Rebuild the site you have into the one you want with Coderick AI (webinar video and Q&A)

image showing the host and the topic of SiteGround's webinar focused on Rebuilding from URL feature

During our latest webinar, our Product Manager Renata Mehandjieva and Product Marketing Manager Viktor Dzhambov took a real website built on a traditional site builder and turned it into something new with Coderick AI‘s Rebuild from URL feature. They pasted the site’s URL, got a fully editable rebuilt version, changed its entire direction with a single prompt, and added features the original site never had. All of it through plain conversation, and all of it published live before the hour was up.

If you missed it or want to rewatch, the full recording is available on our YouTube channel:

Below are the key takeaways from the session, followed by answers to your most asked questions.

Key takeaways from the webinar

1. You can now start a Coderick AI project from the site you already have 

Until now, you could start a Coderick AI project from a prompt, a screenshot of a design you like, or uploaded design and code files. Rebuild from URL adds the option most of you asked for after our last webinar: rebuilding your existing website.

You paste your site’s URL, and Coderick AI visits it and reads its publicly reachable pates just the way an AI crawler would. It reads the pages, the design, the content and images, and rebuilds the top 5 pages from your sitemap as a new, fully editable project. The whole process takes around 8 to 10 minutes, while your original site stays live and completely untouched. What you get is not a locked template but a real project you can reshape freely: your content, your images, your structure, ready to become the site you actually want.

2. Changing your site’s whole direction is now one prompt, not a teardown

This was the moment of the webinar. The demo site started as a general recipe website, and the owner wanted to pivot it entirely to Mediterranean cooking. On a traditional platform, that kind of change means a new template, reconfigured pages, broken layouts to fix, and plugins to re-check, or a developer quote. In the webinar, it was a single prompt: redesign the site with a Greek, Mediterranean feel, keep the existing content, and add new content where needed.

A few minutes later, the entire site had a new identity: new colors, typography, animations, and copy that matched the new direction, with all the original recipes intact. A second prompt then reorganized the recipes into regional categories, complete with descriptions, images, and working filters. Coderick AI even filed the existing recipes into the right categories on its own.

The lesson from the live builds: you don’t need to talk like a designer. “Make it feel Mediterranean” works. And if you know exactly what you want, down to fonts and layouts, Coderick AI follows your direction instead of improvising.

3. The biggest win: adding features your old site never had

Rebuild from URL isn’t just about a fresh look. Once your site lives in Coderick AI, you can extend it with the kind of functionality that would normally send you hunting for plugins or hiring a developer.

In the webinar, one prompt added a “Share Your Recipe” page where visitors submit their own recipes. Behind that simple form, Coderick AI built everything the feature actually needs: a database to store submissions, secure handling of visitor details, and an admin panel, visible only to the owner, where each recipe waits for approval before it appears on the site. None of that backend work had to be described. And as a finale, one more prompt added an interactive map showing where each community recipe comes from, integration included.

4. You experiment in a safe copy, and every change is reversible

Everything in the demo happened in a Coderick AI project. Rebuild from URL only reads your live site, it never modifies it, so there’s no risk to what you have while you rebuild, redesign, and test. You preview your project on its own address, and nothing goes live until you hit Publish.

Inside the project, built-in version control lets you try bold ideas and revert to any previous version with one click if you don’t like the result. For small fixes like a headline tweak or a typo, the Visual Editor lets you click directly on the page and type the change. It’s instant, and it doesn’t use any credits.

Add it all up and the numbers speak for themselves: a full redesign, restructured content, a brand new community feature with its own database and admin panel, and a live published site, in about 30 minutes of prompting.

Coderick AI and Rebuild from URL: your questions answered

We had far more questions during the live session than we could answer on air. Here are the most common ones, answered in one place.

I have a WordPress site. Can I use Coderick AI, and do I still need WordPress?

Coderick AI and WordPress are two different ways of building for the web, and both are great at what they do. WordPress gives you a mature ecosystem of themes and plugins that millions of sites, including many we host, run on happily. Coderick AI takes a different approach: you build and change everything by describing it in a conversation, and the design, content, database, backend, and hosting are all part of one project.

They don’t plug into each other. Coderick AI doesn’t install into WordPress and doesn’t edit your WordPress site. What it can do is use your WordPress site as a starting point: Rebuild from URL reads your live site and recreates it as a separate Coderick AI project, while your WordPress site keeps running exactly as it is, for as long as you want it to. If you publish the rebuilt version, that new site is a Coderick AI project rather than a WordPress site, so from then on you manage it through chat instead of themes, plugins, and the WordPress admin.

So there’s no forced choice here. If WordPress works well for you, keep it, and let the AI Agent for WordPress in AI Studio speed up your work inside it. If you’re curious what the conversational approach feels like, rebuild a copy and experiment. Nothing about your current site changes while you decide.

I built my site with Divi, Elementor, Drupal, or a purchased theme. Does that matter?

No. Rebuild from URL reads your live site the way a visitor sees it: the pages, the design, the content, not the software that produced it. Whether there’s Divi, Elementor, a purchased theme, Drupal, Joomla, or hand-written PHP behind it, the rebuild works the same way. The rebuilt version doesn’t carry the original platform over, so it’s a fresh, self-contained project with no dependencies on your old setup. That also makes it a great option for an aging site on a platform you no longer have anyone to maintain.

What’s the difference between Coderick AI and SiteGround’s AI Studio?

They solve different problems, and they complement each other. AI Studio is your AI workspace, and its AI Agent for WordPress manages and updates an existing WordPress site through chat: content edits, WooCommerce tasks, SEO fields, all inside the site you already have. Coderick AI is a vibe coding builder: you use it to create a complete standalone website or web app.

So if your goal is to keep improving the WordPress site you have, AI Studio is the better fit. If you’re ready to rebuild it into something that gives you more freedom to build, that’s Coderick AI.

Can Coderick AI make changes directly to my live site, or replace just one page on my domain?

No, Coderick AI never operates on your live site. Here’s how the Rebuild from URL works: you paste your URL, Coderick AI reads the site and creates a separate, new project from it. You preview and improve that project on its own address, and when you’re happy, you publish it and decide whether to connect your domain. At no step is your current site modified.

That also means you can’t swap out a single page of your existing site or export a Coderick-built page into it. If what you want is smaller changes to an existing WordPress site, the AI Agent for WordPress in AI Studio is built for exactly that.

What if my site has more than 5 pages? Do I have to re-add the rest manually?

The rebuild from URL currently covers the top 5 pages from your sitemap, which for most websites are the ones visitors actually spend time on, so it’s a strong landing ground to build from. For the rest, you don’t have to recreate anything page by page: export the additional content in a file format (HTML, Word, CSV, even screenshots), upload the files to your project, and tell Coderick AI to add them. It can take in many files at once.

We’re also actively working on a way to bring larger amounts of content into your rebuilt site much more easily. Keep an eye on our emails and product updates in the coming weeks.

My site is a WooCommerce store with hundreds of products. Is this still viable?

The rebuild from URL reads your live public pages, not your entire product database, so a store with hundreds of products won’t transfer catalog and all. For a content site, a business site, or a store with a compact catalog, the rebuild plus a file import gets you a long way. For a full ecommerce operation with hundreds of products, orders, and integrations, a dedicated ecommerce platform will serve you better, and SiteGround Ecommerce is built for exactly that: running a complete online store, catalog included.

Will the rebuild keep my exact content, or can it change things?

The rebuild works from your actual site: your text, your images, your structure. That’s the whole point, it captures what makes your website yours. That said, review the result before you publish, especially text-heavy pages. When Coderick AI can’t bring a piece of content over cleanly, or when a redesign creates new sections that need copy, it writes new text in the style of your site rather than leaving gaps. If a page didn’t transfer the way you want, upload the original as a file and tell Coderick AI to use it word for word. And for any smaller fix, the Visual Editor lets you correct text directly on the page in seconds.

Can I make it use only my images, or leave placeholders for images I’ll upload later?

Yes. The rebuild uses the images from your site by default, and AI-generated images only enter the picture when you ask for them or when a change you requested needs visuals that don’t exist yet. If you want full control, say so in your prompt: tell Coderick AI to use only your uploaded images, or to leave placeholders you’ll fill in yourself. You can also completely change the color scheme to match your brand palette, either by describing it or by uploading a reference.

What about unpublished pages, membership content, or staging sites?

Rebuild from URL can only read what’s publicly reachable on the internet. Unpublished pages, content behind a login or membership wall, and staging environments aren’t visible to it, so they won’t be copied, and they won’t be touched either. If you want that content in your new project, export it and upload it as files. The rebuild also doesn’t copy things that aren’t publicly visible by nature, like databases or third-party integration code.

My site is protected by a captcha or blocks bots. Can Rebuild from URL still read it?

Not while the protection is active, since Coderick AI visits your site the way an AI crawler would. The good news is that you only need to allow crawler access briefly: adjust the setting in your security plugin, firewall, or CDN, run the rebuild (around 8 to 10 minutes), and switch the protection back on once your project is ready.

Is it safe to do this with a live site, or should I use staging?

You don’t need staging to protect the live site during the rebuild, because the rebuilt project effectively is your safe copy. Rebuild from URL only reads your live site; it never writes to it, changes it, or takes it offline. Everything you build, break, and experiment with happens in the separate Coderick AI project, on its own preview address, and version control lets you revert any change with one click.

After the new site goes live on my domain, what happens to my old one? Can I go back?

Your old site isn’t going anywhere. Coderick AI never deletes, moves, or modifies it; it stays wherever it’s hosted, for as long as you keep it. Pointing your domain at the new site is your decision, and pointing it back is just as possible. One thing to be clear about: the two sites are separate from the moment of the rebuild, so changes you make in Coderick AI don’t flow back into your WordPress or builder site. Going back means returning to your old site as it was.

If both sites are online, won’t that be duplicate content for SEO?

Duplicate-content risk arises only if both are publicly live with the same content at the same time. While you’re working, your rebuilt project sits on its preview address and doesn’t compete with your live site. When you’re ready to switch, do a clean handover: point your domain to the new site and retire the old one, so search engines only ever see one.

After publishing, how do I make edits? Is there a CMS or admin panel?

The way you built the site is the way you keep managing it. Bigger changes: describe them in the chat. Quick fixes: click directly on the page with the Visual Editor. There’s no separate CMS to learn.

If you want one, though, you can have it built just by describing it. Ask Coderick AI for a custom admin panel with exactly the controls your workflow needs, which is precisely what the recipe approval dashboard in our demo was. Add a blog and want to publish posts, swap images, and edit text from a dashboard instead of the chat? Ask for a CMS, and Coderick AI builds one for your site.

Can I see or export the code, or move my project to another platform?

Coderick AI is a fully managed platform: your project is built, hosted, and run on SiteGround’s infrastructure, and the current interface doesn’t expose the source code for direct editing or export to another host. That’s by design, and it’s what keeps everything fast, secure, and maintenance-free. If code-level control matters to your workflow, a built-in code editor is on the roadmap, so watch our product updates.

What features can I add? Galleries, video, search, events, members-only areas?

If it runs in a browser and you can describe it, it’s very likely buildable. From the webinar audience alone: a gallery page with lightbox effects using your own images, yes. Videos, yes, embed from YouTube or upload your own and tell Coderick AI where to place them. Site search, yes. Event pages with ticket sales, yes, with payments handled through the Stripe integration. Members-only areas and paywalls, yes: describe who can sign up and what members see that visitors don’t, and Coderick AI builds the signup, login, and gated content. Before you share it, test the whole flow yourself. Nothing goes live until you publish.

Does Coderick AI support payments like Stripe and PayPal?

Stripe, yes, and it’s brand new: as of this month, Coderick AI integrates with Stripe, so the sites you build can take real payments. Tell Coderick AI what you want to sell, then connect a new or existing Stripe account right in the chat, or set it up anytime from the new Integrations page.

And because checkout runs through Stripe, your site can offer the payment methods Stripe supports, including PayPal: enable it in your Stripe settings, and it appears as an option for your customers. A separate PayPal integration isn’t available yet, but expanding payment options is on the roadmap.

Can forms connect to Google Sheets or other external tools?

Not directly yet. Form submissions are stored in your project’s own database on SiteGround’s infrastructure, and you can view and manage them through an admin panel Coderick AI builds for you, which covers what most people use a spreadsheet for. Stripe is the first third-party integration, and more external connections are planned.

Can I use it if my website is in another language, or bilingual?

Absolutely. Chat with Coderick AI in any language, and it picks it up. Your rebuilt site keeps its original language, and you can ask for translations or a fully multilingual setup, including bilingual sites like French and English. Regional conventions like date formats and currencies follow your instructions too.

How do I handle SEO on a rebuilt site?

The same way you handle everything else: you ask for it. The rebuild brings over your content, which carries much of your SEO substance, but not the technical SEO configuration of the old platform. One prompt along the lines of “optimize my site for SEO” and Coderick AI works through the technical side: unique titles and meta descriptions for every page, a sitemap, robots.txt and llms.txt for AI search engines, clean page structure, SSL included, and the loading-speed improvements rankings reward. It can go further when your content calls for it. For a recipe site like the demo, it can add the structured data that lets Google show recipes in search results with photos, ratings, and cook times.

How secure is a Coderick AI site, and what support do I get?

Every Coderick AI project runs on SiteGround’s managed infrastructure, so hosting, SSL, security, and the database are handled as part of the platform, backed by 20 years of hosting expertise. Data your visitors submit, like the emails in the demo’s recipe form, is stored within that same infrastructure, not with a third party. And because there are no external plugins or themes in a Coderick AI site, one of the most common sources of website security issues simply isn’t there. If you run into anything, SiteGround’s support team is there to help, the same way it is for our hosting services.

What does Coderick AI cost after the free trial?

There are three plans depending on how many projects you run and how many credits you build with, starting from $10/month. Every plan, including the entry one, has everything you need to take a project live: publishing, premium SiteGround hosting, custom domain support, and professional email. There’s no separate hosting bill. Start with the 14-day free trial, see how far your ideas go, and pick the plan that fits. You can compare them at Coderick.ai.

Who owns the rebuilt site, and can I rebuild any website I find?

You own what you create: your content, your data, your project’s functionality and output. Coderick AI hosts and runs it on SiteGround’s infrastructure, but the work is yours. As for whose site you can rebuild: Rebuild from URL is meant for your own website, or one you have the rights to. By submitting the URL, you confirm that.

Try Rebuild from URL on your own site

The webinar started from a generic recipe site its owner had quietly stopped touching, because every change meant learning yet another tool. Thirty minutes of plain conversation later, it was a redesigned Mediterranean food site with regional categories, a community submission feature with its own database and admin panel, and a recipe map, published live.

Your website can make the same jump. Go to Coderick.ai, start your free 14-day trial, paste your site’s URL, and watch the rebuild. Your current site stays exactly as it is while you do.

That thing you’ve been meaning to do with your website for years? Do it now.

WordPress 7.0 x SiteGround AI Studio: Webinar Video and Q&A

WordPress 7.0 x SiteGround AI Studio: Webinar Video and Q&A

In our recent live webinar, Yavor Popov and Ivan Stefanov went through the new WordPress 7.0 AI features and showed how SiteGround AI Studio and the SiteGround AI Agent for WordPress build on top of them to handle real WordPress tasks directly in the WordPress admin. The session covered what changed in WordPress 7.0 for AI, how AI Studio fits into the new environment, and a live demo of the Agent across image generation, WooCommerce, SEO, campaigns, and multiple site management.

If you missed it or want to rewatch, the full recording is available below.

Key takeaways

Below are the key takeaways from the webinar and answers to the most common questions from the session.

1. WordPress 7.0 introduces an AI framework that unifies how AI works inside WordPress 

WordPress 7.0’s real contribution is structural: a shared AI framework that gives every plugin and core feature a standard way to use AI directly in WordPress core. Two pieces turn that framework into something you can use. The official AI plugin enables the AI capabilities and surfaces them where you work, for example Generate buttons for images in the Media Library and text right inside Gutenberg. The connectors supply the model access and tokens that make those capabilities actually run, and SiteGround AI is one such connector. In other words, 7.0 defines the standard, the AI plugin exposes the features, and a connector powers them.

2. The AI Agent by SiteGround plays two roles at once: the connector that powers native features and the plugin that adds new ones

This is what makes SiteGround AI more than another connector, and what makes it the easiest path into WordPress AI. As a connector, it supplies the tokens behind WordPress 7.0’s native AI features, routing each request to the best-suited model in the background so you never create accounts, paste API keys, or fund balances across providers yourself. As a plugin, through the SiteGround AI Agent for WordPress, it adds a whole layer of functionality on top of what WordPress ships natively. And on SiteGround-hosted sites the whole thing is already set up: the connector comes pre-installed and pre-connected as the default, with 20,000 free tokens a month, so the native AI features and the Agent are ready to use with nothing to configure. Sites hosted elsewhere get there in a couple of steps, just install the plugin and sign in, rather than wiring up multiple providers by hand.

3. Together, native features and the AI Agent by SiteGround can save hours on everyday WordPress work, including bulk tasks across multiple sites

The combined value of the new AI capabilities in WordPress 7.0 and the SiteGround AI Agent for WordPress show up in time saved. The native features handle single actions, and the Agent picks up the multi-step work that doesn’t fit one button: building posts and pages, editing product images in bulk, creating WooCommerce products from a spreadsheet, applying SEO improvements across a whole blog, and pushing changes across multiple connected sites at once. The live demo showed exactly this, compressing what would normally be hours of manual, screen-hopping work into a single guided workflow.

AI Agent by SiteGround: your questions answered

We had so many great questions during the live session. Here are the most common ones, answered in one place.

Is the SiteGround AI Agent for WordPress free?

Yes. Every SiteGround client gets the Essential AI Studio plan activated for free, and it includes the AI Agent for WordPress along with a monthly allowance of 20,000 tokens that resets automatically each month. With the AI Agent, WordPress users can handle everyday content and site-management tasks faster – from drafting and improving pages or blog posts, to generating product descriptions for WooCommerce stores, to getting help with more complex workflows that content creators and store owners need.

Can I use SiteGround AI Agent for WordPress if my site isn’t hosted on SiteGround?

Yes. SiteGround AI Agent for WordPress is part of SiteGround AI Studio, which you can use regardless of where your WordPress site is hosted. Once you have SiteGround AI Studio, you can use the WordPress Agent to manage posts, pages, plugins, themes, WooCommerce products, prices, and other site tasks through simple chat.

If WordPress 7.0 already adds AI, why do I still need a plugin?

WordPress 7.0 lays a powerful AI foundation, and plugins build the experience on top of it. It introduces a shared AI framework and a Connectors page that give every plugin and core feature a standard way to talk to AI providers. To turn that foundation into AI buttons in your admin, two pieces complete the picture: the official AI plugin enables the native capabilities and surfaces them where you work, for example Generate buttons for images and text inside Gutenberg, and a connector supplies the model access and tokens that make those capabilities run. SiteGround AI is that connector, and the SiteGround AI Agent plugin adds a further layer of functionality on top. If you only want the Agent or want to power other AI-enabled plugins, the WordPress “AI” plugin isn’t required.

How do I set up or activate the SiteGround AI connector?

On SiteGround-hosted WordPress 7.0 sites there’s nothing to set up: the SiteGround AI connector is already installed and set as the default, so it appears as active out of the box. For a site hosted elsewhere, you add it as an external website in AI Studio, generate a connection key, install the AI Agent by SiteGround plugin, and paste the key. For a step-by-step walkthrough, see our Knowledge Base article on activating SiteGround AI.

Which AI models power SiteGround AI?

SiteGround AI isn’t built on a single model. It’s a connector that gives you access to multiple leading models from Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI (ChatGPT), and Google (Gemini), plus image models. You don’t choose a provider manually and you don’t connect each one yourself: the system automatically selects the best and most token-efficient model for each task in the background.

How do tokens work?

Tokens are how AI usage is measured. Each request and the AI’s response consume tokens based on their length and complexity, so there’s no fixed “hours of work” or “number of images” figure, since a short request costs far less than a long, multi-step one. Your Essential plan includes 20,000 tokens per site each month, and you can monitor usage directly in AI Studio, where each chat shows a token consumption breakdown at the top. To see exactly how usage is counted, read our article “How Token Usage Is Counted.”

What happens when I run out of tokens? Am I charged automatically?

You won’t be cut off mid-task and you won’t be charged automatically. Before you start a task that would exceed your allowance, you’ll get a notification that you’re approaching the end of your tokens. Additional tokens are added manually through the Plus plan, so topping up is always your decision rather than an automatic charge.

Can the AI Agent for WordPress build full pages and sections, not just images?

Yes. Beyond single actions like generating an image or an excerpt, the AI Agent for WordPress can create full blog posts and pages, including the structure and sections, so you’re not limited to dropping in individual generated elements. Page generation currently builds with Gutenberg.

Can it edit my existing content in bulk?

Yes. The Agent can edit existing pages and posts, including text, structure, and headings, and it can apply those changes across many pages at once rather than one at a time. This bulk capability is one of the biggest time-savers, whether you’re refreshing copy, restructuring content, or standardizing pages across a site.

Does AI Agent by SiteGround work with WooCommerce

Yes, and WooCommerce is one of the Agent’s strongest areas. It can bulk-create products from a spreadsheet, edit product images in bulk, and set up coupon-and-banner campaigns, turning what’s normally a lot of repetitive store admin into a single guided workflow. For actions that change or remove content, the Agent asks for confirmation before applying anything.

Does the AI Agent by SiteGround work with Elementor and other builders?

Partly, and it depends on the task. For page generation, the Agent currently builds with Gutenberg, so Elementor and other page builders aren’t supported for building pages yet. Most of the Agent’s other capabilities, including editing content, managing plugins, WooCommerce, users, and SEO tasks, work regardless of your theme or builder. Elementor support is a request we’ve heard and the team is looking into it; for the current status, keep an eye on our announcements or check with support.

Can the Agent help with image SEO?

Yes. The Agent can add and edit the SEO-relevant fields for your images, including alt text, titles, and descriptions, and it can do this in bulk across your media. The images it generates are stored in your own WordPress site, and you’re free to manage their details for search.

How does Google treat AI-generated content?

Google evaluates content on quality, helpfulness, and relevance to the reader, not on whether AI was involved in producing it. AI-generated content is indexed like any other content, and it performs well when it’s accurate, useful, and genuinely serves the search intent. The advantage of the Agent here is speed: it helps you produce and optimize content faster, including the SEO fields, while the editorial judgment about quality stays with you.

Can the Agent undo changes, and do I need to back up first?

You don’t need to back up before using the Agent. It keeps the context of what it did, so you can simply ask it to revert or fix a change. And if your site is hosted on SiteGround, automatic daily backups give you an added safety net that you can restore with a single click.

Could the Agent break my site by changing code or plugins?

The Agent doesn’t directly edit PHP, JavaScript, or CSS files in your WordPress codebase. It can help with routine maintenance like updating plugins to their latest versions, and as with any plugin update, conflicts can occasionally happen depending on your setup. If that occurs, the Agent can help install a previous plugin version, and on SiteGround-hosted sites automatic daily backups are there as a fallback, so a problem is always recoverable.

Is my data private, and who owns what the AI creates?

You own what the AI creates for you. Both the prompts and content you provide (your inputs) and the content the AI generates (the outputs) are treated as your Customer Content under the SiteGround AI Studio Terms, and generated images and text are stored in your own WordPress site for you to use.

To produce those outputs, your inputs are sent to the third-party AI providers that run the models, since that’s how each request gets processed. Because of that, you stay in control of what you share. None of your data is used for training purposes for any of these models. 

On retention, your AI Studio chats and files stay in your account while you use the service, and anything you delete through the interface is permanently removed within about 30 days. For the complete detail on how inputs and outputs are processed, stored, and shared, see the SiteGround AI Studio Terms and the SiteGround Privacy Policy.

Where can I watch the recording and get setup help?

The full webinar recording is available at the top of this post, so you can rewatch any part of the demo. For setup, activation, and troubleshooting, our Knowledge Base has step-by-step guides, and our support team is available if the connector doesn’t appear or you run into anything during setup.

Start using the AI Agent by SiteGround today

The best way to see what the AI Agent can do is to put it to work. Open your WordPress admin, hand it a real task, and watch something that used to take an afternoon get done in minutes. No complicated setup, just your free monthly tokens and a site that’s ready to go.

And when you find a workflow that saves you real time, share it in the comments. Your use case might be the one that helps someone else work smarter too.

Follow our blog for news and updates on WordPress & AI.

Build a Complete Online Store with SiteGround Ecommerce (Live Demo + Your Questions Answered)

How to start selling online in hours - live demo with the SiteGround Ecommerce team

In our recent live webinar our Product Innovation Director Hristo Pandjarov and Product Marketing Manager Pavel Valkanov built an online store with SiteGround Ecommerce, showcasing how easy it is to go from an idea to a live online store. 

It was exciting to see how many of you joined us to follow along and start building your own stores.

The webinar covered the main steps of setting up a store, showed the power of our new drag-and-drop editor and answered many of your questions. If you missed it or want to rewatch, the full recording is now available below:

Below are the key takeaways and some of the questions we didn’t manage to get to during the session.

Key takeaways

Building a complete online store in hours is really possible

It sounds like a marketing claim, but the webinar backed it up. The demo walked through the entire process from product setup to a completed test order in under an hour. 

That was on a tight timeline, of course, and your store will need more thought and attention. But the point stands: what used to take weeks of configuration and troubleshooting is now genuinely doable in a few hours or days, even if you’re starting from scratch. 

You can design, build, and sell with a single solution

Payments, shipping, taxes, SEO, discount codes, marketing tools, and a full drag-and-drop site editor are all built into one platform. There’s no plugin stack to maintain, no compatibility issues after updates, and no need to patch together separate tools for separate jobs. If you’ve ever managed a store across multiple platforms and plugins, you already know why that matters.

You don’t need technical skills to build and launch an online store

The webinar showed pages being edited visually: moving elements, changing fonts and colors, creating new sections from templates. Аll of this without writing a single line of code. And helpful tools such as the alignment grid and contrast indicator help you design like a professional.

There’s even built-in AI for generating text and images, so you’re not starting from a blank page. The whole point is that you can set up your store, make it look the way you want, and update it yourself whenever you need to.

SiteGround Ecommerce – your questions answered

What is the difference between SiteGround Ecommerce and WooCommerce?

SiteGround Ecommerce is a fully integrated platform where website building, store management, checkout, hosting, and marketing tools are all built into one product. WooCommerce, by contrast, is a plugin that adds ecommerce on top of WordPress, with capabilities that depend on stacking additional plugins for payments, shipping, tax, design, and more. That flexibility suits businesses with complex, custom requirements, but it comes at the cost of ongoing technical maintenance, additional themes and plugins cost, and management overhead. SiteGround Ecommerce is designed to be the more practical choice for small business owners who want to get selling quickly without becoming part-time website administrators.

Can I migrate my existing store to SiteGround Ecommerce?

We are very excited about providing an option to migrate existing online stores to SiteGround Ecommerce. The team is actively working on such an option for WooCommerce stores and will share more about the release of it soon. In the meantime you can try the new Website Builder and Ecommerce and see how easy it is to build pages and add products. We bet that recreating your existing website might be easier than you think. Plus, starting fresh means that you will have a chance to streamline your content and get rid of old pages or product drafts. If you are still interested in migrating from another platform, please share this feedback with us via the feedback form inside of the SiteGround Ecommerce store manager.

What payment methods are supported?

SiteGround Ecommerce supports multiple payment methods such as: 

  • Stripe, and through it debit and credit card payments, Apple Pay, Google Pay, several pay later options such as Afterpay and Klarna and another 120+ payment options 
  • PayPal, and through it PayPal wallet, PayPal pay later, card payments,  and Venmo 
  • Pay on Delivery, or when the item is picked up from your physical location
  • Bank (wire) transfers via SEPA, SWIFT, BACS, CHAPS, etc.

You can offer multiple payment methods simultaneously, for example, PayPal for wallet payments and Stripe for card payments at the same time. Mollie and Worldpay are not currently supported, however we are looking to expand payment options and your feedback will be key in our decision on how to prioritise them.

What kind of products can I sell?

The platform supports three main product types depending on their delivery method but in reality there is no limit of what you can sell. You can set up physical products, non-deliverable ones, such as services, courses, memberships, and downloadable, such as files and ebooks. You can easily create product variations based on pre-built or custom attributes such as size, weight, colour, gender and age. There is also no limit on the number of products you can list regardless of the plan you choose.

How does tax configuration work?

The SiteGround Ecommerce has a built-in tax calculator with preset standard rates. Through the Basic Tax Setup, you register only for the countries and states where you are legally required to collect tax, which means you can effectively leave tax off for markets where you have no obligation. You can also set up tax overrides at the state, county, city, or ZIP level for the USA. For EU stores, domestic or OSS registration is supported. The Advanced Tax Setup via Stripe Tax handles more complex international scenarios and supports product-level tax codes. Note that it remains the store owner’s legal responsibility to ensure compliance, we recommend consulting a local tax professional.

What shipping options are available?

You can easily set up and manage shipping with SiteGround Ecommerce. We support creating shipping zones by country or state, and set flat-rate shipping, free shipping above a minimum order amount, or local pickup. We will soon launch our native integration with Shippo to easily add advanced shipping options to your site. You will be able to get discounted rates from top carriers,  optimise margins by applying dynamic shipping pricing, and save time by creating and printing shipping labels in seconds. Customers using the integration will have access to many major carriers such as USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, Canada Post, Correos, Deutsche Post, DPD DE, and Evri.

How much does SiteGround Ecommerce cost?

SiteGround Ecommerce is free to try for 14 days with no credit card required. After the trial, there are three plans that have been designed to meet your needs regardless of where in your ecommerce journey you are: 

  • Sell: designed for people that are just starting their online journey; 
  • Grow: for those with some experience selling and looking for a platform that will help them take the next step;
  • Scale: for experienced sellers looking for professional tools that will take them to the next level. 

All plans can be billed either monthly or annually. There is also a Build plan which gives access to the Website Builder only, without ecommerce features. For the most up to date pricing of each plan and all features included visit the product page.

How can I promote my online store?

The platform provides many powerful marketing features out of the box to help you set up and promote your store. You can generate AI descriptions and images to bring life to your products and speed up product creation. Built-in SEO tools help with making your products and pages discoverable by search engines and AI chat bots: automatic sitemaps, SEO-friendly URLs, and meta fields. Google Tag Manager integration also comes out of the box and enables adding tracking and advertising pixels such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, and Facebook Pixel. 

You can make your products more discoverable and set up shopping ads using our automatically generated product feeds for Google Merchant Center, Meta Commerce Manager as well as OpenAI product feed for agentic commerce. Discount codes and promotions (including scheduled campaigns) also come out of the box to boost your conversion rates and average order value. Abandoned cart recovery emails are also available on higher plans. Finally, you can keep an eye on your sales and understand how your store is performing using the easy-to-use analytics,  covering orders and revenue, product performance, inventory, and traffic, with trend comparisons across periods.

Can I add an ecommerce store to my existing hosting plan?

SiteGround Ecommerce is a separate service and ecommerce stores cannot be added to existing hosting plans. The ecommerce plans include their own hosting infrastructure, so you are not paying for hosting twice, instead you get a fully integrated platform where website building, store management, checkout, hosting, and marketing tools are all built into one product. The 14-day free trial is available to both new users and existing SiteGround customers to help you evaluate the platform before you commit to it.

Do you offer support for SiteGround Ecommerce?

Yes! All plans include 24/7 support via chat and tickets, plus a built-in AI assistant that offers contextual help right inside the store manager. Our support team works hard to be fast and friendly, and we’re proud that customers consistently rate their experience highly. And don’t just take our word for it, our reviews and 98% customer satisfaction speak for themselves.

What’s coming next for SiteGround Ecommerce

The platform is evolving fast, and the roadmap is packed.

Advanced shipping options are coming to the platform very soon, thanks to the integration with Shippo, which will allow you to easily pick from a wide range of shipping providers and print labels for your orders.

Beyond that, we are working on an exciting new blogging/news functionality that will help you quickly and easily publish regular content and updates to your website. This has been one of the most frequent requests by users and we are working on making it available very soon. In addition we will soon provide you with the option to create product add-ons, such as custom text for engraving, descriptive attributes and thumbnail variations – all of these will come built in, no plugins or add-ons required.

SiteGround Ecommerce already makes it very easy to create and grow your online store. What’s coming next will make it even harder to find a reason not to start.

Have an idea about an online business or want to see how easy it will be to create a new store? Why not give it a try today? SiteGround Ecommerce comes with a free 14-day trial, no credit card required.

Build anything with Coderick AI by SiteGround (Webinar Video and Q&A)

In our recent live webinar, our Growth Marketing Director Monika Dimitrova and our Product Director Daniel Kanchev put Coderick AI to the test: taking three projects from a blank screen to fully functioning applications, in real-time.

They built a staff scheduling app, a full website with a booking system for a local vet clinic, and a brand new website using an existing one as a visual reference. Three projects, three very different use cases, all created through plain language conversation with Coderick AI.

Along the way, they shared tips on prompting effectively, showed how to iterate on designs, and answered dozens of questions live. If you missed it or want to rewatch, the full recording is now available on our YouTube channel:

Below are the key takeaways and the most common questions from the session, answered.

Key takeaways

The three builds showed very different use cases – and the same workflow

The webinar covered three projects back to back, and each one stretched Coderick AI in a different direction. The staff scheduling app was a pure internal tool – backend logic, user roles, shift management. The vet clinic was a full public-facing website with appointment booking baked in. And the third project started from an existing website used as a visual reference, showing how you can take a design you like and rebuild it as something new.

What stood out is that the workflow was the same every time: describe what you want, review what Coderick AI builds, then refine through follow-up prompts. Whether it’s a website or a web app, the process doesn’t change.

The three projects took about 40 minutes in total – but none of them were finished products. They were strong starting points. The more you iterate, the further you can take it. “Easy and in minutes” is real – it’s just the beginning, not the whole story.

How you prompt makes a difference

The better and more specific your description, the closer the first result is to what you actually need – and the fewer iterations it takes to get there.

During the vet clinic build, the prompt didn’t just say “make a vet website.” It described the pages needed, the booking flow, the kind of information to show. That level of detail meant the first version was already close to usable. Compare that to a vague prompt – you’ll get something, but you’ll spend more time (and credits) refining it.

Think of it like briefing a developer. You don’t need to know how to code, but you do need to know what you want. And if you’re not sure, just describe your goal and let Coderick AI suggest an approach – it’s a conversation, not a one-shot command.

Design isn’t locked – it’s iterative

The first result gives you something real to work with – from there, you shape it. “Make the header darker”, “switch to a two-column layout”, “use the color palette from this screenshot.” Each prompt adjusts the design without starting over. You can even describe a mood or a feeling to Coderick AI and see where it goes. During the session, a single prompt for the vet clinic produced a full warm, Japanese-aesthetic redesign complete with paw prints.

This works with visual references, too – not just words, as the third project showcased. You can share a screenshot of a design you like, and Coderick AI uses it as a starting direction. From there, you shape it into something your own.

You end up with a working project on a real URL – hosting, database, security included

Unlike most AI builders where you generate something and then figure out where to host it, Coderick AI projects go live on SiteGround’s infrastructure automatically. Database, hosting, SSL, deployment – all handled. Hit publish, and it’s live.

Coderick AI – your questions answered

Can a non-technical person really build a full app or website with Coderick AI?

Absolutely – that’s the entire point. Coderick AI was built specifically for people who don’t code. You describe what you want in everyday language, and the AI generates a complete, working project for you – structure, design, database, backend logic, and all.

If you happen to have a developer on your team (even a basic one), that’s a bonus. They can guide the prompts with a bit more technical clarity, which often means better results faster. But it’s not required. Thousands of non-technical users are already building real websites and web apps with Coderick AI – from portfolio sites and booking systems to CRM dashboards and invoice trackers.

Can Coderick AI rebuild or refresh my existing website?

Coderick AI can’t directly edit or update your current website – but it can do something arguably better. You can use it to rebuild your site from the ground up. Describe what you want, attach screenshots of your current design as a reference for the direction you’d like to take, and Coderick AI will generate a fresh, modern version.

For smaller updates like rewording text or restructuring your menu on an existing site, SiteGround’s AI Studio is a better fit – and it’s included free with your hosting plan. The two tools complement each other nicely: AI Studio for quick content updates, Coderick AI for when you’re ready for a complete transformation.

Can I customize the design of the apps built with Coderick AI?

Yes – and this is where Coderick AI really stands out compared to template-based builders. There are no preset themes limiting your design. Every project is built from scratch based on your description, which means you have complete creative freedom.

Want to change colors, layouts, fonts, spacing, or navigation? Just tell Coderick AI what you’d like. You can say things like “make the header simpler,” “switch to a dark color scheme,” “add more white space between sections,” or “make the call-to-action button larger and green.” You can also attach screenshots of designs you admire as visual references.

Every element is customizable through conversation – from the overall look and feel down to individual buttons and form fields. No CSS knowledge required. Just describe your vision, and Coderick AI brings it to life.

How is Coderick AI different from building with WordPress?

With WordPress, you’re assembling pieces – picking a theme, installing plugins, configuring settings, and often hiring a developer when things get complicated. With Coderick AI, you skip all of that. You describe what you want in plain language, and the AI builds a fully working website or web app for you – complete with frontend, backend, database, and hosting, all included from the start.

There’s no theme to configure, no plugins to maintain, and no dashboard to learn. You just chat with Coderick AI, and it handles the technical side. Think of it as going from idea to live project in minutes instead of weeks. And because everything runs on SiteGround’s infrastructure, your site is fast, secure, and production-ready the moment you hit Publish.

Can Coderick AI work alongside my existing WordPress site?

Coderick AI is a standalone platform – it doesn’t plug into WordPress or run as part of it. It’s a completely different approach to building for the web.

That said, there are practical ways to connect the two. You can build a tool, calculator, booking page, or any web app with Coderick AI and link to it from your WordPress site. Each Coderick AI project lives on its own domain, so it works beautifully as a companion to your existing setup – especially for functionality that would normally require complex plugins or custom development in WordPress.

How do credits work?

Credits are how Coderick AI measures AI usage. Every action – from generating a new project to making small tweaks – uses a certain number of credits. Simpler prompts use fewer credits, while more complex or detailed requests naturally use more.

Your credit balance resets monthly with your plan, and you can always see how many credits you’ve used and how many remain directly in the interface. The free trial comes with 50,000 credits so you can test and experiment before committing. Paid plans start from just $10/month and include premium SiteGround hosting – so there’s no separate hosting bill to worry about.

Pro tip: Building in small, focused steps isn’t just better for results – it’s also more efficient with credits.

How many credits does a typical project actually use?

It depends on scope, but here’s a useful frame. A simple landing page or single-purpose app uses far fewer credits than a multi-page site with a database, user login, and booking system.

Paid plans start at 100,000 credits per month on Essential, 200,000 on Plus, and 400,000 on Pro – so there’s room to build, iterate, and maintain without constantly watching the counter. 

Pro tip: The best way to stretch your credits is a specific, well-thought-out first prompt – the closer your brief, the less back-and-forth it takes. If you’re a SiteGround customer, a great way to plan ahead is to use AI Studio to shape and refine your idea before bringing it into Coderick AI.

How does Coderick AI compare to other AI builders like Bolt, Lovable, or Replit?

There are many AI app builders out there, and at first glance they might seem similar – you describe what you want, then AI generates it. The meaningful difference is in what happens after the build.

Most vibe coding tools are builders only and once your project is generated, you still need to figure out hosting, deployment, database, and security. Some platforms bundle these extras, but they typically come from third-party providers and cost on top of the base plan.

Coderick AI is an all-in-one platform. The building, hosting, database, SSL, and deployment are handled together from the start on SiteGround’s infrastructure – no separate bills, no configuration, no second project. You hit Publish, and it’s live. And with 20 years of hosting expertise behind it, your project runs on the same foundation that powers some of the web’s most demanding sites.

Can I build an e-commerce store with Coderick AI?

Yes – and it’s one of the most popular use cases. Coderick AI can build product catalogs, order forms, landing pages, and even membership areas with user login. You describe your products, how you want them displayed, and what the ordering flow should look like, and Coderick AI generates a clean, working storefront for you.

It’s a great fit for businesses that want an online presence without the complexity of WooCommerce or a full e-commerce platform. If your model relies on cash on delivery, bank transfers, or simple order capture, Coderick AI handles it right out of the box – no plugin setup, no overhead.

What about payments like Stripe and PayPal?

Payment gateway integrations aren’t available yet – but stay tuned. This is one of the most requested features and something we’re actively working on. For now, Coderick AI is perfect for order forms, product catalogs, and checkout flows where payment happens outside the platform (think bank transfers, invoicing, or cash on delivery). You get a fully functional storefront with a working backend that captures every order – you just handle the payment step separately for the time being.

How do I fix errors without technical knowledge?

You don’t need to understand a single line of code. If something isn’t working the way you expected, just tell Coderick AI what’s wrong – in plain language. Describe the issue, and it will debug and fix it for you.

That said, the more specific you are, the better the result, and adding a screenshot gives Coderick AI much more to work with.

And here’s the safety net: Coderick AI has built-in version control. If a fix doesn’t work or something goes sideways, you can roll back to a previous working version with one click and try a different approach. The best practice is to build in small, incremental steps – that way, issues are easy to spot and quick to resolve. Think of it as working with a developer who’s always available and never judges you for not knowing code.

How do I maintain my Coderick AI project after it’s built? 

The same way you built it – by talking to Coderick AI. Want to update a product listing, add a new page, or change the wording on your homepage? Just describe what you want, and Coderick AI applies it. 

There’s no separate admin panel to learn, no theme editor to navigate. Your ongoing conversation with Coderick AI is how you manage the site.

Can I see or edit the code that Coderick AI generates?

Coderick AI is designed so that everything happens through conversation: you describe what you want, and the AI builds it. The generated code runs under the hood, and the current interface doesn’t expose it for direct editing in the way a traditional code editor would. For most users, that’s the whole point: no code to write, read, or maintain.

For those of you who want to go deeper, a built-in code editor is in the roadmap – so if code-level control matters to your workflow, keep a look out for news and product updates.

What integrations are currently available?

Right now, Coderick AI handles everything that’s built in: databases, user authentication, email functionality for authentication, and all the backend logic your project needs. Third-party API integrations – like connecting to Stripe, Google Workspace, or external services – aren’t supported yet.

But here’s the exciting part: this is actively being worked on, and there are some big announcements coming soon. In the meantime, there are creative workarounds. 

Who owns what I build with Coderick AI?

You retain ownership of your project ideas, content, data, and everything you create – the website functionality, text, images you upload, and the overall output. It’s your work.

Coderick AI is designed as a fully managed platform, which means your projects are hosted and run on SiteGround’s infrastructure. There’s no option to download the raw source code or export projects to another hosting provider. This is by design – it’s what keeps everything fast, secure, and hassle-free. You focus on building and growing your project; the platform takes care of the rest.

What are the realistic limits of what Coderick AI can build?

Coderick AI is remarkably capable – but it’s good to know where it shines brightest. Here’s a quick breakdown:

What it does well: Business websites, landing pages, portfolios, product catalogs, dashboards, CRM systems, booking pages, membership areas with login, order management tools, task trackers, invoice generators, and internal business apps. You can also ask for animations, parallax scrolling effects, and custom design elements.

What’s coming in the future: Payment gateway integrations, connections to external APIs and third-party services, and expanded e-commerce features.

What it doesn’t do: Coderick AI builds web-based projects that run in a browser. It can’t create standalone desktop applications for Windows or Linux. It also doesn’t currently support agentic workflows or direct connections to external platforms like AWS.

The sweet spot? Any web-based tool, site, or app that you can describe clearly – Coderick AI can likely build it for you.

Can Coderick AI build apps with a database – and can I manage the data myself?

Yes, and Coderick AI creates the database automatically when your project needs to store and retrieve data (user accounts, bookings, product listings, form submissions, inventory records), Coderick AI creates a database for it. No configuration required — it’s there when you need it.

Once the database exists, you can manage it directly through the built-in database dashboard in the Coderick AI interface. From there, you can add records, edit existing entries, or create new data collections. So a real estate agent can add new property listings directly. A restaurant owner can update their menu items. A studio manager can remove past events.

One thing worth highlighting: your database is stored on SiteGround’s own infrastructure – meaning it’s part of your hosting environment, covered by the same data protection and security standards your site already runs on.

Pro tip: You can also ask Coderick AI to build you a custom admin panel – with personalised views, user roles, and exactly the controls your workflow needs.

How do I get the best results when describing what I want?

The quality of your output depends on the quality of your input – and the good news is, you don’t need to be technical to write great prompts. Here are the key principles:

Be specific. Instead of “build me a website,” try “Build a yoga studio website with a class schedule, an about page, instructor bios, and a contact form that collects name, email, and message.”

Build incrementally. Start with the core structure, review it, then add features one at a time. This keeps things clean and makes issues easy to spot.

Use screenshots as references. If you see a design you like, attach a screenshot and pair it with a description. For example: “I want a layout similar to this, with a horizontal navigation bar and a three-column feature section below the hero image.”

Describe problems clearly. If something isn’t right, tell Coderick AI exactly what’s happening and what you expected instead. The more precise your feedback, the faster the fix.

Think of it as collaborating with a talented developer – the clearer your brief, the closer the result is to your vision on the first try.

Can Coderick AI build websites in languages other than English?

Yes. Because Coderick AI generates content based on your prompts, you can build in any language. All you need to do is write in the language you want the site to use, or specify it explicitly.

The same applies to regional variations: if you want UK English rather than American English, or want to make sure dates, currencies, and formatting follow local conventions, just include that in your instructions. Coderick AI will follow your lead.

How do I publish my project live?

It’s as simple as hitting the Publish button inside Coderick AI. Once you do, your project goes live – no extra setup, no third-party hosting to configure, no deployment steps to figure out.

You can either use the system URL that’s automatically generated for your project or connect your own custom domain for a more professional look. Either way, your site is accessible and ready to share the moment you publish.

And here’s the best part: every Coderick AI plan comes with premium SiteGround hosting built in. That means your site is fast, secure, and backed by SiteGround’s infrastructure from day one – security and performance optimization all included. There’s no separate hosting bill and nothing to manage on the technical side. You build it, you publish it, and it’s live.

What’s coming next for Coderick AI

Coderick AI is evolving fast, and the roadmap is packed.

Third-party integrations are with high priority on our roadmap, including connecting to external services like payment providers. It’s a frequently requested feature and one we’re committed to building out.

Beyond that, we’re working on in-preview editing so you can make changes directly in the visual preview, text-to-speech capabilities, and deeper AI enhancements that will make the building experience even more intuitive. In addition, you can expect soon to have professional emails that you can use with your Coderick AI project’s custom domain.

Coderick AI is already a powerful vibe coding tool for building websites and web apps without writing code. What’s coming next will make it even harder to find a reason not to start.

Everything you saw in the webinar – the live builds, the tips, the speed – you can try it right now. Coderick AI comes with a free 14-day trial, no credit card required. Describe your first project, and see what happens.

What would you like to see in Coderick AI next? Drop a comment below – we read every one, and your ideas can shape the roadmap.

Scale your business with SiteGround AI Studio (Webinar Video + Q&A)

In our January 2026 webinar, Product Director Daniel Kanchev and Product Marketing Manager Simona Petrova demonstrated how leading AI models and specialized agents in SiteGround AI Studio solve real business challenges. Through live demos, they showed how the all-in-one workspace can handle day-to-day business tasks, from content creation to streamlining WordPress and WooCommerce management.

For anyone who couldn’t join the live webinar, or for those who would like a second look at the demos, the full webinar recording is now available to watch on YouTube.

Key takeaways 

We covered a lot during the session, so we’ve distilled it down to the most important takeaways for you below.

1. Use the right AI model for every task

Different AI models excel at different tasks, so a core feature of the AI Studio is providing access to multiple leading models from a single workspace. During the webinar, we showcased this “right tool for the right job” approach, explaining how some models are better for summaries while others excel at creative work. We demonstrated this with specific examples, using ChatGPT to instantly summarize a long article into a 30-day action plan, and then switching to Nano Banana Pro to create a unique, high-quality image for a blog post. 

With AI Studio, you can explore which model works best for your specific needs without managing separate subscriptions. This full suite of AI models is available for free to all SiteGround customers as part of AI Studio Essential.

2. Streamline WordPress management with the WordPress AI Agent

Included free in the Essential plan, the WordPress AI Agent helps you manage and maintain your WordPress sites through simple chat commands. During the webinar, we showed how you can perform bulk actions like updating multiple WooCommerce products at once – all with a single prompt. You can even manage multiple WordPress instances at once – like rolling out a plugin update across some or all of your WordPress installations, or creating a new user in every site you manage – just by telling the WordPress agent what you need to do. The agent works both in the AI Studio interface and directly inside your WordPress dashboard.

3. Get marketing campaigns done in minutes with AI agents

The Plus plan unlocks 15+ specialized AI agents built with input from real-world business and marketing professionals who know what works. During the webinar, we demonstrated a few of them in action. We showed that unlike general-purpose AI that often requires several rounds of back-and-forth, these agents deliver strategic, ready-to-use output from the start. 

For example, the Social Media AI Agents for Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn turn your main message into channel-ready posts and publish them directly to your connected pages. They can also analyze engagement and suggest improvements based on best practices. Meanwhile, the Email Marketing AI Agent builds a complete campaign from a single prompt, including subject line, body copy, and images. You can import the output directly to your SiteGround Email Marketing or download the HTML to use in third-party applications.

Answering your questions

We also got a great deal of interesting questions, so we summarized the most popular ones.

Is AI Studio included in my hosting plan, or is it an additional cost?

SiteGround AI Studio offers two plans: Essential and Plus. Every SiteGround customer gets free access to the Essential plan, which includes 20,000 monthly tokens, multiple leading AI models, and the AI Agent for WordPress. The Plus plan is available for an additional cost and provides 100,000 monthly tokens, 15+ specialized business agents for tasks like marketing, content creation, and more, plus a library of ready-to-use prompts to help you get started faster.

What are tokens and how do they work?

Tokens are the units that measure AI usage in SiteGround AI Studio – think of them as the “currency” for every AI interaction. Every task you perform, whether it’s generating text, creating images, running web research, or using AI Agents, consumes tokens based on both your input (your prompt and any uploaded files) and the AI’s output (the generated response). More complex tasks like image generation, file analysis, or multi-step Agent operations use more tokens than simple text requests. 

The AI Studio essential plan (free for every SiteGround customer) includes a monthly token allowance of 20,000 tokens, and you can track your usage anytime in AI Studio or your Client Area. Your allowance resets automatically each month.

What is the difference between AI agents and generic chat?

The key difference is expertise. Generic chat is great for brainstorming and quick answers, but it relies entirely on your prompts to guide the conversation. AI Studio agents, on the other hand, have specialized knowledge built into their core instructions. Secondly, our AI agents can execute tasks directly through platform integrations – they don’t just give you text, they can publish a blog post to your website or update products in your e-commerce store.

Does the WordPress AI Agent work with page builders like Divi and Elementor, or only the native WordPress editor?

The vast majority of the WordPress AI Agent’s features work perfectly regardless of which page builder you use. The only limitation is block-level content editing and creation within the builder itself, since each page builder (Divi, Elementor, etc.) uses a unique content structure that requires dedicated integration.

Everything else works seamlessly on any WordPress site:

  • Complete content management for posts, pages, categories, tags, media library, and comments.
  • Full WooCommerce integration for products, orders, inventory, pricing, and sales reports – everything you need to run your online store.
  • User management to create accounts, update roles, and set permissions.
  • Plugin and theme management to install, update, activate, deactivate, or remove
  • Site configuration to adjust settings and optimize performance.

We’ve seen significant interest in native page builder support for visual editing, and we’re listening closely. We’ll prioritize which builders to integrate next based on user requests, so we encourage you to share your feedback directly through the AI Studio interface.

Can the WordPress Agent create or update products by uploading a spreadsheet with product information?

Yes, the SiteGround AI Studio WordPress AI Agent supports bulk WooCommerce product management through spreadsheet uploads. You can upload a spreadsheet containing your product data – such as descriptions, prices, and inventory – and the WordPress AI Agent can then use that data to either create new products or update existing ones in your WooCommerce store, depending on your instructions.

Can I use the WordPress AI Agent across multiple websites and share access with my team? 

Yes, you absolutely can manage multiple websites with the WordPress AI Agent. We designed it to be a core part of the experience for all our customers, which is why its multi-site management capabilities are included in the free Essential plan. There is no limitation on the number of WordPress sites you can connect, allowing you to streamline tasks across all of your web properties from a single, centralized workspace.

Regarding sharing access with your team, there’s a specific way to collaborate using the WordPress AI Agent right now. If a team member has access to your WordPress dashboard, they can use the agent’s features directly from within WordPress, and any tokens they consume will be drawn from the main account owner’s token pool. 

Can SiteGround AI Studio create and schedule social media posts automatically?

The SiteGround AI Studio social media agents for Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn excel at creating and posting channel-ready posts directly from your prompts. While you can create and publish posts straight to your social pages from the interface right now, scheduled posting – the ability to schedule posts for automatic publishing at future dates – is currently in development. A comprehensive scheduling system that applies to all types of tasks – not just social media – is a high priority on our roadmap and will be a core part of a future update to the SiteGround AI Studio.

Can specialized AI Ads Agents create ad copy and visual assets?

Yes, the SiteGround AI Ads Experts for Meta and Google are designed to create both ad copy and visual assets for your campaigns. You simply provide the agent with details about your product, target audience, and campaign goals, and it generates multiple ad variations around your core offer. Each variation is built to follow the specific structure guidelines of its platform, giving you different hooks and messages to test without having to write each one manually.

What email marketing services can I connect to AI Studio?

The SiteGround AI Studio Email Marketer offers a seamless, one-click integration with our own SiteGround Email Marketing service, allowing you to import your finished ready-to-send-email instantly. While we do not currently offer direct API connections to third-party services, we designed the agent’s output for universal compatibility. You can generate an email and export its full HTML, which you can then easily upload into any external email marketing platform you use.

Will search engines penalize AI-generated content?

No – Google and other search engines have been clear that they don’t penalize content when AI tools were used in the creation process. What matters is quality, not origin. Google’s guidelines focus on rewarding helpful, original content that demonstrates expertise and provides genuine value to readers, regardless of how it was produced.

The SEO risk isn’t AI itself; it’s publishing thin, generic, or mass-produced content that doesn’t serve your audience. To keep your rankings strong, focus on adding your unique perspective, expertise, and real-world examples to AI-generated drafts. Use AI as a starting point, then refine with your own insights and ensure everything is accurate and genuinely useful.

SiteGround AI Studio is designed specifically for creating search-optimized content. Our SEO Expert Agent helps with your keyword research, competitive analysis, and content briefs based on search intent, while the Copywriter Agent creates drafts you can shape to match your brand voice. The result is content that’s efficient to produce and built to perform.

Can AI Studio handle on-page SEO, and does it work alongside plugins like Rank Math or AIOSEO?

Yes, SiteGround AI Studio handles on-page SEO strategy and works seamlessly with SEO plugins like Rank Math, AIOSEO, and Yoast SEO. These tools complement each other rather than conflict – they serve different purposes in your SEO workflow.

Your SEO plugin (Rank Math, AIOSEO, Yoast, etc.) handles the technical implementation: meta tags, schema markup, XML sitemaps, canonical URLs, and on-page analysis. AI Studio’s SEO Expert Agent works upstream as your strategist, helping you with keyword research, competitor analysis, content briefs, and optimization recommendations. You then use insights from the SEO Expert to create content with the Copywriter Agent, and finally publish it to your site using the WordPress AI Agent – where your SEO plugin takes over to handle the technical details.

AI Studio is also developing AI visibility optimization to help content rank across AI platforms (ChatGPT, Claude) and traditional search engines – addressing both SEO and emerging AEO (AI Engine Optimization).

What makes a good AI prompt?

Good prompts are specific prompts. The more details you provide – goal, audience, tone, and any specific requirements – the better your results. To make this easier, our AI Studio Plus plan includes a Prompt Library with ready-to-use prompts for common business tasks like blog posts, product descriptions, and social media content. You can also save your best-performing prompts to reuse them anytime, ensuring consistent, high-quality results without starting from scratch.

What is the difference between Coderick AI and Siteground AI Studio?

The simplest way to think about the difference is that SiteGround AI Studio is designed to help you manage and grow your existing business, while Coderick AI is designed to build new websites and applications from scratch.

SiteGround AI Studio is your day-to-day AI workspace for ongoing business tasks. You use its specialized agents for things like maintaining your WordPress site, creating social media content, running email marketing campaigns, and generating ad copy. It’s a tool for enhancing your productivity and managing your existing business operations. Coderick AI, on the other hand, is a development platform used to create new, fully functional websites and applications without any coding. You simply describe your idea – for example, “build a client invoice tracker with a dashboard” – and Coderick AI generates the entire application, complete with hosting and a database.

Tell us what you need 

We’re just getting started with what SiteGround AI Studio can do, and we’re excited for what’s next. Your feedback is what will guide our development, so please don’t hesitate to share your thoughts with us as you work with it. We want to hear your success stories and learn what tools and improvements you need to help you scale your business. 

[Webinar Q&A] Black Friday Success with Email Marketing

Webinar Q&A Black Friday Success with Email Marketing

Just in time for Black Friday, let’s see how effortlessly you can launch promotional emails or newsletters with our SiteGround Email Marketing tool – no marketing expertise required.

We hosted an insightful live webinar with our Innovations Director, Hristo Pandjarov, alongside Kiril Tsankov, the Lead Product Manager for our Email Marketing tool who showcased the simplicity of our tool, but also shared best practices for email marketing that are designed to help your campaign’s success.

If you did not have a chance to attend, or you simply want to rewatch the session, you can now catch up with the recording of our Email Marketing live webinar on YouTube.

We also got a great deal of interesting questions, so we summarized the most popular ones, as well the ones that we didn’t have enough time to answer during the live webinar in the blog post below.

Integration and Compatibility

Is there a plugin for WordPress that people can sign up with and automatically be added to email groups?

We have designed a Lead Generation Plugin for WordPress specifically for our Email Marketing tool that allows users to easily create sign-up forms and automatically add people to email groups. Clients using the Email Marketing tool can download the plugin from the interface and it will soon be available in the wordpress.org/plugins repo. This streamlines the process of growing your email list and ensures that your audience segments are organized from the outset.

Can we use the email feature while having a Google Workspace with the same domain?

Yes, you can use our Email Marketing tool while having a Google Workspace with the same domain. The DNS change required for the setup of both products is completely different and there is absolutely no conflict in using the two products simultaneously. 

Is this service only compatible with WordPress websites?

SiteGround’s Еmail Мarketing tool is not limited to WordPress websites. It offers flexibility and can be integrated with any type of website, providing a robust solution for your email marketing needs regardless of the platform you use. Do bear in mind however, that our contact generation plugin is currently only available for WordPress websites.

List Management and Segmentation

Can this service handle an email list of 20,000 or more?

Our tool is capable of managing large email lists, including those with 20,000 and up to 50,000 contacts. This scalability ensures that as your business grows, your email marketing efforts can expand accordingly.

Can you segment lists with tags?

Yes you can! In SiteGround Email Marketings “tags” are called “Groups” and offer a simple, yet effective way of segmenting your audience. Using Groups, you can separate your contact list based on different demographics or interests and engage your subscribers with more personalized communication. A common example of this is creating one group for your Leads and another for Existing Customers. Using this approach, you can offer ongoing subscription benefits to your existing customers, while advertising a first-time sign-up incentive for your leads. 

Email Design

Yes, you can customize and add your brand logo to the emails sent through SiteGround’s Email Marketing tool. This ensures that your emails are not only visually appealing but also reflect your brand identity, building trust and recognition among your recipients. 

To customize your brand logo, all you need to do is go to the Email Marketing > Sender Details page and scroll down to the Brand Identity section and upload your logo. Bear in mind it’s a good idea to upload a high-resolution logo, so it does not appear pixelated on high-resolution devices. Even if you need to upload a larger image, fret not, as we will resize it appropriately to make sure it looks great in your campaigns. You can find all the extra details about what size logo to use in our knowledge base – here.

What if we have different styles for different groups; can we configure different template styles?

Not yet, but it will be available in the next few months. 

We know how tempting it can be to experiment with different designs targeting different segments and we are working to give you the flexibility to do so. However, we have to emphasize that for brand awareness purposes, it is better and quite important to adopt a single style of sending emails. That way you keep reinforcing the same brand visuals and your users get used to recognizing your brand. 

To achieve such a single style, users can conveniently tick the box “Apply this design to future campaigns” when sending an email, to ensure future campaigns are consistent with the chosen design.

Email Campaigns

Is this only for Black Friday campaigns?

No, SiteGround’s email marketing tool is not limited to Black Friday campaigns or other seasonal promotions. You can utilize this powerful tool for any project, be it announcing new product launches, sharing valuable content, or nurturing customer relationships throughout the year. We have focused our communication on the Black Friday topic since this is a prime time for email marketing campaigns, for which we have added special thematic layouts in the tool. 

User Experience and Accessibility

Can we add alt tags to the images?

With SiteGround’s Email Marketing tool, you can easily add alternative text (alt tags) to images in your emails. Alt tags not only ensure that visually impaired recipients can understand the content of your emails but also improve your email deliverability and search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.

Is there an option to “Unsubscribe” from these emails when clients desire to do so?

Yes, there is an unsubscribe link which is automatically added to every email you send through the tool, which recipients can use to unsubscribe from your list. Respecting your recipients’ preferences is crucial for maintaining a positive brand image and complying with email marketing regulations.Therefore, once a recipient has opted out of your mailing list, we will automatically exclude them from your future mailing attempts. Recipients can subscribe again to your email list by using a form on your website. Additionally, provided a recipient has consented to re-join your mailing list, you can send them a double opt-in Re-subscribe email through the system. 

Start Creating Content with WordPress (Webinar Q&A)

start creating content with wordpress

We recently hosted a webinar on how to create content online with WordPress. The session is the second one in a series of walkthroughs aimed at helping content creators and website aspirants build or improve their online presence.

The webinar recording is available on our official YouTube channel for those interested in getting started with a WordPress website, or brushing up on their knowledge:

We also got a great deal of interesting questions which we didn’t have the time to address during the webinar, so we’ve provided the answers in the blog post below.

First Steps in WordPress Site Management

How do you customize my URL, so it just has my own domain and doesn’t include “wordpress”?

It seems that you are hosting on WordPress.com and using a free wordpress.com domain name, hence the wordpress keyword in your domain name. You should be able to purchase a custom domain and change it from your WordPress.com control panel.

If you move to a paid hosting provider such as SiteGround, you can register any domain name you wish as long as it’s not taken by someone else, and easily set your site to be accessible by that domain.

The key factor here is that the SiteGround.com portal and the Admin panel of your website are two different areas. By accessing your SiteGround Client Area, you can manage all your sites and payments, and access site-specific tools such as backups, emails, etc. The wp-admin page will lead you to log into your WordPress Admin panel to edit and customize the content of a specific site. To access your SiteGround Client Area, you need to go to login.siteground.com and type your SiteGround username and password. They may be different from the ones you use for accessing your WordPress Admin, so if the system does not accept them, you can use the Login recovery option available on screen.

How do I go about adding a new site to my plan on SiteGround? When is it advisable to have multiple sites? 

All hosting plans we offer, except for the StartUp package, allow you to create and manage multiple websites. To create another site under your account, simply access your Client Area > Websites > Add new and go through our Website Setup Wizard. It takes just a few minutes to spin off new sites using the wizard and we have depicted the whole process in these guides.

It’s advisable to create an additional website in case you have a plan of what you want to use it for and, of course, time, as you will need some extra effort to develop and maintain the site. If you want to write on a totally different topic or start a completely new project, then it’s a good idea to create a new site for it.

Customizing your WordPress Site

Can I publish/display a “coming soon”/”under construction” page as the Home page while I work on my website in private?

In case you haven’t started your site yet, you can always create it on a temporary url provided by SiteGround which is not indexable by search engines (so random people on the web can’t find it accidentally) and later change it to your real domain name. By doing this, you won’t have to worry about installing additional plugins or doing additional configuration.

If you already created your site, one of the easiest ways to create a “Coming soon”, “Under Maintenance” or similar landing page is by using a plugin. It will allow you to design the page using a template and show it to your regular site visitors, while you will be able to access your dashboard and work on your site as usual. Once you’re ready to go live, you can easily disable the page and show the expected content. There are multiple Maintenance plugins available for free in the WordPress repository and one of the best documented is SeedProd.

You can read about alternative ways of hiding your site in our article on how to limit access to website during development.

If I have some pages that I only want subscribers to see, how do I control the login process?

Depending on your final objective, you have a couple of options.

The simplest way that does not require any plugins or whatsoever is to set your desired pages to require username and password to be accessed. This way only website users who have the necessary credentials may be able to view the content on the page. You can password protect your pages from the native WordPress Password Protected option described in our tutorial on adding pages to WordPress. Among the downsides is that there is no automation, in other words you will have to provide the credentials manually to each user.

If you are looking for more robust options for turning WordPress into a community site, you can install a Membership plugin. It comes with elaborate options that you can set to your preference, including enhancing the registration process and personalizing the login screen and dashboard. One of these plugins is BuddyPress and you may read more about it in our tutorial.

How can we add more themes to WordPress?

Additional themes can be installed from the WordPress Admin panel > Appearance > Themes > Add New. You can check our tutorial for step-by-step instructions or watch the webinar from this moment, if you prefer to see the steps.

If we change themes and there are some leftover images and text of the first theme, how can we remove them and troubleshoot this issue?

This looks like a development question, related to the specific site setup, but generally changing your theme should not affect your image and text content because the latter is added by you, while the theme is only responsible for the overall appearance of your site.

If you are referring to demo/imported content from the previous theme that you don’t need, you can either delete it manually from your posts/pages/media library or if you want to start literally from scratch,  you can delete WordPress, reinstall it from Site Tools and apply the new theme.

Can I embed code from another site for my contact form?

You can copy and embed code from a different site into WordPress, but this usually requires advanced coding skills to configure properly. Most of the time, it’ll be easier to check if the other site offers a plugin for better integration. 

Should I ask for the contact plugin from the email provider I will use?

The actual contact form setup depends on the email provider you’ve chosen. If you are using a business email provider (SiteGround offers business email service on all hosting plans at no additional cost), it’s likely that they do not offer a contact form plugin as it’s not within their scope. This is the more common scenario and what you can do is download and use a free third-party contact form plugin from the WordPress repository and set it up with your business email address. The one that we recommended during the webinar was WPForms and it has detailed instructions on how to create a contact form and add it to a page.

On the other hand, there are email marketing platforms that come with a greater toolkit for managing emails, but usually have a corresponding cost. If you’re using such a service, then it probably offers a plugin that lets you easily integrate the contact form you create on its platform with your own site. You would find information about their plugin, instructions on how to use and get support directly on their website.

Do you recommend using Divi/Elementor? If so, could you do one of these workshops on how to best use it?

With WordPress, you get a built-in block editor that is capable of both formatting and editing content, and our Start creating content with WordPress webinar covers exactly that. Divi and Elementor are addons that work on top of this native framework with some caveats among which is the fact that each comes with its own learning curve, which will require additional time and effort to master. Certainly, you can use them, but it’s best to get a better understanding of the basic WordPress framework before using any addons, partly because these addons largely revolve around it as well.

Check out our YouTube channel for an introductory webinar on Divi.

When Your WordPress Site is Ready to Go Live

Is the HTTPS protocol enabled automatically for WordPress websites?

Securing your website with HTTPS protocol is essential. We install an SSL certificate automatically for free on all new websites as long as the website is resolving from our servers. WordPress requires an additional step required before your site loads with HTTPS – to reconfigure your urls and enforce the HTTPS protocol.

We do not automate this, as it is a webmaster decision that we cannot make on behalf of the owner of the site, but we have developed a tool that allows you to do it instantly. If you are already using the SiteGround Optimizer plugin, access its Settings > Environment settings > HTTPS Enforce. In rare occasions, some of your site elements (most often images) may still load with http leading to the so-called mixed content issue. If this happens and your site does not appear as fully secure, toggle also the Fix Insecure Content option. More details can be found in our article.

How do I connect Google Search Console to my site?

To add your site to Google, you will need to verify that you are its owner. This can be done in several ways, but one of the easiest methods, if you are a SiteGround customer, is to create a TXT record in your Site Tools DNS Zone Editor. You’ll be able to get the TXT record during the setup. 

Head to the Google Search Console website to get started and check out their official guide for step-by-step instructions.

Will you be doing a webinar on e-commerce on your site?

We’re passionate about eCommerce and we’re definitely considering it. Meanwhile, you may want to check out some of our previous webinars on using WordPress as an eCommerce tool, such as our step-by-step walkthrough on setting up WordPress as a store with WooCommerce.

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How to Keep Your Site Safe with Site Scanner Security Service (Webinar Video + Q&A)

q&a and webinar session explaining site scanner service

As hackers become more and more ingenious, protecting your website is an on-going process. To help you boost your website security even further, we’ve recently enhanced our Site Scanner addon service with new features and introduced a Premium plan for ultimate website safety. As many of you wanted to learn more about this service improvement, we held a live webinar with our Product and Technology Lead, Daniel Kanchev. He explained how the latest Site Scanner update will boost your site security and replied to your most frequently asked questions. If you did not have a chance to attend, you can now catch up with the recording of our Site Scanner live webinar on YouTube. We also summarized some of the answers to your most popular questions, as well the ones that we didn’t have enough time to answer during the live webinar.

Why should you protect your website in the first place?

Contrary to popular belief, all websites – big or small – are targets to hacker attacks. At the end of the day, attackers don’t care whether you have a brochure website or a big eCommerce store, whether you have a couple of hundred users or hundreds of thousands of visitors. Their goal is to maximize the impact of the attack, causing harm to both your business and your users. Some of the ills they cause include stealing credit card details, sending spam emails, hosting malware on your site, storing files on your account, etc.

Bottom line is that everyone can be a target and get affected. That’s why it’s important to know how to protect your website. At SiteGround, we’re fanatical about the security of the websites hosted on our platform. We’re taking a multi-level approach to secure your sites on infrastructure, server, and application levels, but since the security of a website is also the responsibility of every website owner, we’re constantly adding new features and services to help you in this process and save you time, effort, and money, because dealing with the aftermath of a website attack is time consuming, generates losses and requires certain technical skills.

Isn’t SiteGround taking care of my website security?

SiteGround has adopted a security-first approach in our services and we are taking a comprehensive care of the websites hosted on our platform. Here are some of the things we do:

General website security measures

  • Hosting account isolation makes sure that your site is secured and will not be affected in case another website on the same server gets hacked. It isolates your website from all other websites. If another client’s website gets hacked, this won’t affect your website. It’s good to keep in mind, though, that multiple applications within the same website (e.g. in different folders, or subdomains of the same website) will need some more attention, as they share the same isolated protected space. Hacking one of them might lead to exploiting the other application as well. Therefore, it’s a good idea to protect all your sites with strong passwords, and our SiteGround Security plugin for WordPress websites, for example.
  • Web Application Firewall (WAF) rules, being written by our security experts, prevent your site from being hacked due to a security hole in a popular plugin, theme, etc. We write such smart firewall rules for a really big percentage of WordPress plugins, themes and other applications.
  • Smart AI anti-bot system analyzes all servers, websites and traffic, and blocks illegitimate website requests, or shows a CAPTCHA, when it’s not 100% sure the requests are legitimate. Our AI anti-bot system also takes care of brute-force attacks.
  • Geographically distributed backups to have your data safely available at another location, in case something happens to your server and data center.
  • 24/7 server monitoring of the servers by our experienced system administrators to prevent security attacks, mitigate DDOS, and react in a timely manner against any known or unknown threat.

WordPress-specific website security measures

  • We offer automatic WordPress core and plugin updates to make sure your website is up-to-date and secure.
  • We have developed a free WordPress security plugin available to clients and non-clients alike – the SiteGround Security plugin. It allows you to put additional layers of security to your website and application.

Why do you need our Site Scanner security service then?

Even with all of the above security measures in place, there is always a chance that your site can be hacked by an attacker who has found a way to gain access to it.

Let’s imagine you’re connected to a public wifi network and you’re accessing your FTP account from it. If the hacker is on the same wifi network and it’s an open network, they can sniff the traffic and see your username and password. This is only one of the numerous examples of how attackers can “enter” the backdoor of your website.

That’s why our Site Scanner is useful – even if something happens to your site, it’ll notify you about the issue and you’ll be able to react, as it:

  • Checks regularly for websites threats and detects malware
  • Sends you timely threat alerts and notifications
  • Gives you tools for reaction, if your site is under attack (NEW)

Site Scanner is a great add-on to everything else we do, because it gives you visibility and control, if something suspicious is going on with your website, and provides you with a mechanism for a timely reaction to limit the scope of an attack.

FAQs on how Site Scanner works to protect your website

With the latest Site Scanner update, we offer two different Site Scanner plans – Basic and Premium that provide your website with various security features. Here you’ll find the answers to the most frequently asked questions about these features:

How often does Site Scanner run?

Both versions of the Site Scanner security service run daily scans of the crawlable URLs, while the Premium version includes automated daily scans of the files uploaded for that website.

Does Site Scanner scan the subdomains as well, or only the main website?

The part of Site Scanner that opens up the website in a browser and browses through pages works for the domain name for which you ordered the service. If you ordered a Site Scanner for yourname.com, then it will scan pages on this website. If you have subdomains like blog.yourname.com, they won’t be scanned by Site Scanner in this way – the service will only open the main website in a browser and scan through it.

On the Site Scanner Premium plan, the file scans will work for all the subdomains you have as part of this website. That’s because from a folder structure point of view, all the public HTML folders (the web root folders of the websites) are in one site.

Can Site Scanner scan files, as well as index.php, .htaccess, .txt? How does it work with old HTML sites?

No matter if it’s a PHP, .html, CSS, JavaScript, Python, Pearl, Go, or another type of file, the file scan will be performed. Our Site Scanner scans and looks for malicious patterns through the whole file system, no matter what type of files are in the folders.

If you have an HTML site, chances are that you will not be a target of an attack so often in comparison to a dynamic website; yet, HTML websites can still be hacked and malicious code can be inserted in the HTML. For example, if you have an index.html, someone can inject malicious JavaScript in those html pages, but Site Scanner will detect those.

Does Site Scanner affect website speed or CPU usage?

Site Scanner is lightweight and consists of two main things. The first one is the scanning from a browser perspective, and it runs on a different infrastructure, not on your server. Every day, it opens your website and browses through some pages, generating about 10 or 15 page hits per day which is quite minimal and can be ignored. Second, there are the file scans and the file upload scans. These are things that run on your hosting server, but they’re lightweight and consume very little CPU time. Thus, neither website loading speed, nor CPU usage are affected by Site Scanner.

Is Site Scanner white-labeled?

If you’re reselling services, your end users will see the Site Scanner interface inside Site Tools (it’s white-labeled in that way), but they will not get the email reports. These reports will be delivered to the owner of the website only (the SiteGround client that owns the website). Your clients will also be able to use the quarantine option, they will be able to see the history of scans, as these are also white-labeled.

How to activate Site Scanner?

You can simply log in to your SiteGround Client Area > Marketplace > Hosting services > Additional services and select Site Scanner. You will then see the comparison table between the Basic and Premium plans to choose from, along with their respective prices.

Site Scanner vs. SiteGround WordPress Security plugin

Site Scanner protects your website by detecting threats, attacks and vulnerabilities, sends you notifications, and gives you tools to react. The SiteGround Security plugin on the other hand gives you the ability to increase the level of security of your WordPress website by placing more firewall rules, e.g. you can enable 2FA, block an IP address that is trying to access your website too many times, etc. 

While the plugin increases the security of your WordPress website, Site Scanner works for non-WordPress websites as well. If you have a WordPress website, we recommend that you get the plugin to boost your site security and also get Site Scanner to have a peace of mind that if something happens, you will be notified, able to react easily through the Site Scanner interface and do it on time.

Does 2FA work for the content users on WordPress?

In the SiteGround Security plugin, 2FA can only be enabled for users with elevated privileges, such as administrators, publishers, editors, etc. Once you enable 2FA, these users would have to fill in a token, generated on their Google Authenticator application, to be able to proceed with the login process.

We surely recommend enabling 2FA for your registered users. The only thing that you need to keep in mind is that this might require you to spend some more time supporting end users, when they don’t have access to their phone/email address.

At the end of the day, it depends on your business – if you want your clients to have easy access to your website and to the information you provide, it doesn’t make much sense to enable 2FA. If the website provides access to confidential information that should be protected, then it makes a lot of sense to enable 2FA for the end users of the website.

Does SiteGround have something similar to the “Limit Login Attempts” blacklist feature and how effective is it?

We have this feature in the SiteGround Security plugin and it has proven effective for preventing brute-force attacks.

Can you use Site Scanner and SiteGround Security plugin, if your website is hosted elsewhere?

Our Site Scanner service can be used only for websites that are hosted on our platform. However, the SiteGround Security plugin can be used for any WordPress website, regardless of your web hosting provider, so installing it is the least you can do for your WordPress website security.

What is the best way to prevent visitors or bots from sending emails that appear to come from the domain of your website?

When attackers forge the ‘From’ email address, that’s called email spoofing. There is no way to completely prevent that, but you can restrict it. To do that, you need to specify in the DNS zone of each of your domains which mail servers/IPs are authorized to send emails on behalf of that domain by creating these DNS records: SPF, DKIM, DMARC. In this way, the mail servers of the recipients will be able to better distinguish if the emails are legitimate ones, which were sent from your mailboxes, or phishing attempts.

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Content Delivery Networks and SiteGround CDN Explained (Webinar Q&A + Video)

SiteGround CDN webinar questions and answers

Your website speed is a crucial part of your online success. To help you optimize your website loading time even further, we recently launched our own SiteGround CDN for our clients. Since many of you were curious about this in-house solution, we organized a live webinar with our Product and Technology Lead to answer the most common questions about our latest speed-boosting CDN service, available for free with each of our hosting plans as a Basic version, and as a paid upgrade Premium version. Here are the answers to the frequently asked questions by our webinar audience, as well as to those that we didn’t have the time to answer during the live session.

What is a CDN?

Every website lives on a server somewhere around the world. For example, SiteGround offers several data center locations in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia, which you can choose from when purchasing our web hosting services. When your website visitors open your website, they connect to the server that hosts your website. The closer your visitors are to your host server, the faster your website loads, and the better their user experience. However, the purpose of a website is to be accessible and fast from every point of the world, 24/7/365. For this purpose, a CDN exists.

What does CDN mean? It’s a content delivery network that caches parts of your website or the entire website and distributes it on servers that are closer to your visitors. Basically, it keeps copies of your website in many locations around the world. Thus, if you have an active CDN, every time a user visits your site, it will be loaded from a location that’s the closest to them instead of loading it from the origin server. As a result, a CDN service tremendously reduces page loading times and speeds up your website.

What are the benefits of using a CDN for your website?

Websites with international visitors

If your website has a lot of international traffic, it will be distributed well among different CDN locations. For example, when we launched our SiteGround CDN in locations where we didn’t have data centers, the response time for end users improved drastically – between 6 and 8 times for some websites, and even 10 times for others. Currently, SiteGround has 14 CDN locations all over the world (including the newest CDN location in Sao Paulo, Brazil, as well as our new data center and CDN location in Madrid, Spain) that optimize website performance for international visitors.

Websites with users in remote areas

In many locations around the world, people do not have access to fast internet. Thus, a CDN is very beneficial for users in remote areas, where the internet connection is not so good. When they want to load a website, they will be connected to a server which is closer to their location and thus the website will load faster.

Websites that change content frequently

A CDN caches your website content on a server close to your site visitors and delivers this cached version to them every time they visit your site. So the period you want the CDN to keep a cache of your files is important. If you set your CDN to keep the cached copies for too long – for example, one month – but you make changes to your site frequently within this timeframe, then they won’t be displayed live until you clear the cache manually. Similarly, if you set the cache time to be too short, then it will pretty much not be working as it should be, because the idea behind it is to store a cached version for a particular period of time. Therefore, it’s good to choose a period of time that will suit your site depending on how frequently you intend to make changes to it. For instance, SiteGround CDN cache time to live is set by default to 12 hours, and you can easily customize cache time to live to your own needs on the Premium version.


You also need to consider your website software application. For example, for WordPress websites, we have the SiteGround Optimizer plugin which connects to WordPress in such a way that when you make changes to your site (e.g., change a post or theme, install a plugin, etc.), the plugin detects those changes in real time, it connects to our CDN and flushes only the respective pages that have been changed. This is super handy! For any other type of CMS/application that you may use on your site, we honor the standard cache headers of your application. If your application allows you to set a certain amount of time for caching your pages and resources, then our CDN will honor that time.

CDN Benefits for websites with no international traffic

Even websites with no international traffic will benefit from using a CDN. For instance, if your business is in the U.S., you may have website visitors from the East coast, from the West coast and the central states. If you have a US-based website with us, it will be hosted in our data center in Iowa. In this case a visitor from New York for example will have to wait some more time compared to other users, if you don’t have a CDN enabled. Switching on our CDN service that offers several CDN locations in the US  will make your website load much faster for all US-based users. A similar case scenario applies to pretty much all the rest of the continents in the world.

How does SiteGround CDN compare to third-party services?

Compared to a third-party provider, SiteGround CDN offers many benefits for your website, because it is a service developed around three main pillars:

Easy-to-use

Let’s assume you’re using a third-party CDN provider that’s not integrated with your hosting provider’s services. Then, you’ll need to manage the hosting from one place and configure the CDN settings from another place which often may cause issues. What is more, you’ll have to apply different configurations on your own, depending on the CDN provider you use. For example, in certain cases, when you enable a specific CDN provider, you need to go and reconfigure all of your images to be loaded from specific URLs, in order for those images to be loaded from the CDN.

Therefore, we built our SiteGround CDN in a way that doesn’t need much configuration to be enabled. In fact, you just click one button and it starts working. What is more, it is super easy to use. We’ve given you the smart defaults and from then on you can change some of the things depending on your website needs with just a few clicks. Our CDN allows you to enable it without technical knowledge required, as well as use and change its functionalities hassle-free, with a click of a button.

Blazingly-fast

Another benefit of our CDN is that it makes your website load blazingly-fast because it’s based on the same cloud network which our hosting services are based on – the Google Cloud network. What is more, by utilizing this network, data travels securely through it. Using the same private network allows us to improve website performance and offer fast website loading speed.

In-house built

  • Safety net for issues

Usually, a lot of website owners use a CDN service. If something goes wrong with this service, their whole website and/or business depends on it. Therefore, we believe it’s important that we have full control over any potential issues that may arise and thus, we built our SiteGround CDN in-house. Since it’s an in-house built product, our support team will be able to fix a potential issue with it, as it is a core service we offer.

  • Room for expansion

There is always room for improvement and when the time comes for a new feature or our clients require a new functionality, we’ll be able to add them, as we’ve already built the service ourselves and know its technical specifics. We will consider and evaluate feature requests based on the business case and the feature type. What is more, we’ll be able to do it in a timely manner, as we’ve built the whole CDN for a year and a half (including the research phase). This gives us the confidence that we can expand the service as much as we want to.

Do you need to first disable other CDNs?

In the general use case scenario, it’s enough to have the domain pointed to the SiteGround Central DNS and enable SiteGround CDN. In this way, the DNS will route the requests to our CDN, even if you have Cloudflare enabled, for example. However, in some cases, the apps are configured to use CDN subdomains for static resources, for example, or in other custom CDN setups, it would be better to disable the other CDN and enable only SiteGround CDN.

Can you use SiteGround CDN with our SiteGround Optimizer plugin for WordPress?

A lot of you already use our top-rated SiteGround Optimizer plugin for your WordPress sites. Since the plugin offers multiple website caching benefits, resulting in optimized WordPress website performance, we get a lot of questions about how that would work with our CDN. One of the perks that both of these tools were developed in-house by our team, is that they are designed to be compatible and complement each-other. For example, if you have SiteGround CDN enabled, purging the cache from the SiteGround Optimizer will purge the cache both on the CDN and your origin server. This is true for every type of our CDN plan. Keep in mind that this will not be working for combinations with other CDN providers, i.e. the SiteGround Optimizer plugin won’t flush the cache on another CDN provider.

Website Caching and SiteGround CDN

Is it best to use several of your options or is CDN alone enough?

Your website would be optimized for the best performance, if you have Premium CDN with the following features enabled: Advanced dynamic caching and “Always online” mode to ensure that the CDN edges will serve cached copies of your pages, if there’s a problem with the site on the origin server. What is more, when hosted with us, our Dynamic cache feature will be enabled by default for your site. If you’re using WordPress for your website, you can also take advantage of our SiteGround Optimizer plugin which offers powerful caching options that complement the rest of the above-mentioned features.

Is dynamic content cached statically or is it computed at the CDN edge?

Dynamic cache means that after the PHP on the origin server processes the PHP request and generates the HTML, the origin server sends this HTML as a response and the HTML itself is cached on the CDN edge servers. The default cache time to live (TTL) on the CDN edges is set at 12 hours. However, you can always change the cache TTL from your application or .htaccess file. Alternatively, if you have the SiteGround CDN Premium, you can customize your cache TTL with just a few clicks.

What happens to sites that pull data into the site real time, e.g. a real estate site?

The answer to that question would depend on whether you want to pull the data each time, or pull the data and then cache it. If you want to pull and cache the data, it’s better to use our Premium CDN with dynamic cache. However, if you want to pull the data from the remote source on each request without caching it, and to deliver the freshly pulled data to your client, then you don’t necessarily need dynamic cache.

What is and isn’t delivered by the CDN local node?

If you use the free CDN, only your static files will be delivered from the CDN edge cache. If you use Premium CDN, you can also have dynamic cache. This caching logic is similar to the SiteGround hosting server’s cache logic. Just like it is on the SiteGround hosting server, logged in users, carts, checkout pages and others are bypassed by the cache. What is more, if you’re using WordPress, you can also download the SiteGround Optimizer plugin to exclude specific pages from the cache.

Does it matter for the CDN, if the website is WordPress or not WordPress content-based?

The simple answer to this question is no, the CDN is respecting the cache-control headers and you can pass such headers to control the CDN cache, no matter what application you’re using. The cache files generation and manipulation works the same way for every application.

However, for WordPress sites we do more and automate cache flushing for example. Certain WordPress pages are excluded by default too. We do advise WordPress users to go for the Premium CDN combined with the WordPress Optimizer plugin.

How quickly does a cached page update over the CDN when a page is updated?

If you’re using WordPress with our SiteGround Optimizer plugin, you can take advantage of all caching features and purging options, such as “Purge cache” or “Auto-purge” from the plugin. If you’re not a WordPress+SiteGround Optimizer user, there won’t be an auto-purge, so you’ll need to purge the cache from your Site Tools > CDN section. The cache purge usually happens immediately but in some cases, you might need to allow 30 seconds for the cache to be purged on all CDN edges.

How to choose between SiteGround Free CDN with each hosting plan & Premium CDN Version

Can you touch on the difference between free version and premium version?

Our SiteGround CDN is an in-house built solution that comes with each of our hosting plans completely free of charge. The free plan allows you to take advantage of different functionalities, such as caching of your website static content; up to 10 GB bandwidth CDN traffic per month; immediate initiation of purge of all cached resources for your website (the cache purge usually happens immediately, but in some cases you might need to allow 30 seconds to purge the cache on all edges); development mode to temporarily suspend caching, make changes to cacheable content and see those changes right away.

What is more, SiteGround CDN also comes with a Premium version that offers even more benefits for your website. The Premium plan allows for advanced dynamic caching; unlimited CDN traffic; activation of the CDN for all your domains (including subdomains and parked); custom time to live for you to choose for how long website resources are cached; “always online” feature that will keep delivering the already cached pages, in case your website starts returning errors.

What happens if you exceed the traffic quota on the Basic plan?

As mentioned above, the traffic quota on the Basic plan is limited to 10 GB per month. If you reach that limit, the Free CDN will automatically stop working. Yet, 10 GB is enough for all the small to medium-sized businesses hosted with us, because that was one of the conclusions during the SiteGround CDN Beta period. If your website makes more traffic than that, you’ll definitely need to upgrade to the Premium version.

How to set up SiteGround CDN?

The setup of SiteGround CDN is easy – you can enable it with the click of a button from your Site Tools > Speed > CDN section.

How will this process affect the existing DNS entries?

In order to use our CDN, you need to be using our central DNS service. To do that, you need to make sure that your domain is pointing to our name servers: ns1.siteground.net & ns2.siteground.net. Read some more information on how to change the name servers of your domain. Why do we need to be in control of the whole DNS zone for your domain name? So that we know exactly how to configure the service without breaking anything else, such as Microsoft Office 365, or Google Workspace, or a similar service. 

What will we do? We’ll only change the DNS A records for your domain name and for www.yourdomainname.com. Thus, by enabling the CDN, we’ll change the IP address to which your domain name resolves, but other than that, there won’t be any other changes. All the traffic for your domain name and for www.yourdomainname.com will be routed to the closest CDN location, but no other related services should be affected. That’s the perk of us controlling all these services, such as web hosting, DNS part, and CDN part – we can guarantee to some extent that we will not break other connected services.

Note: If you are migrating your DNS management to SiteGround’s Central DNS please make sure that you manually create all needed DNS records via the Site Tools interface before actually pointing your domain name to ns1.siteground.net and ns2.siteground.net.

Do I have to run my server to www or can I do it without www?

There’s no need to convert your website to a www version (if it’s not), as SiteGround CDN works either way.

Does the CDN give you any extra server resources?

If you use the SiteGround CDN, it will allow you to better utilize the existing resources of your hosting plan. This means that extra resources will not be added but your current hosting plan will probably be able to handle a bit more traffic.

What is the best way to set up SiteGround CDN for client sites?

The setup process is a piece of cake. As mentioned above, as long as the domain is using our name servers, it’s a matter of a few clicks in your Site Tools.

Can you enable the CDN once for all sites you run?

If you have more than one website, the SiteGround CDN should be enabled separately per each individual website from the SiteGround Site Tools panel.

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Ecommerce Terms and Conditions Protect Your Online Store – Webinar

Does your online business have Terms and Conditions (“T&Cs”) document? If you haven’t established one for your store yet, it’s good to dedicate some time and specify your T&C because they are crucial for protecting you from potential liabilities and misunderstandings. In the case of e-commerce, that’s a vital step that you shouldn’t miss as you handle sensitive client information.

What are Terms & Conditions?

Terms and Conditions (also known as Terms of Use or Terms of Service) allow you to set the way in which your product, service or content may be used, in a legally binding way.

While they cannot be used to avoid complying with applicable law (e.g., GDPR), they protect you for almost everything else and can be used to set favorable conditions for your business.

Who needs Terms & Conditions?

Almost everyone from Bloggers to E-commerce, SaaS, and Enterprise businesses – as they are both practical and preventative. They often contain legally mandatory information which makes them not just practical, but necessary in some cases which brings us to e-commerce.

What’s the legally required information that applies in regards to e-commerce?

Under most countries’ consumer laws, in addition to the default required privacy disclosures, you’ll need to inform customers of the following:

  • Returns/Refund details;
  • Warranty/ Guarantee information (where applicable);
  • Safety information, including info on proper use (where applicable);
  • Terms of delivery of product/ service;
  • Identifying information such as a legal address and business name;
  • Industry-related legal disclosures;
  • Rights of consumers (such as withdrawal rights), where applicable;
  • Seller contact details (e.g., email address).

Note: In some cases, e.g., in the EU, where return and withdrawal specifics are not stated, the user is granted extended rights. So, for example, where the legal withdrawal/return time frame is 14 days, if you do not state this in your terms and conditions, the user is granted 14 days under the law. Likewise, if you do not specify who bears the return shipping cost, the cost falls to you by default.

How Terms & Conditions protect you?

Aside from helping you to comply with the law, terms also help you with handling user-related issues when they arise and – even more importantly – aid in preventing problems in the first place. They do this by setting a legally binding agreement between you and your users, on the subject of your rules for accessing/using your service.

  • In regards to protecting your business in a preventative way, be sure to include things like:
  • Disclaimers & limitation of liability
  • Shipping, processing and return rules
  • Account creation & termination conditions, accepted behavior
  • Setting your law of governance

How can I create legally valid Terms and Conditions to suit my specific business?

Iubenda’s Terms and Conditions Generator lets you easily generate and manage Terms and Conditions that are professional, customizable from over 100 clauses, available in 8 languages, drafted by an international legal team, and up to date with the main international legislations.

The solution is optimized for everything from e-commerce, and apps, to complex scenarios like marketplace and Affiliate scenarios. Read more about it here. We also have a 20% discount available for SiteGround users!

Watch the Webinar

To help you go through that process, we organized and held a webinar on the topic with our friends from Iubenda. Abbie Clement, Head of Content at Iubenda and Andrea Giannangelo, CEO of Iubenda, talked about how T&Cs protect your e-store, what you need to include in your T&C, and how their service can help you with that. You can watch the recording of the webinar below:

Special Discount

To make it even easier for you to start, we have set up a special discount for Iubenda’s services that you can quickly get from this link or by going to SiteGround’s Marketplace. You can find the coupon in your Client Area > Marketplace > Partner Perks.

Webinar Questions Recap

When you go to a website, and they ask you to “agree” to the Terms and Conditions, do they keep any proof that you agreed to it as proof?

Yes, this is often done. It is always a good idea to keep proof of any consent that users might give. There are several ways to keep track of this: one option is to do it manually, or you can use something like Iubenda’s Consent Solution, which records and stores proof of consent for each of your users. The solution comes with a dashboard from which you can review and manage these consents. For more information on this, please visit this page.

What should be included for a service business, such as а therapist, life coach, etc.? No products or shipping involved?

The T&Cs for this kind of service should, at the minimum, contain identifying information for the company, a description of the service, risk allocation, disclaimer and liability relation information is also important for this type of business. Also, if there exist any mandatory industry-related disclosures – it’s a good idea to also add them in your

Terms & Conditions. Do note, though, that product-based businesses and service-based businesses have different warranty and withdrawal requirements, so we invite you to read further here.

What are key items that need to be implemented through terms of use or privacy policies to be GDPR compliant?

GDPR compliance is covered by the Privacy Policy of a given website and not by the Terms & Conditions. At this link, you can find all the basic elements that need to be included (alternatively, this information is included and explained in the webinar recap video above).

How do we know what to include in T&C and how to word it? Can we add whatever we want? Go through a lawyer?

Some of Iubenda’s clients chose to work together with their lawyer when determining which clauses to add to their documents – and this is always a good idea. With that said, the Terms & Conditions Generator includes a guided set-up to id you in determining what’s needed for your site or app. Furthermore, Iubenda’s customer support staff are available via live chat or email to help you.

What are the available languages?

All of Iubenda’s solutions are available in 8 languages: English, Italian, German, French, Dutch, Russian, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese.

I have terms and conditions on my e-commerce site in the UK. I buy from a supplier that offers Dropship as well as wholesale. They have no terms and conditions on refunds of postage. With distance selling, I have to refund the original postage cost, if any, and the cost of goods if the customer returns the product as they don’t like it. But the supplier only returned my product cost, not the postage. Are the rules different for Dropship suppliers?

Dropshipping is a bit tricky because often, the customer cannot return the product directly to your supplier. One way to address this issue can be to state an alternative return address in your documents. Another solution can be to add in your T&Cs that the buyer pays for the shipping cost in cases where they return simply because they do not like the product.

Overall, when it comes to dropshipping, especially with overseas-based suppliers, it’s best to understand or set all terms before working with the supplier to avoid complications. Where you can’t do this, setting favorable terms and conditions document can help – provided that they do not conflict with applicable law.

How does a potential buyer who visits an e-commerce store agree to the terms and conditions stated on the site? If the visitor does not agree, can he/she still purchase from the site?

One way to implement an “agreeing” action can be to add a checkbox and statement linking to your terms and conditions at various points throughout your site (e.g., on a sign-up form). How you chose to set this up is entirely up to you – however, it is best practice to additionally link your terms and conditions from the footer of all pages of your site so that it’s always easily accessible to users.

Regarding purchases, in most cases, websites will not allow users to purchase without first agreeing to the terms and conditions. The terms can be linked at the point of payment so that the user can read and agree (by checking a checkbox, for example) before signing up or purchasing.

If the company is registered in one country but offers online services to another, to which law should we comply to?

A good general rule of thumb is to comply with the laws of the country in which you base your operations, as well as those of the country your site targets. You can read more on this topic here.

Does your Consent Solution integrate with WordPress?

Yes, it does. Here’s a guide on how to install Iubenda’s WordPress plugin.

When we work with kids and parents, what should be considered?

Regarding kids, there are enhanced requirements. The following resources will shed some light on this topic:

How can I apply the SiteGround/Iubenda discount code to the business bundle?

You need to click the link we have provided, and you are automatically redirected to Iubenda’s website. Hover over “Products and Services” and click on “Pricing” from the drop-down menu, there you need to choose “Bundles” and pick the Business Plan. The full price for 1 year is $99, and with the discount applied a bit less than $80 per year ($7 per month). The license for this also includes access to the Pro version of the Privacy and Cookie Policy Generator.

Is there a developer package, or would my clients need to purchase their own license for their individual site?

Yes, you can set up an account and purchase a multi-license subscription and resell to your clients yourself, otherwise, you can join Iubenda’s affiliate program and earn 30% on each purchase while giving a 10% discount to your clients.

On your site, you talk about a “license” is that per website? So 1 website = 1 license?

Yes, one license is needed for every website or app in 1 language. So if you have 1 website available in 2 languages, then you need to buy 2 licenses to create all the documents you need. (Note: Multi-license plans are available which offer huge discounts where more than 4 licenses are needed).

Do you give your clients a choice if they want to add terms and conditions to their site?

There are multiple integration options that include a simple embedding that allows adding a widget to the footer of your website, having a direct link that you can add anywhere on your site or app. Alternatively, you can also directly embed your document into the body of your web pages or via API. For further details, see this post.

Do you have a T&C generator for tour companies?

Iubenda’s solution works for any business – we cover everything from the most common scenarios to the most complex cases. You can read more about it here.

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