep a backup of your site on your local machine, too. We highly recommend that such copies are created and kept by each site owner, as this increases the redundancy and minimizes further the risk of data loss.  

You can learn more on how to use our backup service in our detailed Backup Service Tutorial.

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How to Make Your Website More Environmentally Friendly

co2 emissions and speed server website icons

Reducing our carbon footprint is an enormous endeavor on a global scale – countries and individuals unite together to decrease carbon emissions. Given the fact how difficult it is to minimize carbon emissions, you might feel that your every day efforts are a drop in the ocean. On the contrary, every effort counts – each recycled plastic item, every website made greener, contributes to this worldwide struggle.

You read that one correctly – a website should be eco-friendly, too. One would think that since websites are digital assets, they don’t leave a carbon footprint. However, websites consume large amounts of energy to load for users and appear in search results.

Here’s how your website impacts the environment and how to reduce its carbon footprint.

What Impact Does a Website Have on the Environment

According to statistics, an average website produces 211 kg CO2 emissions annually. This is the equivalent of 1055 km of driving a car. And that is for just 1 website.

There are nearly 2 billion websites in the world, according to Statista. These make the Internet the sixth largest consumer of electricity on the planet. As a result, on a global scale, it produces around 2% of global CO2 emissions annually, equivalent to the aviation industry.

To calculate your website’s carbon footprint, you can use one of the carbon footprint calculators, available online for free.

4 Ways To Make Your Website Greener

Once you’ve calculated your website’s carbon footprint, there are steps that you can take to reduce this number even further. Have a look at the actions below and think if you can implement the ones you haven’t already taken.

Choose a Green Hosting Provider

Having a green hosting partner for your website is the first step to an eco-friendly website. If you’re still deciding on your hosting provider, or want to check whether yours offers green hosting services, you can simply visit their website and look for green practices and initiatives, such as using renewable energy sources (e.g. wind and solar power) to power their servers, recycling or reducing waste, and similar commitments to the environment.

Why is that so important? Here are some statistics that show how important is the role of your hosting provider in creating and maintaining an environmentally friendly website.

An average website produces 4.61 grams of CO2 for every page view. However, at SiteGround, we dedicate much time and effort to host greener websites. As a result, for websites hosted with us, each site visit amounts to approximately 1.7 grams of CO2 emissions – nearly three times more carbon-efficient than the industry average. Here’s a glimpse of some of the things we do to achieve that:

  • 100% energy match

Our data center infrastructure is powered by the Google Cloud platform which matches 100% of the electricity consumed by the servers with energy from renewable sources. This strategy ensures high redundancy, optimal site speed and sustainability.

  • Data centers close to end users

SiteGround uses more than 10 data centers around the globe for hosting our clients’ websites. The closer that server is to the majority of their website visitors, the faster their website loads for users, and the less energy it consumes.

  • Servers run on the latest tech stack

We constantly optimize our server software and develop powerful tools to maximize efficiency and minimize resource usage. Some of these tools are our in-house built CDN that caches site content on multiple servers on different continents, custom PHP setup that improves page load by up to 30%, SuperCacher that enables full-page caching to make websites up to 5x faster.

Optimize Your Website Performance

If you’ve already using a green hosting provider for your website, that’s a solid foundation for having an environmentally friendly website. The next thing you need to think about is your website loading speed.

A slow website consumes more energy to load. If your website is slow, it will require a lot of processing power from the server, for every visitor that comes and tries to load it. Thus, your site produces more carbon emissions.

Improving your site’s loading times will result in less energy consumption, it will undeniably improve the user experience of your website visitors, and at the end of the day, you’ll have a more eco-friendly website. Here are some practical tips on how to increase your website loading speed:

  • Optimize your use of images

To improve your website’s loading speed, you need to optimize the way you use images on your site. First and foremost, consider what images you use and reduce them by removing the unnecessary ones and/or concentrating them into single files. Second, prioritize and load critical images first – those above-the-fold should load first, while non-critical images could use lazy-loading only after critical images or when they are needed. Next, compress images in size as much as possible, without compromising on their quality. Last, but not least, leverage caching for static images, in order to minimize redundant user requests.

  • Leverage website caching

To speed up your website even further, leverage one of the most powerful technologies – caching. What’s more, it can be applied on different levels of your website – on server and on browser level. Server-side caching reduces the website’s loading times by keeping a copy of the web page on the server. SiteGround clients take advantage of three levels of server-side caching – Nginx Direct Delivery for static content, Dynamic caching for dynamic content, and Memcached (for object caching). Browser-caching, on the other hand, can also significantly reduce your site loading times – when a user visits a website for more than once, their browser will load the cached version of the page, stored on their device.

  • Use a CDN

To speed up your website even more, use a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN distributes copies of your website to users in different geographical locations by loading your website from servers that are located closer to the end user. SiteGround clients leverage our free in-house built CDN which provides their websites with blazingly-fast loading speed, requires no configuration on their side, and is easy-to-manage. But, surely, there are multiple paid CDN products and options out there.

  • Clean up your website from unnecessary weight

Decluttering your website should be just as common as spring cleaning your home. There are some pages, plugins, themes, redirects, files, content and more that slow down your website and increase its carbon footprint. Here are a few things to keep in mind when cleaning up your website:

First, get rid of unused plugins and themes, because of the straight-forward rule: “the less code, the faster your site”. Next, remove outdated content and files from your site. These also take space on your site and further slow it down. Last, but not least, reduce unnecessary redirects that affect website speed by adding extra steps to the page load process – keep your pages and content a click away. To clean up your site even further, explore more techniques in our blog post.

Improve SEO Visibility

Even if your website is hosted with a green host and is optimized for performance, there are still other steps that you can take to make it even more environmentally friendly.

When people search for your website on search engines, that requires a lot of energy. In terms of greenhouse gases, one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2. To put that into perspective, an average car driven for 0.6 miles (1 km) produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches.

That’s why if you optimize your website for search engines, the end users will spend less time searching for it, which in turn will result in less energy spent on server requests, and ultimately a more environmentally friendly website.

Let’s explore the top three SEO practices you can try in order to improve your website’s visibility:

  • Optimize your site structure and navigation

Your website structure is how you organize your pages and content into (sub)categories. Navigation, on the other hand, is how you guide your users to these pages and content. To optimize website structure and navigation, you need to have descriptive URLs with relevant keywords, logically structured and easy-to-follow navigation menu, and use internal links that lead to your own content and pages. All these will help you create a user-friendly site hierarchy, which in turn improves the way search engines crawl your site and its visibility in search engines results pages.

  • Target relevant keywords 

Keywords are what users put in search engines to find what they’re looking for, and at the same time keywords tell search engines what your website is all about. That’s why it’s important to use words wisely. Create clear and concise content that corresponds to what users search for and expect to see on your site. Research and use keywords that your audience looks for in order to match their search intent. Use synonyms and variations as well, in order to cover a wider range of their searches.

  • Audit your website regularly

Analyze the performance of your site regularly to make sure that your website is ranking well and is providing good user experience. For this purpose, you can use different tools, such as Google Analytics, or various SEO tools, that will help you monitor and identify areas for improvement. Common issues include duplicate content, broken links, or slow loading speed.

Strive for User-Friendly Design

Last, but not least, your website design should also be user-friendly in order to make your website more environmentally friendly. Why is design so important? When users land on your site and it provides them with an optimal user experience, this mitigates energy usage and thus, carbon footprint. Let’s explore some effective design strategies:

  • Minimalistic design

When it comes to website design – less is more. Make sure you provide your users with what they are looking for in a user-friendly manner. Avoid unnecessary assets and too many visuals that will distract the users from what they’re looking for. Include only visuals that will somehow benefit your users in their end goal on your site. Keep your design clean in order to reduce page size, your website’s rendering and thus, carbon emissions. 

  • Easy navigation

Ensure your website navigation and finding what users are looking for is easy and can be done in a few steps (clicks). Help your users way-find your content easily by structuring your navigation menus with their user experience in mind. Including internal links to your products and services will also allow users and search engines alike to identify key information easily. Intuitive navigation makes visitors spend less time and energy finding what they require, accomplish tasks with reduced steps and thereby lowers carbon emissions.

  • Mobile and desktop friendly

Another aspect of the user experience is to ensure your visitors can do all of the above just as easily and quickly as on any device they use. Whether they visit your website from a mobile or a desktop device, there shouldn’t be an issue for them to navigate or reach what they’re looking for. What’s more, mobile devices use less processing power than larger devices. Making your website fully responsive helps reduce energy consumption, improve performance and create a seamless user experience.

Wrap Up

Having an environmentally friendly website is just as important as your other sustainable daily practices, such as reducing plastic usage, using public transportation, recycling waste, and others.

However, creating and maintaining a green website takes time and effort. That’s why it’s important to have a reliable green hosting partner like SiteGround on your side, in order to not be alone in the journey to an eco-friendly website.

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[Expert Chat] Getting Started with Email Marketing

experts on email marketing

Whether you have a small personal or portfolio site, an eCommerce store, or are just starting up a small business website, there is one thing that can effectively boost your online presence at every stage – email marketing.

To help you get started and grow your email marketing efforts, right on time for the upcoming holiday season, we organized an #SMBGrowthChat on Twitter Spaces along with Alessandra Farabegoli (@alebegoli), Digital Agency Owner & Email Marketing Expert, and Emanuel Cinca (@emanuelcinca), Marketer, Entrepreneur, Creator of Stacked Marketer. If you missed the live event, we’ve got you covered. Here are their expert tips on how to build and grow your email list, choose the right email marketing solution, optimize your email campaigns, and other key elements for your emails’ success.

Is email marketing right for you

Contrary to popular belief, email marketing is not only for companies with huge budgets, “Email marketing is for everybody who wants a long-term relationship with their customers,” Alessandra Farabegoli, Digital Agency Owner & Email Marketing Expert, points out.

Email marketing is your direct communication channel with your audience that helps you grow, engage, nurture and eventually convert the people interested in your company – whether you’re a blogger, an artist, an NGO, a b2b company, or an event organizer.

“Depending on what resources you have and what strengths you already have within your marketing team, maybe email marketing is not the first thing that you think about doing, but in the long-term, it’s for everyone,” says Emanuel Cinca, Marketer, Entrepreneur, Creator of Stacked Marketer. 

How to get started with email marketing

Since email marketing is within your scope, you’re probably wondering where to start from. Here are the basics of email marketing to begin with and then build upon them:

How to grow your email list

Before sending any email marketing campaigns, you need to start gathering subscribers to reach out to. To effectively grow your email list, the main thing you need to do is know your ideal subscriber. 

“Know the people who want to join your list, because you have to know where to look for them, how to advertise your list (maybe on social networks), where the people you want to join your list are,” Alessandra Farabegoli advises.

Once you know your audience well, your next step is trying to understand what will trigger them – what kind of interesting and relevant content or reward to offer to these people who are thinking of joining your list. Build your promise around that and tell it effectively – explain what they’ll get, if they join your list.

It’s then crucial to deliver on your promise – “make sure that whatever you promise in any lead magnet or any reason you give people to sign up, the content you deliver, or the information, the products continue to be within that sphere,” Emanuel Cinca points out. For example, if you get people to subscribe to your list through a lead magnet on how to create social media campaigns, but then you deliver content around SEO, that might not be a good idea, adds Emanuel Cinca.

At the end of the day, it’s not the numbers, it’s the quality of your audience, as Alessandra Farabegoli notes. “You want to grow your list with people who actually want to stay with you and continue to read and be engaged in the long-term,” she adds.

If you’re wondering where to find these high-quality readers of your future email campaigns, Emanuel Cinca advises to look for other email lists for people who are already engaged with different newsletters, because in general, newsletter readers read other newsletters. Alessandra Farabegoli adds that guest posts and guest newsletters are also a great way to make you known by other newsletter readers.

If you’re a SiteGround client, using our Email Marketing tool, you can easily add a subscribers form on your website and start building your email list with our Lead Generation plugin for WordPress. It’s a great opportunity to create a lasting relationship with your site visitors, nurture them and turn them into loyal customers.

To collect email subscribers easily and efficiently, it’s crucial to choose the right email marketing solution.

Choose the right email marketing solution

Choosing an email marketing solution that best fits your goals will actually depend on your business needs. 

For example, if you’re doing an eCommerce project, you “need automation features that allow creating automated workflows, such as an abandoned cart, or complex welcome series that can segment people and differentiate messages,” Alessandra Farabegoli says. 

On the other hand, if you’re doing a newsletter, look at newsletter-focused features – you need to have highly-customizable templates that are easy-to-use, good team member permission to have different roles for different team members (to add and do reports, view and send newsletters), Emanuel Cinca advises. He adds that it’s also important to have an integration with WordPress or any other solution you use. Other crucial features include the view of the email editor, the ability to segment subscribers and send relevant messages to the right people, Alessandra Farabegoli points out.

At SiteGround, we understand that ease of use is key. That’s why our Email Marketing tool is user-friendly and integrated into the SiteGround Client Area, allowing seamless management of your website and email campaigns in the same place. You can choose from our highly-converting layouts, customize them to suit your brand and send your campaign in a matter of minutes.

Top strategies for sending email marketing campaigns

Now that you’ve built your email list with subscribers, you have to start communicating with them directly via email. Here are our experts’ top tips for sending successful email marketing campaigns:

Types of email campaigns you need to send

Our experts are of the opinion that the most important campaign is the welcome email or the welcome series emails, because when a subscriber enters your list, it’s the peak of interest moment. Alessandra Farabegoli advises you to build upon this interest still with the first emails that will make people think it was worth subscribing to your newsletter, as you’re sending them interesting content. 

According to Emanuel Cinca, another important type of email you should have is the re-engagement email to clean up your list. If someone disengages after a long period of time (period is based on the emails they’ve received, not on time), send them a re-engagement email. If they still don’t engage with you, he advises you to consider segmenting or unsubscribing them, so that they do not receive as many emails as everyone else. Otherwise, this might hurt your email reputation.

Alessandra Farabegoli points out that if you’re selling online, there are then some more types of emails you need to send, such as post-purchase emails, abandoned carts, winback flows, etc. which you can set up in order to nurture your customers, have them use your products better, and maybe cross-sell and upsell.

An important thing to keep in mind, though, is that you must have a plan, Alessandra adds. This goes to say that you need to create an email calendar with the topics you want to build on and their schedule. “Find a regular schedule to send emails, because consistency is key. Your newsletter must be an appointment. People should know – today, this newsletter is coming and I want to read it,” Alessandra notes.

How often should you reach out to your subscribers

Indeed, it’s important to have an “appointment” with your readers and send them emails regularly. Yet, how often should you reach out to them so that they don’t consider you spammy? 

Our experts agree that there’s no one size fits all. The timing will depend on your subscribers’ list, their reading habits, their expectations, what content you send and the purpose of your email. However, there are some general factors to consider when sending emails:

What defines the right moment to press “send”?

Nowadays, everybody checks their email every day – from when they get up until night, but what’s the right moment, when they’re ready to read your message, when they will be interested to read about the topic, or consider buying your product, Alessandra Farabegoli asks. The simple answer is that it depends on your message.

For example, if you’re sending a news email, you can send it in the morning, when most people are reading the news. If you’re sending a sales email and you want the reader to make a right-away purchase decision, mornings are not the best time to do so. For instance, sending an email about planning a trip would perform best outside working hours.

In Emanuel Cinca’s experience with a Monday to Friday newsletter that includes marketing news and the latest case studies, Monday to Thursday still gets the same engagement, because they’re providing readers with information related to the subscribers’ jobs, they are reading it as part of their work routine.

As Alessandra Farabegoli points out, you need to avoid busy times of the week, e.g. Monday mornings are generally not the best moment to send b2b campaigns, but there’s an exception to this rule – for example, welcome emails or post-purchase emails should be sent immediately.

Segment and personalize your email campaigns

Once you’ve identified when to hit the “send” button, you might also want to segment and personalize your email campaigns before sending them out, for better performance and results. Our experts give valuable advice on both the eCommerce and non-eCommerce side of things:

  • eCommerce projects

“If you work on an eCommerce project, the most obvious segmentation is between people who are already customers and people who are not,” Alessandra Farabegoli says. She explains that there are two main factors to keep in mind – engagement and source. 

Engagement is key for eCommerce projects and you need to clean your list regularly – avoid putting people that are less engaged, even though they are customers. You can still write them for sales, Black Friday, special offers, or new product launches, but you need to lower the frequency of sending emails, so that they don’t mark you as spam or unsubscribe from your list.

The source is also very important, according to Alessandra Farabegoli – “if you realize that people, who come from a lead acquisition campaign, don’t buy anything in the end, you may reconsider if this campaign is the right place to advertise,” she says.

  • Newsletter publishers

Emanuel Cinca gives insight on the non-eCommerce side – for newsletter publishers, you can have segmentation by frequency (when they want emails to be delivered) and activity (re-engagement of subscribers on a regular basis). You can also segment based on the source where people came from – not necessarily to personalize for them, but to know how things are working: ROI generating, readership status, sales numbers, etc., he explains. One more way of segmentation is interests, as Alessandra Farabegoli adds. “Ask people what they are interested in, or use the interest from where they clicked on,” she points out.

With the Email Marketing tool, SiteGround clients can target specific audience groups and add a personal touch with dynamic content variables, such as the first name of the recipient, etc. Our system also automatically suppresses hard bounce email addresses to keep email lists healthy and improve open rates and reputation.

Best practices for optimizing your email campaigns

After sending your email campaign, you’d need to make sure that your deliverability and open rates are as high as possible. Our experts have some valuable advice on how to achieve that, what other key metrics to track, and how to optimize your email campaigns for even better results.

Ensure higher email deliverability rates

According to Alessandra Farabegoli, the main factor is your sender reputation. “To ensure you reach the inbox, keep your promises and send relevant content. The main thing is how you keep the relationship with your subscribers, so that they continue to think your emails are worth opening, clicking and reading,” she explains.

Emanuel Cinca also points out some other important algorithms behind email deliverability. Generally, if you follow the rules of most service providers, you’ll usually not go into the spam folder, unless you’re truly spammy. However, your email can go to the Promotions tab, where less people will engage with it. Emanuel Cinca has a fix for this issue: “The best thing to do is get high engagement on your very early emails, e.g. try to get replies on your welcome email – offer a bonus lead magnet in exchange for replies,” he advises. If you get that high engagement early on, it’ll help your emails go to Updates or the Primary inbox, which means that people get a notification when you send them an email. What’s more, the inbox will be the default one for the new subscribers to begin with, unless they start to become disengaged,” Emanuel Cinca explains.

Another factor that matters significantly is the sender itself. “Your own domain, your sender – that’s the key to your subscribers’ inbox,” Emanuel Cinca points out. However, he adds that some email service providers don’t let you completely set up all authentication, SPF, etc. through them, and then you cannot add your custom domain which is essentially the key to the inbox.

Again, it comes to your choice of email marketing tool. At SiteGround, we take care of the technical side of your campaign sending to make sure your emails hit your audience’s inbox. We have one-time domain authentication that boosts the odds of sending your emails right in your audience’s inbox. The more emails that get delivered, the better your reputation gets.

Make sure your users open your emails

Now that your email has landed in your subscribers’ inbox, what would make them open and read that email? According to Alessandra Farabegoli, here are the top 3 factors that would make people open an email:

  • Sender’s reputation

“The sender is the first thing we’re checking when browsing through new emails – if this person or company is regularly writing interesting content, then I can give them my attention,” Alessandra Farabegoli says. If not so, people tend to skip, archive or even delete, without reading.

  • Subject line

Next, you need to write engaging subject lines, because the subject line is the first thing they’ll read. Emanuel Cinca’s experience shows that all their newsletters regularly have very short subject lines, literally 1 to 3 words,  which are slight teasers of what is inside.

  • Preheader text

The preheader text is right next to the subject line and it’s important as it helps readers see what they will find inside. According to Alessandra Farabegoli, the preheader can even be left blank, because in this way your email will stand out, with a bit of space around it.

“I always say the subject line and the preheader text are the ambassadors of the email, but the most important thing is to keep a good relationship with your reader,” Alessandra Farabegoli concludes.

Track key metrics to measure your email campaign success

The key metrics that you need to track are those that are important for your business, such as sales or conversions – a download of a document, an actual purchase and others. Then, you need to check “what builds these sales – is it clicks from the website, is it opens, how many subscribers you have,” Emanuel Cinca explains.

However, Emanuel Cinca warns that nowadays “you should be careful about considering open rate as a very important metric – it’s relevant, but you need to have context behind it, because Apple mail privacy protection, for example, opens 100% of your emails over time”.

Both our experts agree that nowadays click-to-open rate (CTR) is really important, because it shows if you’ve built the right call-to-action (CTA) – if people who opened your email, decided to take it a step further, Alessandra Farabegoli explains. “Look at your CTR, are people clicking on what you want them to click, especially if you have a call to action,” Emanuel Cinca concludes.

With our Email Marketing tool, you have access to built-in analytics to gain insight into metrics, such as open rate, click rate, bounce rate and interactions, to measure the success of your campaigns.

Perform A/B tests to optimize campaigns and improve results

In case you’re not happy with the performance of your email campaigns, there’s a way to improve the results by performing tests of different email elements.

The first thing to consider, before performing any tests, is your list’s length. Alessandra Farabegoli points out that you need numbers to get relevant and statistically significant results. “You need at least maybe 20K subscribers to get a decent result from an A/B test on subject line, or sender, or timing, for example. If you want to test some content element, such as the CTA, you need at least 10 times that number,” she explains.

Emanuel Cinca agrees that if you send a newsletter one time and you have 1000 subscribers, A/B testing the subject line for them for that one time, won’t yield any results. Yet, he has a workaround, if you don’t have the volume now – you can A/B test your welcome sequence and subject line, if you have such automations or sequences. Start testing from the beginning, even if you have a few hundred subscribers – the important thing is to run this test all the time. Then, after 6 months, you might reach a statistically significant result.

To improve the content you send, you need to receive feedback from your actual readers, Emanuel Cinca advises. One thing you can test is your content structure, he adds – somewhat longer articles, bullet points, etc., split up your content as much as you can. Emanuel Cinca gives a bonus tip, in case you cannot A/B test directly and get the data– to run a survey to your audience.

Our experts agree that email marketing is a powerful tool that everyone can leverage, not only big business owners. Follow their professional tips in this article to make the most of your email marketing campaigns.

Check our YouTube recording to hear the whole Twitter chat conversation and follow us on Twitter for more news and discussions on useful topics.

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Protecting Customer Data during Peak Shopping Seasons

a guy sitting on a laptop and protecting customer data

Since more businesses are going online, customers’ personal data becomes even more important for hackers who leverage it on the dark web. With Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the holidays ahead of you, as a business owner, you can expect increased website traffic and with it – higher risk of data breaches.

Protecting customer data during these peak shopping seasons is crucial for your business in terms of brand reputation and trust, customer loyalty and protection, laws compliance and cyber attacks prevention.

Increased Cybersecurity Threats

Customer data leakage has indeed become one of the biggest security threats of our time. According to Statista, as of 2023, the global average cost per single data breach amounted to $4.45 million, where the average cost varies across sectors. The highest average cost is in the healthcare industry, with each leak costing the affected party $10.1 million.

In 2022, the most common cause of a cyber attack in the USA was email phishing, according to data by Statista. Some other common threats faced by retailers and consumers include website malware and ransomware, data breaches, identity theft, and others.

The Implications of Data Breaches

All of the above-mentioned cyber attacks can have a huge negative impact on your business. Let’s explore a few ways why is data security important:

  • Impact on customer trust and brand reputation

To operate with customers’ information means that customers have trusted you with their personal data. If you suffer any data breach, even not your direct fault, your customers will lose their trust in your business. In turn, this will result in you losing customers and profits. Brand reputation damage and negative PR are the other long-term damages.

  • Legal and regulatory consequences

A data breach will cost your business not only your customers, profits and reputation, but big financial losses. On one hand, you can be held liable for failing to comply with privacy regulations, which in turn can result in a lawsuit with financial consequences, i.e. regulatory fines.

For example, if you collect personal information of EU residents, the applicable law for your business will be GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), or if you collect consumer data of residents of California, USA, you’ll be subject to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and so on. Such regulations and laws will apply if your customers are residents of these countries, even if your business is not located there.

Essential Measures for Client Data Protection: Securing Data Systems

To avoid a data system breach, implement these essential measures to secure data systems:

  • Keep data systems up-to-date and patched

One of the most common reasons why data systems get hacked are security vulnerabilities in softwares which get exploited by cyber criminals. It’s important to keep an eye on patch releases for the softwares you use and implement them in due time. These will not only bring your software up-to-date, but also keep your data safe.

When you’re using a lot of different softwares, this could be tedious work on its own. SiteGround clients that use WordPress, take advantage of our WordPress auto-update feature. It automatically updates all WordPress installations, hosted with us, and ensures that our customers’ WordPress sites are secure and up-to-date.

  • Implement robust access controls and encryption techniques

Your access point is another common source of a security vulnerability. To increase security and reduce the risk of data breach, implement the usage of a password management tool which will create, encrypt and store smart passwords for you and your employees for all the tools you access with a password. A tool like this will take care of static data, but now let’s take a look at what happens to data that’s in transit.

A lot of traffic may go through your website, including sensitive information like login credentials and credit card details of your customers. To keep all these protected, you need to encrypt them. An SSL certificate can easily encrypt all this data and it is essential for your website security. SiteGround clients, for instance, leverage free SSL certificates on every web hosting plan we offer.

Enhanced Security Measures and Increased Vigilance during Peak Shopping Seasons

Even though the above-mentioned steps are crucial to begin with, there are some enhanced security measures to follow in order to manage data security protection:

Implementing intrusion detection and prevention systems

You need to have your website scanned regularly for potential threats. Start by implementing an anti-virus and anti-malware software or prevention system. Make sure the tool you choose is reviewed and approved by your security team and  the team is in control of it at all times. This will allow you and your employees to stay up-to-date with the latest security measures and updates.

SiteGround clients have the opportunity to leverage our Site Scanner service that helps protect their websites from malware. Our Site Scanner constantly crawls web pages to detect the latest threats that might affect a website, warns clients about such potential threats at an early stage and in a timely manner and gives them tools for reaction, in case their sites are under attack.

For WordPress users, we have an all-in-one security solution – our free Security Optimizer plugin. It’s available to all WordPress users (no matter where they’re hosted) and provides them with all the security measures they need to keep sites safe. The plugin protects sites on application level (hides WordPress version; disables themes & plugins editor, etc.), provides advanced protection, such as locking and protecting system folders, enabling advanced XSS protection, hardens login security, and many other features.

Conducting regular security audits and monitoring network traffic

Even if you implement all these security measures, you still need to monitor your website security status regularly. You need to keep an eye on your site’s security status at least once a month, yet this could take some time, effort and money. As a business owner, you probably have lots on your plate, so you might consider outsourcing this activity.

SiteGround clients receive free monthly security reports, delivered straight into their inboxes. We automatically monitor our clients’ websites and send them detailed summary results, along with actionable tips on what they can improve to reduce the security threats, in case we detect any weak areas on their websites.

Collaboration with Logistics Partners

With all the enhanced security measures in force, you then need to think about your collaboration with logistics partners, i.e. the participants which provide the cloud computing services, such as Google Cloud, AWS (Amazon Web Services), or Microsoft Azure, for instance. Effective communication and collaboration are key for ensuring secure handling of customer information throughout the supply chain. Companies working together is also important for reducing costs, improving service quality and flexibility. 

To achieve all these, they need to communicate openly, share common goals and have trust in the partnership. Should they succeed in their collaboration, this will result in different advantages, such as improved customer satisfaction, better risk management and even cost savings. 

For example, companies like Amazon or Apple handle sensitive customer data. If they don’t follow strict client data protection standards, there’s always a chance for potential vulnerabilities in the data protection chains. Back in 2019, Amazon Web Services faced a data breach, affecting CapitalOne bank’s 100 million customers’ names, social security numbers, credit scores, and credit card data. An ex-employee was found guilty in misconfiguration of cloud storage servers to access and steal the data.

When businesses collaborate closely with logistics partners, they can ensure the implementation of crucial security measures (e.g. encryption, 2-factor authentication and others). Effective communication and strong relationships with logistics partners are essential factors for a successful overall performance and data security protection.

Employee Awareness and Training

Now that you’ve secured your website on all levels, it’s important to make sure that your employees are also up-to-date with the latest security measures in order to prevent weak points. Start by educating your employees about security best practices. To mitigate human errors, conduct regular security awareness training and checks. Educate employees about the most common security threats, such as phishing, in order to prevent hackers from stealing their credentials and personal details.

Our website can be a good starting point with tons of useful security resources. Visit the security category on the SiteGround blog to get more information on website security topics.

Transparent Communication with Customers

An essential next step is to have transparent communication with your customers about your privacy policy and how you handle their data.

You need to have clear, written Privacy Policy and Data Handling Practices. Important points to cover in it include who can access your customers’ data and in what ways, as well as how their data will be used and how it should not be handled.

Publish the Privacy Policy on your business website and communicate it to your customers, informing them how you collect, store, use and protect data privacy. Keep them in the loop about the latest changes and updates to your privacy policy.

Educating Customers on Secure Online Shopping

Being a customer during peak shopping seasons has its security threats as well. To protect  personal information, be cautious of phishing emails, use strong passwords and update your devices and software regularly.

What is one step you can take to protect your personal information? Learn at least four good ways on how to protect your data and yourself from phishing and online scams in our dedicated blog post.

Developing an Incident Response Plan

In the unfortunate event of a security breach happening, it’s a good idea to have an incident response plan, developed in advance. Draft thorough steps on how you would contain a data breach or security incident. These should include timely notification of affected customers and/or employees and open cooperation with the relevant cybersecurity authorities. When it comes to a security incident, communication is key. Make sure your employees can report suspicious activities to your data protection security team (or data protection officer), as well as ensure that your customers are informed at all times of any suspicious behavior. Beware what you share with your customers and provide them only with the essential information they need.

With the peak shopping season just ahead of all of us, we can not stress enough on how important protecting customer data is. Ensuring security data protection is key for your business, as it will keep your customers’ trust, brand reputation and your success levels high. Implement the data protection security measures you learned from this article for a successful and secure shopping season. Add a comment below to share with us other security measures that have worked well for your business data privacy or tell us more about your general data protection strategy.

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My First SiteGround Team Festival

SiteGround employees at SiteGround Team Festival 2023

This June marked the 5th SiteGround Team Festival, but for me it was the first one. Even though I joined the company more than two years ago, it was right after the pandemic hit and the world just stopped, so it took a while, but the wait was so worth it. My bar of expectations was already set pretty high, as I had heard legends about the past SiteGround Festivals (in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019), even before I joined the team. Indeed, it turned out to be so much more than a team building event, more than a festival – an experience. An epic one.

🏰 A tour of the festival’s location

Our Team Festival was located in the surroundings of a beautiful residence, built in the early 80s. The area around it has large lawns, forests, diversity of plants and animals species, even its own lake! The building itself was quite interesting as well, and everyone had a chance to sign up for a tour inside the place. Here are the top 3 things that stuck in my memory about the backstory of the residence. The building was constructed way back in the 1980s as one of the residences of the social political party leader at the time. All the materials used for building it were produced locally, that was part of the whole idea around the construction. Huge and impressive chandeliers were hanging from the ceilings in every room, hallway, and bedroom. 

The place where it was built was also not chosen at random – they had scientists inspect the air, wind and soil quality carefully before deciding on the construction site. Because of the unique location, surrounded by mountains and wind currents, the air in this exact place is supposed to be one of the cleanest and freshest ones by miles.

🎪 A glimpse of the workshops and activities

Traditionally, our team gathering is a whole festival, it spans two-days of activities and workshops, mostly led by our own colleagues. Our events team does an internal call for workshop suggestions months before the festival, and that’s how the program shapes itself naturally following the interests of the SiteGround people. From compost-making, and birdhouse workshops, to coffee & beer brewing, and screen printing of T-shirts & tote bags – we had it all! Five hundred SiteGrounders could all choose between 10 different workshops, taking up between a few hours and a whole day! The list goes on and on with multiple sports activities from the early morning to the afternoon, again, led by our own professional team instructors – yoga, pilates, workouts, football, volleyball, and table tennis tournaments. Also paintball, slacklining, archery…you name it, we had it.

The diverse range of workshops and sports activities was indeed impressive, one would wonder where we got the power for the fun festival part starting in the evening – because the best was saved for last.

🎸 Let me…entertain you

The evening started out with a whole new portion of entertainment, this time – on the full-blown 30-meter SiteGround music stage. It all began with a stand-up comedy show to warm up the stage for what was about to happen that night:

The return on stage of our in-house band – New Technical Issues that consists entirely of SiteGround employees, proven to be talented not only in fixing technical issues. The team cheered them on and enjoyed their performance so much that they had a hard time leaving the stage, as we wouldn’t let them. Next time they promised to think about a third round of encore! And that was just the beginning!

At SiteGround we work hard every day, and we always put our whole heart and mind into what we do. When we party, we keep that same high bar. That’s why the headliners on the SiteGround Team Festival 2023 were … RUDIMENTAL themselves!

Thanks to them, our team festival cheer echoed around the surrounding woods until late that night – dancing, singing, jumping, shouting. The experience is hard to put into words!

I can’t imagine what organizing such an epic two-day event might look like, but the SiteGround team definitely pulled it off – because, again, we are organizing it ourselves. Apparently, 6 months in the making, only about 5 people in the core organizing team, over 100 outside professionals to help with the campsite site up, music stage, and healthy food catering on the spot, just so that 500 SiteGround team members and guests can rest and nurture their spirit and senses together for two days, for the fifth year now. 

What’s the one thing that I learned from my first SiteGround Team Festival? SiteGrounders are never bored, and never boring.

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Celebrating 20 Years WordPress

wordpress 20th anniversary

This is a special time of the year for SiteGround and the vast WordPress community worldwide – WordPress, the platform that powers over 40% of all websites on the internet, is turning 20 on May 27, 2023! During almost all of its life, SiteGround has been actively involved with the WordPress project and its community, contributing, sponsoring, and providing expert WordPress hosting services to more than 2+ million WordPress sites. As we celebrate WordPress’ 20th birthday, we want to reflect on our shared journey, commemorate milestones, and express our unwavering commitment to empowering you – our valued customers and WordPress users.

A Shared Journey

From the moment SiteGround was founded in 2004 (just 1 year after WordPress emerged), we recognized WordPress amazing potential. Back then, it was a new, blogging platform that had the opportunity to change the web – and it did! It evolved into one of the most powerful open source content management systems used by millions of websites worldwide. In these almost two decades, we have worked closely with the WordPress community, sponsoring and participating in hundreds of WordCamps and WordPress Meetups worldwide. During all these years we have been contributing to the project, offering our expertise, and developing a powerful platform for WordPress users to create, innovate, and thrive.

Contributing to better WordPress

Ever since the beginning, WordPress development has relied heavily on the contributions of its users. There is tons of voluntary work involved in maintaining, improving and developing WordPress. SiteGround has dedicated many hours of work of different members of its team to address various needs of the project. Some of our team members have contributed code, others organized events and translated help articles, etc. We have also supported external contributors, all with the purpose of helping make WordPress better for everyone using it. As a company, we believe that contributing to the WordPress project is one of the ways to pay back to the community and the opportunities WordPress brought to us and our clients. You can check our company profile and current list of active contributors on wordpress.org website.

In addition to contributing to the WordPress core and project needs, we have developed two of the most popular free-for-all plugins – the SiteGround Security and SiteGround Optimizer plugins. The plugins provided us with the opportunity to share our hosting expertise beyond our own hosting platform and enabled millions of WordPress users to immensely improve their websites’ security and performance – two of the pillars of any successful website.

Bringing the WordPress community closer

One of the key pillars holding WordPress community together are the community events – the most common being the WordPress Meetups and the WordCamps where diverse WordPress members come together to get to know each other, exchange ideas and find ways of cooperating more efficiently. Ever since 2011, SiteGround has been one of the main sponsors of WordCamps and later on of Meetups, helping empower these live interactions. As of this month (June 2023) we are also a Global WordPress sponsor, thus supporting pretty much all WordPress events around the world.

Providing hosting expertise

Throughout this amazing journey, SiteGround has been proudly supporting WordPress users in creating and managing their digital presence with premium hosting services designed specifically for WordPress websites, custom tools and features, custom plugins and more. Our commitment to delivering a high quality service has been recognized on the official wordpress.org/hosting website, where we are one of the only three recommended hosting providers.

Together with WordPress, we’ve reached numerous milestones. From WordPress’ evolution as a simple blogging platform to a full-fledged content management system, to SiteGround’s development of a state-of-the-art hosting platform with powerful WordPress tools and features, our combined journey has been nothing short of spectacular.

We invite you to visit our dedicated page showing how SiteGround and WordPress paths have crossed over the past 20 years, helping us achieve numerous milestones.

> > VISIT PAGE

Our Continued Commitment

We are incredibly proud of our close relationship with WordPress and the immense value it has brought to our users. As a testament to this commitment, we continue to innovate and offer an extensive suite of WordPress-specific features and a premium hosting service. As WordPress continues to grow and innovate, so do we. Our goal remains to provide you with the best possible hosting environment for your WordPress website.

Thank you for being part of this incredible journey! Here’s to WordPress’ 20th Birthday, and here’s to another 20 years of innovation, growth, and shared success with SiteGround and WordPress!

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How to Reduce Your Website’s Carbon Footprint: Twitter Chat

sustainability twitter chat

If the internet was a country, it would be the 4th largest source of carbon emissions. On average, a website produces 1.76g of CO2 per visit from the processing power needed to load and deliver the page. That’s why as a website hosting provider we have a responsibility to optimize our services and the performance of our clients’ sites to minimize these negative effects as much as possible.

To dive deeper into the topic of website sustainability, we organized a #WebSustainabilityChat on Twitter along with several experts in different fields of website development – Nora Ferreirós (@noraferreiros), Responsible UX/UI Designer, Ari Stathopoulos (@aristath), Web Developer, Accessibility & Sustainability Evangelist, and Marketa Benisek (@MarketaBenisek), Digital Sustainability Lead at WholeGrain Digital. Here’s a summary of their discussion with some useful tips and tools to help you measure and reduce your website carbon footprint.

How do websites contribute to carbon emissions

In short, the faster your website, the less server resources it uses. Likewise, the simpler the website, the less data it uses. Website speed optimization and keeping things simple are good both for the environment and for saving energy.

“Every bit of information you put on a website will need energy. The more information you put on your website, the more energy you need, and the more carbon emissions you will contribute to,” points out Nora Ferreirós, Responsible UX/UI Designer.

How to measure your website’s carbon footprint

Our experts agree that there’s no need to use many tools to measure your website’s carbon footprint, but rather find one tool that gets the job done. You simply run a test, make improvements on your site and see if that has an impact: “It doesn’t matter which tool you use, just use one consistently and make comparisons to see if your changes make sense,” says Ari Stathopoulos, Web Developer, Accessibility & Sustainability Evangelist. Here are a few examples that you can use:

The Website Carbon Calculator “gives context about the energy you consume with your website by comparing it with non-digital stuff – your website consumes X kg of CO2, and it’s the size of a car, for example”, explains Nora Ferreirós.

“Ecograder is more about metrics and all the settings you should improve in order to reduce your website’s carbon emissions,” says Nora Ferreirós.

Keep in mind that apart from using such tools, it’s even more important to have context about sustainability, Nora Ferreirós, points out because “sustainability is a way of doing things and understanding how they work – it’s not just about metrics”. The decisions you make about your website are just as important as the technology and tools you use, she adds.

5 tips to reduce your website’s carbon footprint

Once you’ve measured the carbon impact of your website or particular webpage, it’s time to work out a way to reduce their carbon emissions. Here are some top tips and immediate actions you can undertake to improve your website sustainability:

Improve your website’s performance

Let’s first look at the bigger picture in terms of website performance. According to Ari Stathopoulos, the best way to optimize your site is to get rid of all the things that are not related to what you actually want to do.

To explore this point, he gives an example with a website that sells T-shirts, for instance. In his opinion, most website owners would want their site to have everything – 10 images on the product page, a video presentation, plus a slider at the top with related products, and all that other stuff that are not really necessary in order to sell the actual T-shirt.

Marketa Benisek, Digital Sustainability Lead at WholeGrain Digital, elaborates further and explains that it all comes down to the elements that are causing the individual webpages and the website to be larger than necessary. In her opinion, these are usually “either very large stock images, or videos that are data heavy”. Here’s some advice on the images and videos:

  • Reduce the size of your images

As Marketa Benisek points out: “For example, if you have thumbnail images on the website’s team page, even though those images appear small on the site, they can sometimes be uploaded as full-size, like 1MB or 2MB. By reducing the size of those images, you also significantly improve the speed of that page.”

  • Rethink how you use videos on your site

If you have any videos, you might need to rethink the way you use them. First of all, “think whether the video really serves the purpose or whether it can be replaced, perhaps, with an svg animation, instead of a full-on video, and also avoid autoplay videos,” Marketa Benisek continues. Ari Stathopoulos adds another smart alternative as well – if you want to show a presentation of a product, you don’t need to embed a video, you could just link to the video on YouTube.

Optimize your website’s data transfer

To optimize your website’s data transfer, your starting point should be the notion that everything you put on your website is data – “every single pixel is a piece of data that people will have to download from the website,” Marketa Benisek points out.

You need to start with one step at a time. As Nora Ferreirós advises, it’s important to begin with having less things on your website (just the ones you need) and then build them up, if needed. The reason is that it would be more difficult to optimize a website later on, once it’s already big and has a lot of things: “If you want to optimize your data transfer, just transfer less data,” Nora Ferreirós says.

In case you already have lots of things on your website, you need to reduce them, as this can significantly reduce the overall size of the website, therefore the data transferred, and eventually the carbon footprint.

Bottom line is to keep everything on your website simple, minimal and clear for your users to easily find what they’re looking for. To achieve this, you need to “think about what would be most useful to your users and have an understanding of who your users are,” Marketa Benisek concludes.

Apply UX/UI optimizations

Not only should you have an understanding of who your users are, but also an understanding of how they are interacting with your website. For this purpose, you need to design the user journey on your website.

If you’re clear on who your audience is, then design your website accordingly, “simplify the entire user experience and make sure people find it easy to navigate when they visit your website”, Marketa Benisek advises. Nora Ferreirós shares an insight on how to achieve that: “A great exercise to keep things simple is to think about you as a user. When you’re a user, you don’t want things to be complicated, you want to understand what people are selling to you, so think as you navigate a website and apply this to your own.”

Once you’ve identified the user journey, the best way to achieve the objectives you have for your users, is to focus on one thing that you want to say. In Marketa Benisek’s opinion, simplicity on websites signifies a lot of confidence. For instance, Apple is one of the best examples to take as an inspiration. They have very little information on their pages, but they’re straight to the point. They only feature the information that people are looking for.

When your objectives and messages are clear, think about the website as a whole project, not about specific features (sliders, or videos, etc.) – only then you’ll be able to optimize your website and your UX/UI, Nora Ferreirós advises. Every part of your website should then work together for that main objective, she adds.

Adapt SEO practices

SEO also plays a huge role in website sustainability. For this purpose, Ari Stathopoulos advises you to think about the user journey again. He explains that most people go in a search engine, search for something, land on a website, and if it’s the wrong website, they try again with the next one and so on. Therefore, you need to be concise with your message – the clearer the text is, the more related users you’ll get, in his opinion. He warns that, on the contrary, “if you do keyword stuffing, all sorts of people will land on your website and none of them will stay, because your website will not be what they are looking for”.

SEO is indeed important, but we also need to keep it human, Nora Ferreirós warns. We sometimes begin to work for machines, while we’re supposed to work for people – get your website ready for helping humans and for giving them services and products they need, she points out.

Choose a sustainable hosting partner

The last but not least part of the puzzle is your web hosting provider. Ari Stathopoulos points out that there’s a lot of blame on hosting providers, regarding greenhouse emissions, but in conclusion he agrees that more web hosting companies are turning green, and that’s a strong and important tendency.

Here are a few questions to ask when choosing your web hosting provider, in order to make sure they are providing green and sustainable services:

  • Do they use renewable energy for their data centers?
  • Do they improve server software to minimize resource consumption?
  • Do they optimize websites for higher performance and less data transfer?
  • Do they have a sustainability-oriented company culture?

At SiteGround, for example, our efforts are dedicated to creating a green web hosting environment that helps both our business and our clients’ websites be sustainable. 

  • Our data center network is powered by the premium Google Cloud platform that matches all electricity consumed by the servers with energy from renewable sources;
  • Our custom PHP setup lowers the server memory usage and gives more space for the server to handle more website traffic faster;
  • Our SiteGround CDN, SuperCacher, and other in-house built solutions maximize websites’ performance and increase their efficiency;
  • Our company operates in green offices and regularly initiates and supports green social causes.

Wrap up

The top advice our experts recommend to all website owners is to keep things as simple as possible. That will not only help your users navigate easily through your website, but also significantly reduce your website’s carbon footprint.

Check our YouTube recording to hear the whole Twitter chat conversation and follow us on Twitter for more news and discussions on useful topics.

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Start, Grow & Succeed Online with Tips from Top Business Experts

smb growth twitter chat

As a small business owner, you need to manage almost everything yourself – your brand, your store, your website, etc. To help navigate through all that, we’ve got you covered with professional advice from top experts that will help you start, grow, and succeed online.

We organized an #SMBGrowthChat on Twitter Spaces along with Syed Balkhi (@syedbalkhi), Entrepreneur, Investor & CEO, Cal Evans (@CalEvans), eCommerce expert & Internet entrepreneur, Aleyda Solis (@aleyda), International SEO Consultant & Entrepreneur, and José Ramón Padrón (@monchomad), SiteGround Spain Country Manager. Here’s a summary of their discussion with some expert tips on how to succeed online.

Essential steps when starting an online business

The very first essential step to starting an online business is knowing your target market. “In my mind, the most important thing for a business is knowing who your customers are and how you can get that customer,” notes Syed Balkhi, Entrepreneur, Investor & CEO.

As a next step, you need to come up with a domain name and website idea. Aleyda Solis, International SEO Consultant & Entrepreneur, points out that “the building block, the main pillar of your online business should be your website”.

Create your small business website

Now that you are at the stage of building your website, you need to choose carefully which website building app to use for your small business site. It will all depend on the functionalities you need in order to provide your services or products, as well as on your own capabilities. 

For example, if you have technical capacity, you’d probably be able to develop your website from scratch. However, that would take you much time and effort. For this purpose, as a programmer, Cal Evans recommends using WordPress: “The reason I say that is because I’m a programmer, but I can spin up WordPress and put a theme in there and put together 5-6 plugins and usually get exactly what I’d have done, without having to program”. Syed Balkhi also recommends WordPress and points out that 43% of the web uses it, including SMBs, developers, entrepreneurs, and others.

Must-have elements on your website

After you’ve built your website, let’s explore what are some of the must-have elements to include on it.

No matter what type of website you have, you need to communicate what you do. Aleyda Solis points out that “you should have at least a landing page, explaining what you’re offering, what’s the value of it, its price (range), and a contact form, so people can get in touch with you.” She adds that if you have many products, categories, or brands, then you need proper navigation that allows users to go through your web structure and reach your different offerings. Of course, if your website is very complex, you need to add a search feature as well.

Syed Balkhi builds upon this idea and notes that you need to have a way to stay in touch with your users, to enhance their user experience and help them get to the goal of conversion (subscribing, buying, etc.). In his opinion, it’s good to “add an email newsletter, or a push notification platform, because you need a way to connect to your visitors after they leave (the majority of people leave your website and they never come back – it’s like 70% or for some websites it’s even 97%), or even SMS notification.”

A general rule to follow when adding these elements is that “the most important content should be no more than two clicks away,” José Ramón Padrón says. Think about the user experience and the importance of CTAs – make it clear and simple for your users to get the information they need with minimum clicks.

Scale your online business

“You can not improve what you can not measure,” points out Syed Balkhi. To scale your business, you need to know your visitors – how they are finding and using your website, because this helps you focus on the content and products that matter the most, he adds.

For this purpose, Aleyda Solis recommends using marketing analysis tools “to better assess which are the keywords that are already bringing traffic to your website from an organic search point and from paid search perspective as well.” Some of the most popular marketing analysis tools you can use are Google Analytics, MonsterInsights, SEMRush, etc.

As a next step for scaling your business, Aleyda Solis recommends using marketing automation tools: “such tools will allow you to easily follow up with your customers, if at some point they leave a landing page, before converting […], to collect and develop your audience with forms that you can easily create, similar to email marketing.” If you’ve chosen WordPress, there are many plugins that can provide this automation, as well as plenty of integrations with some of the top marketing automation platforms.

“When you already have a product and you know what’s working, now you have to do a lot of testing and optimization, so you can use a landing page builder that lets you do dynamic personalization – you can try different offers, different PPC ads,” adds Syed Balkhi.

When your business is growing, it’s also important to use a hosting provider that offers a variety of products in order to avoid further migrations. As José Ramón Padrón points out, “you need a hosting provider with many data centers, CDN points all over the world, specific tools for improving website security”.

Sometimes, when the business grows, the team also grows with it. For this reason, there is a need for automation of internal processes – how the information flows inside the company – tools like Jira, Slack, etc. are important, José Ramón Padrón adds.

Fundamental marketing channels

The number one channel to reach your customers is through search engines (the biggest ones being Google and YouTube), thus SEO would be your most important starting point. Aleyda Solis advises you to have an SEO specialist, when building your website in order for SEO practices to be taken into consideration right from the start, so that later on, when you’re ready to launch your full SEO strategy, it would be easy for you to do so.

“Keyword research within the SEO process is super valuable not only for SEO, but also to understand when you still don’t have internal data, how your audience is looking for your products or services, and how to position yourself versus your competitors,” Aleyda adds.

Your mailing list is the next important marketing channel – “it doesn’t need to be a full email marketing strategy at the beginning, but starting to collect email contacts right away is something I’d recommend,” notes Aleyda Solis. This will allow you to build an audience and engage with it later on in a more personal way.

After that, you can start building your mailing list with people that are interested in what you might be selling or the services you offer, as noted by Cal Evans, eCommerce expert & Internet entrepreneur. He adds that once you know you’ve got a product market fit and a website, then you can register your Twitter, Instagram and other accounts, and start building your mailing list.

Syed Balkhi gives you a bonus tip for you to engage and connect with the audience you’ve built by now: “Push notifications work equally as good, if not better than email marketing, and that would be a less known tip that not many SMBs take advantage of”.

Growing your mailing list

Now that you have a mailing list with subscribers, you need to figure out a way to further grow this list. We’ve got you covered with actionable tips from our experts:

  • Create compelling content

It’s easier to create compelling content than you think. “Look around for the questions that people ask you, and you can put together something like a pdf and build a landing page with it with OptinMonster,” explains Cal Evans.

  • Run social media campaigns

Cal Evans also shares that to boost his subscription rates, he runs social media campaigns about once a month and it works for him. “You have to be careful – you can end up spending a lot of money and getting absolutely nothing, but you’ve got to figure out where your target market/audience is – are they on Twitter, Facebook, etc.,” adds Cal Evans.

  • Implement exit intent

Exit intent is that thing you see when you start taking the mouse towards exiting the website – like a pop-up, for example. “Some people might think it’s really annoying, but the reality is that that user was going to leave. By showing them a good and targeted offer, it converts 2% of the users into subscribers,” Syed Balkhi points out.

  • Add content upgrades

It’s also important to analyze where your traffic is going to and then add content upgrades to these pages, such as your most popular blog post, for instance. “In this blog post, create a lead magnet – an eBook, a chat list, a worksheet, etc. – a freebie that’s specific to that blog post. For example, you have 12 tips to get more traffic, and then 5 bonus tips that you’d only be able to get, if you subscribe,” Syed Balkhi explains.

Do this by adding a CTA at the top, middle/bottom of your page (or both places). When the user clicks that link, a pop-up comes up and they should enter their name and email to access that content upgrade, Syed Balkhi advises.

  • Do on-site retargeting

You can always spend money on Google or Facebook retargeting ads, but there’s also a way to do on-site retargeting. If a user came to your website, then they left, and later on came back, there are ways to target that customer, using a plugin like OptinMonster, as Syed Balkhi points out. A simple message like “Welcome back! Consider joining our list, so you can get updates?” could do the trick.

  • Run on-site follow-up campaigns

When somebody visits a specific page on your website, you can prepare a follow-up, especially for them. “Maybe they’re already a subscriber to your email list, and when they come back to a specific page, you can give them an exclusive discount or a coupon. Also, if you’re just starting out, you can use giveaways,” advises Syed Balkhi.

These are all great ways to boost conversions and get more subscribers. A general advice that applies to all of these tips is to be very natural with them and avoid an intrusive approach. They “can be embedded/integrated within the workflow that you have for your user journey, in a way that’s actually attractive and appealing to the user,” Aleyda Solis summarizes.

Final thoughts

In 2020, we saw a lot of new businesses starting online, and then disappearing in 2021 or 2022. To avoid having such a short business lifetime, follow our experts’ tips and make sure you define your target market, prepare a competition analysis, build a marketing strategy, and create a website with customer experience around the product or service you want to sell. 

Check our YouTube recording to hear the whole Twitter chat conversation and follow us on Twitter for more news and discussions on useful topics.

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Spring Clean Your Website for Stronger Security and Faster Speed

spring clean your website for better security

Like your home, your website also accumulates dust and clutter over time that can slow it down and make it vulnerable to security threats. So cleaning your website is just as important as spring cleaning your home, and with our help, it can be much easier and faster.

Get started with our actionable tips on how to declutter your site for even stronger security and faster speed.

Clean up your WordPress website

For all of you, using WordPress, we’ve identified some crucial, yet easy-to-follow tips that will help you take special security and speed care of your WordPress website.

Quick website security tips

  • Keep your WordPress version and plugins up-to-date

It’s important to keep your WordPress version and plugins updated to the latest version, because hackers use every opportunity and backdoor to attack your website and get access to your files or valuable information. Keep an eye on the latest WordPress versions and plugins and install them in a timely manner. Luckily, SiteGround clients don’t have to worry about this, as we do it automatically for them – we autoupdate all WordPress installations, hosted with us.

  • Clean up your user roles and permissions

Make sure you review and remove inactive users or limit access for certain users only to the resources they require. For instance, give administrator access to your site only when strictly necessary and only to users that actually need it. The same applies to the login details for your hosting account.

  • Enforce strong and secure passwords

Weak passwords are one of the most common reasons sites get hacked. Always use secure credentials for accessing your account. On top of this, remember to store your passwords only in password vaults – no plain text, no writing them down, no sharing. As a complementary step, you’d also need to implement 2-factor authentication for login access. It will require an additional step of verification upon each log-in for an extra layer of security.

  • Clean up unused plugins and themes

Outdated plugins and themes can open up the backdoor for hackers to gain access to your website. That’s true even for deactivated plugins and themes. For this reason, delete any plugins and themes that you’re not using to lower the risk of security breaches on your site.

These are just some of the steps to follow in order to spring clean and secure your WordPress website. The good news is that you don’t have to do them on your own and one by one. Some of them and many more you can find as one-click features in the free SiteGround Security plugin, available for all WordPress users. Download it now and enable many powerful security options in just a few clicks. For SiteGround clients, it’s already been installed and working out-of-the-box.

Easy-to-follow website speed advice

  • Clean up your WordPress database

Your WordPress database can significantly affect the speed of your website, which, in turn, affects its overall health and search engine rankings. To ensure optimal performance, it is important to keep the database clean. Cleaning up your WordPress database is a vital part of refreshing your website and optimizing its functionality.

  • Compress large images

Large images can significantly slow down your WordPress website. Use image compression to speed up your site. You can compress them as much as you like, without compromising on their quality. For this purpose, make sure to always take advantage of the latest image formats, such as WebP format.

  • Minify CSS and JavaScript files

Minify your CSS and JavaScript files which will basically remove all unnecessary characters from them. Minification of CSS & JS files will speed up your website by reducing your site’s code weight.

  • Preload your fonts

Your website’s fonts are yet another thing that the browser needs to load in order for the users to see it. To keep them from slowing down your website and allow the browser to render faster, you need to preload your fonts. Keep in mind to preload only the font files that you use most oftenly, not all of them; otherwise, you might end up slowing down your site further.

To help you get access and enable most of the above options and many more with just a few clicks, we have an in-house developed SiteGround Optimizer plugin that’s free and available for all WordPress users. It also offers powerful caching features, frontend optimizations, as well as media and environmental optimizations.

Scan your website thoroughly

Continue with performing a complete and regular scan of your website, checking it for potential malware-infection and other security threats over time. There are different types of site scanning services available out there. At SiteGround, we have our in-house developed Site Scanner security service. The Site Scanner checks your entire website for malware and the latest threats, notifies you about any potential security issues in a timely manner, giving you enough time and tools to react in case of any suspicious activity.

Apply powerful website performance optimizations

Level up your website speed by implementing these powerful optimization tips:

  • Make sure your PHP is fast

Ensure that your website is running on the latest and fastest PHP version and that your web server handles that in the best way possible. SiteGround clients have the opportunity to take advantage of our ultrafast PHP setup that cuts the TTFB (time to first byte) and makes web pages load 30% faster in comparison to standard PHP setups.

  • Leverage caching

Caching is one of the most powerful techniques to make your website load even faster. You can apply caching at different levels, such as browser caching and server-side caching. SiteGround clients take advantage of our powerful caching technology out-of-the-box that’s built in-house on three levels – Nginx Direct Delivery for static content, Dynamic caching for dynamic content, and Memcached (object caching). All three can speed up website performance up to 5 times.

  • Use CDN

Speed up your website even further by enabling a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN keeps copies of your website on servers that are geographically closer to your end users. Then, when they request to see a web page, it gets served faster from a location that’s close to them. SiteGround clients take advantage of our free in-house built SiteGround CDN which now comes in version 2.0 that is even faster and more efficient.

Check your website security and speed status regularly

Once you’ve done all of the above, it’s good to keep an eye on your website security and speed status regularly. Make sure you’re aware of any potential backdoors on your website that might still be open for the hackers, or any performance issues that might slow down your website.

At SiteGround, we know how much time and effort this might cost you. That’s why our clients receive monthly security and performance reports, delivered straight into their inboxes, at no extra cost. 

In the monthly security reports, we provide them with digestive summary results from automated security checks that we perform for their websites. Our clients get their site security status in a user-friendly and understandable format, along with actionable tips on how to reduce the risk of malicious attacks, in case we’ve identified areas that need their attention. With the free monthly security reports, we help our clients stay in control of their website security in the long run.

Similarly, the monthly performance reports provide our clients with easy access to information about their website speed status. We check a number of performance categories for our clients’ websites (e.g. cache ratio, CDN usage, WordPress optimization, and more), and give them an overall performance score in a user-friendly structure, plus actionable recommendations, if some areas need improvement.

As you can see, website security and speed are an ongoing process that needs your attention throughout the whole year, not just in the spring. Yet, now is the best time to start taking care of your site speed and safety in order to avoid any potential issues in the future.

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