Now, we’re telling the story of Yana – the unstoppable force behind SiteGround’s cyber security measures. As our Information Security Officer, Yana’s passion for protecting our community is unmatched. But there’s more to her than meets the eye – athlete at heart with a pinch of love for painting and gaming, let’s dive into her story.
Join us as we embark on another chapter of our ON & OFF THE CLOCK series, where we celebrate some of the remarkable women of SiteGround. You already met Sophia and Velina whose curious and creative natures know no bounds.
Today, we’re thrilled to introduce you to Dobromira, fondly known as Dobby – a DevOps engineer who fearlessly navigates the predominantly male-dominated profession with her inquisitive mind and problem-solving skills.
We started our ON & OFF THE CLOCK series with a heartfelt gratitude to the dazzling women of SiteGround who bring boundless creativity and expertise to our team and community. First, we introduced you to Sophia – one of SiteGround’s web & graphic designer powerhouses that brings our content to life.
Now, we want you to meet Velina – one of our human resources experts who carries an adventurous spirit with her wherever she goes.
SiteGround has been certified as the best employer in Bulgaria for 2022 by ARS Bulgaria, which conducted the survey with the exclusive partnership of the global company Kincentric. Kincentric is an organization with over 50 years of experience in employee engagement research. This is SiteGround’s fourth certification under this methodology. This year, 32 companies competed, and only four received the certificate.
The Kincentric Best Employer program honors the best employers in the world based on the evaluation of their employees, as reported by an independent internal survey. It measures the four factors that decades of data collection show distinguish successful companies from the rest. These are employee engagement, business adaptability to innovation and customer needs, top and middle management and good people development practices. Over the past five years, 4,000 organizations worldwide have examined their HR practices using this methodology.
“For us, as an employer, the most important recognition is the evaluation of our team, the people of SiteGround, because they are the basis of everything we do and achieve as a business,” said Valentina Kozhouharova, HR Manager of SiteGround.
According to the results of the survey, employee engagement at SiteGround is 88%, which is above the average for the IT industry in Bulgaria. Nearly 91%, say the company’s work environment encourages diversity of talent and different ways of thinking.
“We congratulate SiteGround for their certification as The best employer in Bulgaria,” said Rumyana Boseva, CEO of ARS Bulgaria, Kincentric’s exclusive partner for Bulgaria. “The Kincentric methodology represents organizations’ outstanding achievements in creating a good work environment, positive culture and sustainable business results. SiteGround stands out from the rest with its strong employee and senior management commitment and focus on developing talent.”
SiteGround has three offices in Sofia, Plovdiv and Stara Zagora. They employ 500 people, and the company continuously invests in the development of their expert skills and professional competences, as well as in creating a positive and motivating work environment in which people feel free to develop their full potential. During the last year – from the beginning of 2022 until now, nearly 16% of our employees were promoted to higher positions.
SiteGround also offers many benefits, including “Short Fridays”, its own restaurant and barista, its own gym, additional health insurance, annual medical check-ups, psychologist, massages, sports cards, unique office environment, and various traditional initiatives to support the physical, emotional, personal and professional development of the employees.
March is here, and with it comes an amazing celebration of womanhood – International Women’s Day. This year, we’re turning our spotlight to the incredible women at SiteGround who bring professionalism and personality to everything they do. We believe that a supportive workplace that values each individual leads to a ripple effect of positive energy that extends far beyond the workspace. In our series, “ON & OFF THE CLOCK,” we’ll be showcasing the stories of some of the women who have been instrumental in SiteGround’s growth, sharing their experience of navigating work and life with a smile.
Meet Sophia – SiteGround’s web & graphic designer powerhouse who brings creativity everywhere.
As a small business owner, your website performance is crucial for your users’ experience, SEO rankings and even more importantly – for your conversion rates.
To help you maximize your website speed on a budget, we organized an #SMBGrowthChaton Twitter Spaces along with Arnout Hellemans (@hellemans), Online Strategy Consultant & SEO Expert, and Nat Miletic (@natmiletic), Web Dev, WordPress, SEO, Agency Growth. Here’s a summary of their discussion with some professional advice and expert tips on improving your website speed in a cost-effective way.
Why should you care for your website speed
Before digging deep into improving your website speed, let’s explore why it’s so important for your small business. A faster website means:
Better user experience
Your website performance impacts your users’ experience – when your site loads faster, users are more likely to interact with it and spend more time on it. The happier they are with your website, the more visits you’re likely to have, because your brand reputation will also improve.
Higher SEO rankings
Website speed is one of the metrics Google looks at from an SEO perspective. Arnout Hellemans, Online Strategy Consultant & SEO Expert, notes that “if a user can’t get to your site or it takes too long to load, they might not be able to consume the information on it, will go back to the search engine, and click on another result – that’s a signal you haven’t been able to answer a user’s query, which has a big influence on ranking”.
More conversions
Website performance is also a very important factor for your conversion rates. Nat Miletic, Web Dev, WordPress, SEO, Agency Growth, points out that it’s “even more important when it comes to eCommerce because how long the checkout process takes, directly impacts sales, sign-ups, etc.”
How to track your website performance
Given the fact that your website speed is so important for your small business, you’re probably wondering how to figure out how your site is performing. Here are a few free tools you can use, recommended by our experts: GTMetrix, Google PageSpeed Insights, webpagetest.org, or SEO tools, such as ahrefs and SEMrush, which also test for speed.
“For simple tests, I like to use GTMetrix – it gives you a good overview, it’s free to use, they even have bookmarks, so you go to a page, you click it, and it’ll automatically generate a report,” suggests Arnout Hellemans.
If you’re using Google Chrome, “you can basically right click and Inspect element – you get a console and go to the Performance tab, do a Lighthouse test, which will test the whole page. Half a year ago, they introduced Performance Insights that will show you which elements on the site are influencing the core web vitals scores,” adds Arnout Hellemans.
In case you decide to use the Chrome development tools to run performance tests, beware that “it will show you localized performance tests. If you have a very fast machine and internet connection, by default, it will show you that you’ve got great performance, but if you test with some other options […], your performance picture is going to look a lot different,” warns Nat Miletic.
How to speed up your website cost-effectively
If the tests show that your website performance needs improvement, here are some professional tips from our experts on how to do that in a cost-effective way:
1. Choose a good hosting provider
If you’re still at the very beginning – in the process of starting a website, begin by picking a good hosting provider: “From my experience, I think one of the main things to worry about is the hosting and what is going on in the background. […] It all starts with good quality hosting to improve performance,” advises Nat Miletic.
2. Pick a fast and efficient theme (if you’re using WordPress)
While you’re building a website, “if you’re using WordPress, pick a fast and efficient theme, because it will make all the difference and go a long way in terms of website performance,” notes Nat Miletic. He points out that there are a lot of free themes that you can use, such as Astra, GeneratePress, and many others.
3. Apply caching mechanisms
“My personal preference for free or inexpensive tools – caching is a must, especially for WordPress sites […] It creates static pages on the server that are quicker to come up on a user’s browser,” explains Nat Miletic.
However, Arnout Hellemans warns that “when you refresh pages, make sure you purge the cache, because otherwise, people will still see the older version – if you remove a link, it will still be there”.
What is more, there are different types of caching, which can be quite complicated, especially for small business owners. That’s why Nat Miletic advises you to “pick a tool that’s easy to use – SiteGround Optimizer is very easy to use and has fairly simple options […] It’s now available to any site owner”.
4. Use a CDN
Usually, if you have website visitors from all over the world, but even if you don’t, you should consider using a CDN. It helps serve your website to your visitors from where they actually are geographically, but it also helps serve your content faster in general.
Nat Miletic reminds that “it goes back to the hosting – a lot of hosting providers have these things baked in already, so they have their own CDN network, they have their own plugins to help with performance”.
This is also true about SiteGround – our in-house built SiteGround CDN is free and makes websites load blazingly fast around the world. It now comes with Version 2.0 which increases the website loading speed by 20% on average, going up to 100% for visitors located in some specific parts of the world.
5. Compress images
There are large images that slow down websites, but there are also ways to compress them and make them more efficient: “You’ve got all kinds of image compression tools out there. Most of them are free. WebP format, in the majority of cases, is 20% better in size than .jpg,” suggests Arnout Hellemans. “There are also plugins for WordPress – SiteGround Optimizer can be used to convert images to WebP format,” adds Nat Miletic.
6. Minify JavaScript and CSS files
Excessive JavaScript and CSS also slow down your website by adding a lot of code to the weight of your site. To speed up your website, you need to minify JavaScript and CSS files, which removes all unnecessary characters from them. For this purpose, you can use a free plugin, such as the SiteGround Optimizer plugin for WordPress websites, which will do all that for you, no matter where your site is hosted.
7. Optimize fonts
Another thing that can slow down your site is the fonts. These can be things like little emojis or social share buttons. “What you can do, instead of loading those social share icons, for example, is using the .svg version of that. If you need a Twitter button, or a Facebook button, use an .svg version of that – it’s going to be much smaller than the font,” advises Nat Miletic.
He adds that “a lot of people use Google Fonts which are typically hosted outside of your website, using the Google service. You’re making round trips to their servers in order to download fonts and it’s not very efficient. Sometimes, there are options to download those fonts locally on your site and then use them”.
With the free SiteGround Optimizer plugin for WordPress websites, you can do the above-mentioned tips with a few simple clicks. Our in-house built plugin provides you powerful features that are available to you even if you’re not that technically advanced.
Wrap up
Our experts all agree that website performance is an ongoing process – there’s always something to fix, so you need to make small improvements as you go and keep speeding up your website.
You can listen to the whole Twitter chat conversation by checking our YouTube recording. Follow us on Twitter for more news and discussions on useful topics.
We recently launched our Monthly Security Reports that give you valuable information about what we’re doing to secure your site and highlight measures you may have overlooked. As we have seen a great interest in the reports and given the fact that website speed is just as important as website security, we’ve decided to provide you with yet another useful feature – Monthly Performance Reports. These reports will inform you about different areas related to your website speed and will help you identify things that may be improved.
What you’ll find in the Monthly Performance Reports
Each month we’ll automatically check a number of performance categories for your site: cache ratio, CDN usage, data center and network speed, WordPress optimization, and others. Then, you’ll receive a report with the results which will include your total website performance score, a breakdown score for each category, and actionable recommendations if some areas need improvement – straight to your inbox.
What are the benefits of the Monthly Performance Reports
Easy and regular access to information
With our Monthly Performance Reports you will be receiving regular information about your site status, delivered by email. It will include important areas that may be hard for our clients to check themselves on a regular basis. For example, we will be monitoring what percentage of your traffic is served from the cache each month (the higher the percentage, the faster your site is) and will inform you if this ratio is not optimal.
Actionable tips
On top of all that, you’ll get actionable tips in case any of the performance categories need improvement. We’ll let you know how to make the most of each optimization option that is available on our platform with clear and easy instructions. Let’s say that we identify you’re not using our Dynamic cache option, or our CDN, or our WordPress Optimization plugin. In such a case, we’ll notify you about this and provide you with information on why to use it and how to switch it on.
User-friendly structure
You’ll be able to quickly scan through the results and spot the tips in an easy-to-follow, color-coded structure of the report. You’ll also get an overall score for the month both in points and percentages, as well as a comparison of how it has changed from the previous month.
How to receive your Monthly Performance Reports
You get this feature for free and it’ll be available for you if you are a site owner of at least 1 active website.
We will gradually begin to proactively send the reports to all our clients, but you may sign up yourself today to be among the first to receive their report.
SiteGround received four awards for its employer branding and HR management at b2b Media’s annual Employer Branding Awards. The company was awarded in the categories “Innovation in talent management”, “Employer branding video”, “Excellence in stress management” and “Excellence in Office Space”.
The annual awards of b2b Media distinguish businesses and individuals for achievements in the field of building and strengthening the image and popularity of the employer brand – for innovations in talent management, for new successful strategies in HR. In the contested competition, more than 120 projects of 60 companies were evaluated by the independent jury.
“SiteGround is not just a workplace, but a community you belong to – with values and example. What all four awards we won have in common is our team, the amazing people who work with us. The success of our employer brand is a natural continuation of our philosophy, which is based on caring for employees and investing in their development”, says Valentina Kozuharova, Human Resources Manager at the company.
SiteGround has three offices in Sofia, Plovdiv and Stara Zagora. They employ 500 employees, and the company continuously invests in the development of their expert skills and professional competences.
SiteGround also offers many benefits, including reduced hours on Fridays, own restaurant and barista, own gym, additional health insurance, annual medical check-ups, psychologist, massages, sports cards, unique office environment, and various traditional initiatives to support the physical, emotional, personal and professional development of employees.
As of February 28th, 2023, all clients using our CDN have been migrated to its latest version, SiteGround CDN 2.0, providing faster and even more efficient site performance. Our in-house built CDN is included for free in all our plans, so all new clients will also be able to activate it.
Website loading speed may have a serious impact on search engine standings, bounce rates and sales conversions of your site. As a web hosting provider we are able to contribute to your website’s success by helping it load faster. That’s why at SiteGround we’re constantly implementing new speed-enhancing technologies that are more powerful and easier to use for our clients.
One of our latest products, that ensures faster sites for our clients, is our custom-built CDN. Just a few months after its launch, it is already used by hundreds of thousands of domains. We have seen the service has a considerable positive impact on our clients’ website performance and we are also receiving a steady flow of positive feedback from the users.
To improve the service even more, we have just deployed version 2.0 of SiteGround CDN. It employs the power of anycast routing and Google network edge locations and thus increases the website loading speed by 20% on average and may go up to 100% for visitors located in some specific parts of the world.
Why is the CDN 2.0 faster?
As you probably already know, the idea of the CDN (Content Delivery Network) is to keep a copy of your website on multiple locations called points of presence (PoPs) around the globe. When you have website visitors located far away from the original server that hosts your site, the CDN allows them to see a version of your site from the closest PoP. Thus the time needed for the data to reach your visitors is shorter than if it was served by the original server and your site loads faster. The closer your visitor is to a PoP the shorter the time it takes your site to load.
But apart from the geographical distance between the visitor and the PoP there are, of course, other factors that influence the speed with which the PoP is reached. It makes a difference if the data travels through the public network or through the much faster Google Cloud internal network.
In our initial CDN setup each PoP had its own unique IP address and required the central DNS system to calculate the distance between users and PoPs, determining the best routing through the public network. Now in the CDN 2.0 we have implemented an anycast layer which ensures that IP addresses remain the same for all our PoPs. This way we eliminate the DNS layer calculations and clients requests are automatically routed to the closest edge location of Google network. Once the request reaches the edge location, it enters the much faster Google Internal network and reaches the closest SiteGround CDN PoP almost instantly. So now the closer your visitors are to the network edge location, the faster your site loads.
The great news is that Google Cloud network already has 200+ edge locations around the globe, which means that most visitors are always very near one of these. Also whenever new such points are added by Google, they will naturally make our CDN faster in new regions.
What are the benefits of the CDN 2.0?
Faster sites and better TTFB
Due to the implementation of the anycast routing and the fact that we are able to take advantage of the extraordinary speed of the Google internal network, now millions of visitors of the sites that use our CDN service will have better experience and have the requested sites load faster.
Time to First Byte (TTFB) is a measurement of the time it takes for a browser to receive the first byte of response data from a web server after making a request. When comparing the first byte response times from more than 50 locations the TTFB improvement is around 20% on average and up to 100% in regions that were further from the SiteGround’s CDN PoPs.
Higher CDN reliability
CDN 2.0 is backed by cross-region load balancing, including automatic multi-region failover which allows them to react instantaneously to changes in users, traffic, network, backend health, and other related conditions. This helps to ensure that the content remains available, even in case any of the CDN PoPs goes down.
How to get the CDN 2.0?
Starting from the middle of February, we will gradually switch both the Free SiteGround CDN users and the Premium SiteGround CDN users to the new version of the service. The process wouldn’t require any action on the client’s end and will be fully automated. If you are still not taking advantage of our CDN, it is a great time to add CDN to your site now through your client area.
Last December, while everyone was in the whirlwind of the end-of-year Holidays, among the SiteGround team there was a different excitement in the air. We had just announced our support for the World’s first human-powered rowing expedition from the Antarctic – and our whole team was anticipating the start of the adventure, planned for January 2023.
Fast forward to a little over a month later, the mission was successfully completed with extraordinary success and 8 Guinness records! As one of their main sponsors, at SiteGround we are extremely proud with the accomplishment of the crew, but even more so with their cause – the petition to help prevent the overexploitation of the once pristine marine environment of the Southern Ocean.
Our support for entrepreneurial spirit and a stand for the Planet
It all started in November 2022, when we decided to hold an inspiring internal event for the SiteGround team in our HQ office. We had invited Bulgarian entrepreneur and adventurer Stefan Ivanov, who already had 2 Guinness Records with his son Maxim, awarded for their astounding journey, called NEVEREST. For NEVEREST his son and himself spent 105 Days across the Atlantic in the hurricane season in a rowing boat they built themselves in their garage at home.
During the meeting with the team, Stefan revealed that he was about to become part of another expedition with even bigger stakes and cause – to help protect the environment of Antarctica. The upcoming mission resonated deeply with the inherent values of the SiteGround team – to challenge yourself, raise the limit of what’s possible, and live with purpose. But it also highlighted our need to care and take action for our planet and our personal and collective responsibility for its protection. In the words of our co-founder, Ivo Tzenov, “The courage to keep doing what you believe in, despite that everyone tells you it’s impossible, is no stranger to us. It’s exactly what’s been driving our work and success at SiteGround from the start. But the mission had our support also because of their cause and stand for the environment, which is also something that we at SiteGround firmly believe in”. So it was only natural that we decided to support this endeavor.
The Shackleton Mission 2023
The crew of the Shackleton Mission included 6 leading explorers and adventurers from 5 countries – Captain Fiann Paul (Iceland), Lisa Farthofer (Austria), Jamie Douglas-Hamilton (United Kingdom), Brian Krauskopf (USA), Mike Matson (USA), and our home-country representative Stefan Ivanov (Bulgaria). The expedition departed across the Southern Ocean from the Antarctic King George Island to South Georgia Island aboard their boat, Mrs Chippy, on January 11, 2023. Their 850 nautical mile journey passed across what is regarded by many as “the most dreaded bit of ocean on the planet”. It retraces the voyage made by Sir Ernest Shackleton and 5 of his crew in 1916 that saved the lives of all 28 members of Shackleton’s previous Endurance expedition.
The 2023 Shackleton Mission was conducted under the flag of “THE EXPLORERS CLUB”. Established in New York in 1904, the club has been supporting scientific expeditions of various disciplines and uniting its members in the bonds of good fellowship. It’s the same club, whose flag graced the first expeditions to the South and the North Poles, mount Everest, and even the Moon!
The whole SiteGround team followed the Antarctic mission’s journey closely thanks to the online diary of the Bulgarian representative in the crew, who even managed to post regular updates along the way! On January 17, 2023, the mission was completed and the team landed safely on Laurie Island (South Orkney Islands) after rowing 777 km (420 nautical miles) in the Southern Ocean in 6 days. The row meets all requirements of the Ocean Rowing Society and qualifies as a successfully completed polar ocean row and won 8 Guinness Records:
🏆 First human-powered expedition from the Antarctic
🏆 First human-powered expedition on the Southern Ocean South to North
🏆 First human-powered expedition on the Scotia Sea
🏆 The first human-powered expedition completed entirely within the Southern Ocean
🏆 Southernmost start of a rowing expedition
🏆 Fastest row on the Southern Ocean
🏆 Longest distance rowed on the Southern Ocean
🏆 Fastest Polar row
A small row boat, a giant leap for the Planet
The crew of the Shackleton Mission were aiming to challenge what’s humanly possible, but their mission went beyond that. It is true evidence that with the right team, the right partner, and support, we can accomplish anything.
That’s also true for the mission’s even greater goal – to prevent the overexploitation of the once pristine marine environment of Antarctica. The petition started by the crew calls for the designation of new marine protected areas of at least 4,000,000 km2 in the Southern Ocean – the largest marine protection in history. Given that over 90% of the large marine species in the oceans are already in danger of extinction, with your help we can stop this.
