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(New) SiteGround Email Marketing tool to boost your business growth

girl at laptop using SiteGround email marketing tool

Since day one, SiteGround has been all about helping our customers create high-performing websites to achieve their goals. We’ve been in your corner, listening to your feedback and constantly improving our hosting services to give you lightning-fast loading times, rock-solid security, and a seamless user experience.

But here’s the thing: while absolutely essential, having a website is only the beginning of your online success journey. The full potential of your site lies in the ability to connect and engage with your audience. To help you achieve that, we’re excited to introduce the new SiteGround Email Marketing tool. Designed with simplicity and efficiency in mind, this powerful addition to our suite of services will help you talk directly to your audience, driving growth and success for your business.

The growth potential of email marketing

Email marketing delivers remarkable results for professionals and businesses of all shapes and sizes. It’s a proven and direct way to effectively reach your audience, build credibility, increase brand recognition, improve sales, and boost website traffic, to name a few. Take it from us; we’ve been using email marketing forever and have seen its tremendous effect first hand. It has stood the test of time and emerged as the most reliable form of online communication, surpassing even social media in effectiveness.

Affordable, yet super effective

Email marketing has proven to be a powerful and budget-friendly tool for driving sales and revenue. Let’s talk numbers. Litmus, one of the most widely-used email testing tools, reports that the average return on investment (ROI) for email marketing is a staggering 4,200%. With minimum upfront investment, you can reach a large audience and enjoy amazing results. All you need is your content and a powerful, yet easy email marketing tool – like the SiteGround Email Marketing.

Direct channel to your leads and clients

When it comes to reaching your target audience, email marketing takes the lead. To paint you the picture, 90% of emails land directly in the intended recipients’ inboxes. In contrast, a mere 2% of Facebook followers are likely to see your post in their feed, according to a Forrester research. Email paves a direct line of communication with the people who genuinely want to hear from you, resulting in better conversion rates than other marketing channels.

A perfect fit for any project 

Email marketing may seem hard, but we promise – it’s easier than you think. You don’t have to be a pro in content creation – you just need to know your goals and that’s what you’re already great at! Planning to share news about a new product with your customers, drum up some buzz with a special deal, or send out a roundup of your best blog posts? Email marketing is one of the most effective tools to use. It’s a great fit for any project and makes connecting with your audience a breeze.

SiteGround Email Marketing – built for your success

The SiteGround email marketing tool is designed to be incredibly user-friendly, so even beginners can create and send professional emails with ease. The tool is available out-of-the box and integrated in the SiteGround Client Area so that SiteGround clients can seamlessly manage their website and email campaigns all in one place. This means less time spent juggling multiple platforms and more time focusing on what truly matters: growing your business.

Let’s take a closer look at what the SiteGround Email Marketing tool has to offer.

Easy builder to create stunning emails

SiteGround Email Marketing tool

Easily create professional emails with our intuitive builder. Choose from our best layouts or start from scratch, add your content, and make it yours. Plus, our built-in responsiveness ensures your emails look great on any device, from desktops to smartphones and tablets.

Campaign management built to drive growth 

Campaign management built to drive growth 

SiteGround Email Marketing makes managing email campaigns easy and efficient. Create campaigns with a click and use our intuitive email builder to craft the perfect message. Choose between reaching all your subscribers or targeting specific audience with customized Groups and add a personal touch with dynamic content variables. Preview and test your campaign before sending it to ensure everything works perfectly.

(NEW) Lead Generation plugin for WordPress to build and grow your email list

Want to grow your email list? Meet our Lead Generation plugin for WordPress, a new feature of our Email Marketing tool, designed to help you create and add sign-up forms to your website easily. With just a few clicks, you can integrate the plugin with your SiteGround Email Marketing account and watch as new subscribers grow your list. The best part? Every new sign-up will be automatically added to your contacts as a ‘Subscriber.’

Contact lists for optimized targeting

Contact lists for optimized targeting

Effortlessly import subscribers with CSV files and create interest groups for targeted messaging. Have complete control over individual profiles and maintain GDPR compliance. On top, our system automatically suppresses hard bounce email addresses to keep your list healthy and improve open and click rates.

Built-in analytics to improve conversions

Built-in analytics to improve conversions

Understand your campaign’s effectiveness and boost your results through our built-in analytics. Gain insight into important metrics such as open rate, click rate, bounce rate, interactions, and more to determine the most effective approach for your audience and increase conversions.

Start today and experience the power of email marketing 

Don’t miss out on the chance to boost your online success with SiteGround Email Marketing. Log in to your Client Area -> Marketplace -> Email Marketing and get advantage of a special introductory offer and test the tool’s incredible potential firsthand. It’s time to unlock the full potential of your online presence and achieve the growth you’ve been dreaming of.

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Migrate to Google Analytics 4

the new features of google analytics 4

This July 1, 2023, Google permanently retires the application that has accompanied us in our web analytics for the last ten years: Universal Analytics. In doing so, it concludes a migration process that began three years ago, with the introduction of Google Analytics 4 in 2020. Although at that time it was not yet called that.

The change has caused an earthquake in the digital ecosystem since both versions are not compatible with each other, and switching from one to another involves a process, misnamed migration, which can sometimes be complex.

Indeed, Google Analytics 4 does not allow the import of historical data stored in Universal Analytics, which can be strategically important for those who need to perform comparative analysis with previous periods. For example, the case with an ecommerce that needs to contrast the results of this year’s Black Friday campaign with those of previous years.

To avoid this problem, the Google team insisted over the last two years that we install the new GA4 in parallel to UA, thus overlapping both measurements. As was predictable, many people did not carry out the integration until the last moment. Some have not even done it after the blackout.

In the following lines, we will try to find a solution to this situation.

What changes does GA4 entail?

GA4 represents a radical change in the way data from your digital assets is acquired and processed. There are several very important differences compared to previous versions.

Web + app

Google Analytics 4 allows tracking and analysis of both websites and mobile applications. This means you can gain insights and metrics on the performance of your website as well as the usage of your mobile app, all in one place. This is especially useful in a world where many businesses have a presence on both the web and mobile platforms.

All is about events

One of the main features of GA4 is that it is based on an event-centric model. In previous versions of Google Analytics, the focus was primarily on page views. However, in GA4, all data is collected and organized into events. An event can be any action that users take on your website or app, such as clicking a button, playing a video, or submitting a form. This allows for a higher level of flexibility and customization in data analysis.

Machine learning

GA4 leverages the power of machine learning to provide more detailed and valuable insights. It uses machine learning algorithms to perform advanced data analysis and uncover hidden patterns and trends. This helps identify opportunities and challenges for your business such as high-value audience segments, revenue predictions, and specific user behaviors. The artificial intelligence and machine learning in GA4 also allow for the creation of custom models to predict future user behavior.

Cross-platform and cross-device tracking

GA4 has an enhanced ability to effectively distinguish users who browse your site from different devices or browsers. It can now tell if the same user accessed your website from their mobile browser in the morning, through the office computer in the afternoon, and on your business app from their tablet at night. User accounting is thus more accurate, and we can fully trace the customer journey.

Data-driven attribution

GA4 offers more accurate and comprehensive data-based attribution compared to previous versions. With data-based attribution, you can better understand how different marketing channels and user actions contribute to your business goals. You can see which traffic sources and marketing tactics generate more conversions and make informed decisions about resource allocation. The attribution of responsibility for each marketing action is much more precise and fair as it is distributed based on how effective it has been with each type of user, statistically speaking.

Should I install GA4?

The answer to this question is always “it depends.” If you’ve used Universal Analytics on your website, it seems reasonable to make the switch and collect data in GA4. However, this has its technical and legal implications.

As you may already know, the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, requires user permission to perform analytical processing of their data. This reason alone justifies the use of a cookie banner for any website whose potential target is not only the European Union, but also other countries like the United Kingdom, Japan, Argentina, Uruguay, Switzerland, Canada, some states in the U.S., and increasingly more countries around the world.

On the other hand, it’s very likely that for many of the people reading this article, server analytics will be sufficient, thus avoiding this small legal quandary.

Statistics on SiteGround

At SiteGround, we have an entire section in the Site Tools dedicated exclusively to statistics, where you’ll find very interesting information about your website.

In it, you can access useful information such as the volume of traffic your website receives, the countries of origin, the source of visits (search engines, social networks, other sites), your most viewed content or pages, and the technology used by your visitors (browser and operating system).

The collected information can be viewed both in line chart format to measure temporal evolution, as well as in bar charts or tables to consult absolute values.

The analysis periods are monthly, and the information is updated with a frequency much higher than that of Google Analytics, which can take up to 24 hours to consolidate its data.

The main aspect you should consider with these reports is that they are based on what is known as server logs, a type of data that does not discriminate between bots and human users. Therefore, the data volumes may not accurately represent the number of readers or customers of your online asset. In any case, the evolutionary information of the traffic, month by month, is very useful to understand the growth of your website and the content with the highest demand.

Alternatives to GA4

If the information from SiteGround’s statistics is not enough and you want to continue avoiding managing legal aspects related to user privacy, it is recommended that you install another general analytics solution like Matomo, or specific ones for WordPress like Fathom, Koko Analytics, or Simple Analytics, for example.

But if you want to conduct a thorough analysis of your site’s traffic and performance, understand how users interact with your content, identify the most effective traffic acquisition channels, or discover those elements with the greatest potential for improvement on your website, GA4 is the most comprehensive tool and the current industry standard. Moreover, there is already quite comprehensive official documentation, tons of guides on user blogs, and thousands of videos showing many of its advanced features.

How to install GA4

There are several ways to install GA4. All of them work similarly to how it was done with Universal Analytics. If you were already using this tool, the easiest way is to change the tracking code or the identifier from one to the other.

You will find the Measurement ID in Admin > Data Streams > Web Stream Details, and you will recognize it because it is a ‘G’ followed by a dash and a series of characters, for example, G-PSW1MY7HB4. This ID from the example is the web stream identifier of the Google Merchandise Store, a property that Google shares for demonstration purposes and that you can consult whenever you already have a Google user.

In this same space, a little further down, in the Google Tag section, you will find the View Tag Instructions section, where Google offers some recommendations on how to install the tracking code on your website, either through the Measurement ID that you obtained in the previous step, or through the complete script for a manual installation.

The most comprehensive formula for all those WordPress users who care about respecting the privacy of their visitors is to add the GA4 tracking script to their website through a cookie plugin. For example, GDPR Cookie Compliance has a section in its settings for third-party cookies where you can add it.

As soon as you complete and save the configuration (follow the official plugin documentation to make sure you don’t miss anything), your GA4 property will be tracking all those visits that accept the cookie policy of your website.

The future of GA4

Over the next few years, Google Analytics 4 will be present on millions of websites. Not only on those where its tracking code is installed, but also in hundreds of thousands of tutorials, manuals, tips, and courses.

You can be sure that Google Analytics will continue to be the standard and that its tool will continue to grow day by day. The current version still needs to be polished in many aspects, but changes and updates that increase its potential are published every week.

The closure of Universal Analytics should mean a reorientation to GA4 of the many resources it consumed, so it seems logical to think that the steps it will take in the coming times will be larger and more firm.

For those of us who have been working with it daily for many months, it is already a very useful resource that is difficult to tame but gives us a much broader and deeper view of our digital assets. We know that the learning curve is steep and that it is difficult to overcome resistance to change, but we are sure that if you give a little love to your Google Analytics 4, you will be getting sparks out of it in a few hours.

Have you tried it yet? What did you think? Have you encountered any problems? We would love to hear about your experience in the comments.

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Introducing SRS (Sender Rewrite Scheme) to Make Email Forwarding More Reliable Than Ever

forwarded email that goes to the recipients inbox

Email services have always been an integral part of SiteGround’s hosting offerings, and our customers heavily rely on them. Every day, we process hundreds of thousands of emails. Many of them are sent out by forwarders set on our servers by our clients. Ensuring the successful delivery of these forwarded emails can be more challenging than you think, as sender verification is not as straightforward as with direct emails.

With the introduction of our own Spam Protection system, we now have more options to enhance the handling of our outgoing email traffic. It allowed us to become one of the few hosting companies to implement Sender Rewrite Scheme (or Mail SRS) and thus significantly improve email forwarding delivery rates for our clients. Here are the details of how this new functionality works and how it benefits our users.

Why are forwarded emails harder to deliver?

Usually, when there is an incoming email, the receiving server tries to identify if the sending server is legitimate and if the email should be accepted. The purpose of this check is to prevent malicious senders from reaching your inbox (for example, a scam email pretending to be coming from your bank’s domain name). 

Domain names used for legitimate email sending need to have an SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record, that defines the IP addresses or hosts that are allowed (or not allowed) to send messages on behalf of this domain. 

In the Email Forwarding scenario, we have a Sender, who is sending an email to a destination address and after that, the destination address forwards the mail to its end recipient. This means that the end recipient is receiving an email coming from a “mediator” server, which might not be allowed to send messages on behalf of the sending domain, according to its SPF record.

This, based on the receiving servers’s policies, can result in mails being rejected or sent to your Spam folder due to SPF (Sender Policy Framework) failure.

How does SRS make email forwarding more reliable?

Sender Rewrite Scheme (or Mail SRS) is a mechanism that provides a solution in cases of email forwarding so that SPF failures can be avoided. This way legitimate forwarded mails can be successfully accepted from the receiving mail server.

SRS works by rewriting some of the metadata in the email messages after it’s passed the mediator server, “instructing” the destination mail server to check the SPF against the forwarding server, not the original sender’s domain. That way, the SPF check would pass because the forwarding server’s IP would match the sender’s address. Here is a real-life example of how this works:

Imagine a service you use (your bank, for example), sends an email to your business email address webmaster@yourdomain.com, which is hosted with SiteGround. The mail comes from your bank’s IP and its “from” address is billing@yourbank.com, for example – as these two are matching the SPF check passes and the mail is delivered to webmaster@yourdomain.com.

Now imagine that you would like to have this email forwarded from your business email  webmaster@yourdomain.com to your personal email name@gmail.com. 

If there is no SRS, Gmail will see an email sent from billing@yourbank.com but coming from a SiteGround IP.  As these two do not match, the SPF check will not pass and Gmail will probably deliver the mail to the Spam folder. 

If SRS is configured correctly, the “from” address will be changed to webmaster@yourdomain.com to match the SiteGround IP as its host. As these are matching, the SPF check will pass and you will receive the important email from your bank in your personal mailbox as well.

This makes SRS an important part of each mail server configuration for maintaining the efficiency and reliability of email forwarding services, ensuring that important communications are not mistakenly marked as spam or rejected due to SPF checks.

SRS Implementation Results 

We’re already observing a very positive impact on the deliverability of the forwarded mails after SRS was made available on our servers. Our data shows 0% SPF failures for all forwarded email messages going through our servers, proving incredible stability and reliability of our mail service and improving the reputation of our mail system addresses. Needless to say, all of this directly benefits the mail reputation of the domains of clients hosted on our servers as well. 

We believe that the mail Sender Rewrite Scheme is the best way to ensure trustworthy and reliable email services when it comes to email forwarding. Although it’s popular mainly in mail-specific providers and not so much in the majority of hosting companies, we’ve gone the extra mile to add this super useful and efficient mechanism to enhance the email experience of our clients even further.

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Discover Your Entrepreneurial Persona with Our Personality Quiz

discover your entrepreneurial persona

May marks National Small Business Week in the USA for the past 60 years now. It recognizes the importance of SMBs to the U.S. economy. This year at SiteGround we went beyond that first week, and dedicated the whole month of May to helping small businesses start, grow and succeed online with informative content and useful resources:

  • Email course that helps you start your business online with actionable challenges to master your business skill set in one month;
  • Free guide: Journey of an online buyer that helps you learn how to build and optimize your website to increase conversions, based on the modern online buyer’s journey;
  • Tips from top business experts that help you navigate through everything you need to manage yourself – from the must-have elements on your website to the fundamental marketing channels, and many more.

To wrap up the SMB month, we prepared a fun business personality quiz to help you discover your entrepreneurial spirit and find out who is your perfect business match.

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Answer a few witty questions on how you approach your work and business tasks in order to:

  • Find out your entrepreneurial alter ego

Which one of the 16 business personalities are you – a Visionary Entrepreneur that approaches work with thoughtfulness and imagination, a Devoted Perfectionist that is committed to hard work, or someone else? Take our quiz to get a full description of your business personality straight to your inbox.

  • Unlock and download your custom digital badge

Once you complete the quiz, you’ll also receive your custom digital avatar, free to download and share with your friends and fellow business partners. It will correspond to your work approach and be a nice addition to your social media profiles.

  • Discover your entrepreneurial “soulmate”

As a bonus, you’ll learn what are the three business personalities that you work best with. Share your results with friends to find out who is your perfect business match among your friends and fellow entrepreneurs.

TAKE THE QUIZ

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Celebrating 20 Years WordPress

wordpress 20th anniversary

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

A Shared Journey

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

Contributing to better WordPress

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

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

Bringing the WordPress community closer

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

Providing hosting expertise

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

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

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

> > VISIT PAGE

Our Continued Commitment

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

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

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New Data Center and CDN Point in Paris, France

Paris Data center and CDN point

We’re happy to announce that we’re expanding our data center and CDN network with a new location in Paris, France. Our new data center and CDN point will further increase the loading speed for French visitors of our clients’ websites that receive traffic from France.

New data center in Paris, France

Our new data center in Paris, France, is part of our data center infrastructure, powered by the premium Google Cloud platform. It ensures high redundancy and availability, fast connectivity, multi-layered security, and green-friendly service. We believe that our new data center will improve the experience of our customers even further. Here’s how:

What are the benefits of our new data center

The main benefit of our new data center in Paris is that it will improve the website loading speed of websites whose main traffic is from France. Having your website(s) hosted on a server closer to your main website audience shortens the distance between your website and its visitors, and thus speeds up its loading times.

This has a positive impact not only on your website speed, but on your visitors’ user experience as well. People are more likely to stay on your website, if it loads faster, and they tend to visit it again, if they had a good user experience. This in turn will lead to higher conversion rates as well.

How to move your website(s) to our new data center

If you would like to move any of your existing sites to our new data center in Paris, you could order their relocation in your Client Area > Marketplace > Hosting Services > Relocation. You can relocate each of your sites, hosted on a shared web hosting service, or your entire Cloud hosting account, if you are using Cloud hosting service.

From now on, all new sites created on StartUp, GrowBig and GoGeek plans by our French customers will be hosted by default in the new Paris data center for your convenience. Paris will be your default location for newly ordered Cloud hosting plans as well.

CDN Location in Paris, France

Our in-house built SiteGround CDN service provides multiple geographical locations around the world in order to optimize our clients’ websites loading speed. We’re now launching yet another location – a CDN point in Paris, which will significantly increase the loading speed of websites with traffic from France, both there and all over the world.

If you still haven’t activated our CDN service for your website(s), go ahead and enable it completely free of charge from your Site Tools > Speed > CDN.

With the launch of our new data center and CDN location in Paris, we hope that our customers will enjoy an even better hosting experience.

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

sustainability twitter chat

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

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

How do websites contribute to carbon emissions

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

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

How to measure your website’s carbon footprint

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

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

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

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

5 tips to reduce your website’s carbon footprint

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

Improve your website’s performance

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

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

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

  • Reduce the size of your images

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

  • Rethink how you use videos on your site

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

Optimize your website’s data transfer

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

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

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

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

Apply UX/UI optimizations

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

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

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

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

Adapt SEO practices

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

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

Choose a sustainable hosting partner

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

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

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

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

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

Wrap up

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

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

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

smb growth twitter chat

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

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

Essential steps when starting an online business

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

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

Create your small business website

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

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

Must-have elements on your website

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

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

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

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

Scale your online business

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fundamental marketing channels

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

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

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

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

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

Growing your mailing list

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

  • Create compelling content

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

  • Run social media campaigns

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

  • Implement exit intent

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

  • Add content upgrades

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

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

  • Do on-site retargeting

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

  • Run on-site follow-up campaigns

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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Adopt Sustainable Website Practices with our Earth Day Bingo

earth day bingo SiteGround

Earth Day is a good occasion to recognize that we all have a responsibility to protect our Planet – even though that’s something we should do every day, we usually take it for granted. So we wanted to use this as a reminder to adopt sustainable living and website management practices and reduce our impact on the environment by making small changes in our daily lives.

Set yourself up for the challenge by completing our Earth Day Bingo!

earth day bingo SiteGround

Manage More Efficient and Sustainable Websites 

As a website owner, it’s crucial to recognize the impact your website has on the environment. Here are a few tips to help you manage a sustainable website:

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Spring Clean Your Website for Stronger Security and Faster Speed

spring clean your website for better security

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

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

Clean up your WordPress website

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

Quick website security tips

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

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

  • Clean up your user roles and permissions

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

  • Enforce strong and secure passwords

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

  • Clean up unused plugins and themes

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

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

Easy-to-follow website speed advice

  • Clean up your WordPress database

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

  • Compress large images

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

  • Minify CSS and JavaScript files

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

  • Preload your fonts

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

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

Scan your website thoroughly

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

Apply powerful website performance optimizations

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

  • Make sure your PHP is fast

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

  • Leverage caching

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

  • Use CDN

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

Check your website security and speed status regularly

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

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

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

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

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

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