Stay ahead of the curve with expert updates on server technology, security protocols, and performance optimizations. This section covers essential hosting advancements, from PHP and MySQL upgrades to practical tips for securing and scaling your online presence.
With the launch of our new Site Tools-based infrastructure we have opened a wide range of opportunities to further improve the loading speed of the websites hosted on our servers. The first change we have already introduced to everyone using Site Tools is the replacement of the Static Cache with a new NGINX Direct Delivery. We no longer serve images, CSS, JS files, and other static content from the server memory, but we use NGINX for direct loading of these files from the SSD instead. This improves browser caching for your site and also makes CDN usage easier and more efficient. Most importantly, NGINX Direct Delivery allows more RAM space to be used for dynamic content caching, without compromising on static content loading speed.
Ecommerce has definitely gained huge popularity in the last few years. In fact, holiday eCommerce sales reached a total of $126 billion last year — up from $108.2 billion in 2017. That’s a 16.5% increase in online sales! Most people do not feel like going to crowded malls anymore. They prefer shopping online and finding the largest discounts from the comfort of their own home.
Industry experts say social media plays a major role in eCommerce businesses because it helps companies establish a strong web presence and increase their website traffic. When it comes to Black Friday, people are particularly ready to spend. That is why you have to make sure your eCommerce store is ready for this special day and come up with the right strategies, which include social media.
Review last year’s Black Friday campaign
Before you rush into planning anything for the upcoming Black Friday, you should definitely take the time to review your campaigns from previous years. Check how it went and whether you fully achieved your goals at the time. Do you think your last campaign was successful? Ask yourself similar questions and figure out what went wrong. This first step is about reflecting on your previous success or failure. In this way, you can see what you can improve for the next campaign. It will be better if you break down last year’s results by channel. For example, if you ran ads and promotions on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, you need to decide which one had the best return on investment. Finally, you have to figure out what you definitely want to repeat this year. There might be certain things that can be effective for this year’s campaign as well.
🔥 Check out the 15 Black Friday Ecommerce tips that will help you drive more online sales during the year’s most important shopping season.
Black friday text on the airport timetable. Sale theme. Vector illustration.
Start planning earlier
Success comes to those who plan ahead. Unfortunately, when companies have to create social media content, it often falls to the last minute. And of course, if someone is pressed for time, the results are normally less inspiring. You should consider creating a social media calendar. This way, you can map out when your Black Friday campaign starts and when it has to finish. Besides this, you also have to decide which channels to use. Most people think it is better if you create a large number of posts, but be careful. You certainly do not want to be annoying and annoy your customers with all the spam. Planning these things earlier improves your chances of success in Black Friday sales.
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Get more creative
When you launch your social media campaign, you have to choose which channels to use. Ideally, you would have a slightly different strategy and approach to each one of them. For example, what you create for Facebook should be completely different from what you post on Instagram. People can get “ad fatigue” seeing the same ads and posts and are looking for variety. If you want to keep your regular customers, you have to offer them something unique and appealing. Spend more time discovering the audiences on each channel and make sure your content is going to serve the needs of the audience in the best way possible. Come up with some Black Friday themed content that is specific to your business, to the channel, and be creative!
Choose the best products to promote
Person Hands Shopping Online With Credit Card And Laptop At Desk
If you are looking for success in the Black Friday sales and promotions, don’t just promote any products. Choose them wisely. Every eCommerce company has its own top products and bestsellers. They are usually what your company is known and famous for, so you should not miss the chance to promote their discounts on your social media Black Friday posts. When people check on Facebook and see them at a lower price, they will not hesitate to take advantage and order them.
Save time and use social media tool to schedule and post
When your posts are ready for your social media channels use a social media tool such as Social Web Suite to schedule all your posts in advance. This will save you a lot of time and you will be able to see all the posts on your social media calendar so you can add more if you need it. This will also allow you to publish your posts to all your social networks at the same time which is great for time-sensitive news. The best thing is that after the Black Friday promotion, you will be able to see the analytics of the posts and see how your social media marketing efforts performed.
Planning a Black Friday social media campaign might not be an easy task, but in the end, it will be worth your efforts. Fewer people are visiting physical shops and are now spending a lot of time and money online shopping. Social media certainly helps them to find various products easily and reminds followers that sales are a limited-time offer. The most important thing is to prepare your Black Friday strategy with thought. Creating high quality and engaging social media posts shouldn’t be rushed. Remember, quality over quantity. There is no point in creating hundreds of posts with no value. Black Friday is a favorite day of many people of all ages, and if you are well prepared for, it can bring you huge profits.
This was the final installment of our Black Friday series. Check out all our past content on the blog for tips on how to improve your website design, conversions, online marketing, and more.
Plenty of work happens behind the scenes of a regular website. But even more work is needed for the maintenance and development of a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress – the software that powers 34% of all websites on the web. New WordPress versions are released regularly to provide new functionality, security improvements, and all types of fixes. In the case of WordPress, which is an open-source software, a big part of the work is thanks to the voluntary support of dedicated individuals and companies within the WordPress community.
The team at SiteGround has a long history of WordPress involvement – we organize and sponsor both local and worldwide WordCamps, work on WordPress core and plugins, and are active on the WP.org security, community, marketing, and hosting teams. So we were stoked when our WordPress community manager, Francesca Marano was selected as a Release Coordinator for the latest major version, WordPress 5.3. On the verge of the official release, 12 weeks after she took upon that role, here is our chat with Francesca about her role and responsibilities in the process, and of course – what you can look forward to with the new release.
We recently announced the launch of our new Client Area and Site Tools. Our COO spoke about it from a business perspective and how important this project is for our future growth. I would like to give you the technical perspective and why we see these new interfaces to be also a technical milestone for SiteGround.
SiteGround has always been first and foremost a service company. However, for many years, our business growth has been tightly correlated with our technical evolution. The more software we developed in-house, the more the quality of our service was rising and the more our reputation was growing. Not only that, but we have grown the self-confidence of a high-tech company that produces powerful and smart software solutions and is always among the first to implement the most innovative technologies.
So, when we realized that many of our business ideas were slowed down or made impossible by the limitations of our currently-used underlying platform, we had the courage to think bigger than what’s available on the market and dared to re-create everything from the ground up.
Recently we had the pleasure of hosting a webinar with Alain Schlesser, the lead developer of the WP-CLI project, the command line interface for WordPress. Nearly 1300 people attended and we had a blast fielding questions and seeing our clients engage with us live. Even if you have missed the live stream, it is not too late to learn how to do some of the most popular things with WP-CLI, like automating backups, troubleshooting website errors, performing a search & replace in your database, cleaning up spam comments, resetting your passwords, and more. All you have to do is watch the webinar video below.
Our customers use SiteGround to host a wide variety of projects, but some of our favorites are non-profit websites that use the internet to make the world a better place. That’s why we’re proud to support events like do_actions, annual hackathons held in cities around the world where participants from the WordPress community come together to build websites for local organiзations. On May 25, it’s Caceres’ turn to hold their do_action and we’re pleased to attend and sponsor.
Did you know you can increase your online traffic by tapping into your offline network? In-person relationship building can have a tremendous impact on your ability to reach people online. Even introverts can find a way to connect with a community and increase visibility and number of visits to their site. Here are four tried and true methods, from easiest to hardest:
Update: Since the migration to Site Tools we have temporarily disabled the QUIC support on our servers. QUIC has evolved into HTTP/3 and we are currently working on implementing HTTP/3 and adding support for it to our build of Nginx. Once the HTTP/3 support for NGINX reaches a stable version, we will apply it immediately and publish a new blog post with more details on it!
This is a picture of Coron Island in the Philippines, definitely one of the most beautiful places I have ever been to. I truly love it, but their super slow Internet connectivity was the one thing that kept me from going back. It is painful to see how slowly sites load there, considering how much effort we put into optimizing our website technology both on the server and application level. But now, SiteGround has QUIC on our servers and Coron may make it into my travel plans again.
QUIC considerably increases site loading speed when you have poor connectivity. It’s the base for the next generation of Internet protocol coming: the HTTP/3. And, as usual, we are among the first hosting companies to provide this hot speed technology to all our customers.
Our commitment to helping WordPress grow has been consistently strong throughout the years. About 80% of our 2 million domains are associated with sites built on WordPress and we have been helping more and more people get introduced to the possibilities of WordPress.
Traditionally, through sponsorships, we help a huge number of WordCamps and meetups happen all around the world. But what we consider even more important, is our personal involvement. In addition to encouraging our most talented people to attend, speak at and organize WordPress events worldwide, we also help independent experts share their expertise with an even wider audience through our WordPress Ambassador program.
Here is a brief roundup of our contribution in 2018. Stay tuned for more in 2019!
In 2018, Spain was the second most active country for local WordCamps, bested only by the US. Taking into consideration the population of the two countries, Spain actually had almost twice as many events per capita last year. When SiteGround launched its Spanish operations in 2015, there were only 3 WordCamps in Spain, including WCEU, and 9 meetup groups with 10,017 members in total (according to WordCamp Central registration). Fast forward to 2018 and we count 10 local WordCamps and 52 meetup groups with 24,862 members. This is an amazing 150% increase in membership and over triple the number of events!
So what’s the story behind this incredible growth? Of course, it all starts with the quality of the WordPress platform itself and the fact that its adoption rates are globally on the rise. However, from where we stand we see three additional factors that have influenced the local Spanish growth and we are proud of SiteGround’s role in all of them. By sharing our insider’s take on this development, we hope to help other local WordPress communities accelerate their growth too.
