Posted on

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.

START YOUR FREE TRIAL

Posted on

SiteGround Ecommerce and Website Builder: Shippo integration, custom code, advanced forms, popups & more

abstract image of siteground ecommerce updates including shipping integration and popups

Running a small business means wearing every hat: designer, marketer, accountant, shipping department. Website troubleshooter shouldn’t be one of them. So every time we update the SiteGround Website Builder, the question is the same: does this actually make your day easier? This latest batch does, across shipping, marketing, and everything in between.

Professional shipping, without the headache: introducing our Shippo integration

Shipping label and tap to track button represent SiteGround Shippo integration

Shipping is one of those things that sounds simple until you’re actually doing it. Which carrier? What rate? Did you overcharge and lose a sale, or undercharge and eat the cost? It adds up fast.

With our new Shippo integration, those decisions get a lot easier. Your customers see live shipping rates at checkout, calculated in real time based on package size, weight, and destination. Behind the scenes, you get access to discounted rates from 16 carriers, including FedEx, UPS, USPS, DHL, and Royal Mail, across 49 countries.

And when an order is ready to go, generating a label takes a few clicks. The tracking number goes to your customer automatically, and the order status updates itself. No copy-pasting, no chasing down confirmations.

For anyone shipping products regularly, this is the kind of update that quietly saves hours every week. Note that the Shippo integration is available on Grow and Scale plans.

Engage visitors when it counts with popups

Graphic representation of website popups on SiteGround Ecommerce

Sometimes the most effective message is the one that shows up at exactly the right time. The new popups feature lets you build and display targeted messages directly on your storefront, no code needed.

You control who sees each popup and when: set time-based or scroll-based triggers, define reappearance frequency, and target specific pages, categories, or products. Toggle any popup between Active and Inactive at any time.

Creating and editing popups is available on all plans. Setting a popup to Active requires a Trial or Scale plan.

Pull your sales data whenever you need it 

Abstract of an order export via SiteGround Ecommerce

Tax season, a monthly reconciliation, a gut-check on last month’s numbers. Whatever’s prompting it, digging through orders one by one is nobody’s idea of a good time. Now you don’t have to. Export your orders as a CSV, filtered by date range and order status, and you’ll receive an email with a download link once it’s ready.

Make your site look exactly how you want it to

graphic representation of custom html for SiteGround Ecommerce

When you need something the builder doesn’t have out of the box (say, a booking calendar, a launch countdown, a specific embed) the new custom code component lets you drop in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, iframes, or Markdown directly onto any page. No developer needed, and nothing else on your site is affected.

Collect the right information

Graphic representation of custom form fields in SiteGround Ecommerce

A generic contact form gets generic responses. But a form built for your business gets exactly the responses you need. With that goal in mind, custom form fields let you add short and long text, email, dropdowns, radio buttons, checkboxes, and dividers to any contact form. Whether it’s a client intake, a quote request, or a signup, your form works the way your business works.

Move elements faster

Graphic representation of moving multiple website elements in SiteGround Ecommerce

Reorganizing a layout used to mean moving elements one by one. Now, multi-component select lets you grab multiple elements at once and move them together. Small change, big difference when you’re deep in a redesign.

Built for you and with you

Every one of these updates came from listening to you: your feedback, your frustrations, and the things that were taking longer than they should. Building a professional website or running an online store should be something anyone can do, without needing a development team or a logistics department behind them. These updates make that happen, and there’s a lot more to come.

[103]

Posted on

Critical UpdraftPlus vulnerability patched across all SiteGround WordPress hosted sites

SiteGround security illustration showing code, plugin icons, and a shield under a magnifying glass.

If your website uses the UpdraftPlus backup plugin, here is the short version: a critical vulnerability was discovered in the plugin, and we have already updated it to the patched version on all affected sites we host. You are protected, and there is nothing you need to do.

Below is what happened, what we did, and what to keep an eye on.

Your site is already protected

On June 11, 2026, our engineering team force-updated the UpdraftPlus plugin across all hosted sites running a vulnerable version. Every affected installation was moved to version 1.26.5, which contains the official fix. More than 128 000  sites on our platform were running a vulnerable version, and all of them have been patched.

We tested the upgrade paths before rolling anything out and found no issues. We do not expect any site breakages as a result of this update.

What the vulnerability is

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-10795, is an Unauthenticated Authentication Bypass affecting UpdraftPlus versions up to 1.26.4. In plain terms, it allowed attackers to gain administrator access to a WordPress site without knowing any username or password. From there, they could execute code on the site, which is about as serious as a plugin vulnerability gets.

The “unauthenticated” part is what makes this critical. Many vulnerabilities require an attacker to already have some level of access, like a subscriber or contributor account. This one required nothing at all. Any site running a vulnerable version was exposed to anyone who knew about the flaw.

What we did and when

As soon as the vulnerability was disclosed, it took our team less than an hour to proactively complete the update of the patched version of the plugin to all affected sites, acting immediately to close the exposure window before attackers could exploit it at scale, rather than waiting for site owners to update manually, or be affected in any way.

Here is what the response looked like:

  • We identified all hosted sites running UpdraftPlus versions 1.24.x, 1.25.x and 1.26.x.
  • We tested upgrades from 1.24.x to 1.26.x and other affected versions to 1.26.5 in advance to confirm the update would not cause problems.
  • We force-updated more than 128 000 affected installations to the patched version 1.26.5.
  • The whole process was complete in ~52 mins.

Will the update affect my website?

We do not expect it to. Plugin updates between these versions were tested before the rollout, and no issues came up.

That said, if you want extra peace of mind, here are two quick things you can check:

  • Confirm your backup schedule in UpdraftPlus is still configured the way you set it.
  • Verify that your most recent backup completed successfully.

Both take less than a minute from your WordPress dashboard.

Why we force updates for critical vulnerabilities

When a vulnerability is critical, trivially exploitable, and publicly disclosed, every hour of delay matters. Attackers begin scanning for vulnerable sites within hours of a disclosure like this one, and waiting for each site owner to update manually would leave thousands of sites exposed in the meantime.

In those situations, we patch first and notify right after. We believe a proactive update is always the better trade compared to leaving sites open to full takeover.

As a general rule, we also recommend keeping plugin auto-updates enabled wherever possible. It is the single most effective habit for staying ahead of vulnerabilities like this one.

Posted on

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.

TRY NOW

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

Posted on

File uploads in Coderick AI: bring your code and design exports in the chat

Coderick AI Files preview showing bringing existing code file from Claude to Coderick AI and how it turns into a real section in Coderick-generated site

Building with Coderick AI is really amazing. You describe what you want, and Coderick AI builds it for you. That works beautifully when you’re starting from an idea. But sometimes you’re not. Sometimes you already have something done elsewhere that you wish to reference or use.

Maybe you prototyped a layout with Claude Design and you want it as your homepage. Maybe a Claude artifact got you close on a component and you just need it inside a live, hosted project. Maybe you found an HTML template that’s almost right, and you’d rather hand the file over and request a few changes, than describe it from scratch in three paragraphs.

That’s what file uploads in Coderick AI are for.

Build on top, not from scratch

Use the file upload functionality as a starting point and prompt Coderick to work with it. Add new sections to a homepage layout you’ve uploaded. Turn a single page into a multi-page site. Wire up functionality around a static design.

Coderick builds on top, adds new elements, improves your draft, and finalizes the project, instead of starting from scratch. You save time, credits, and enhance the value of the work already done.

Coderick AI code files upload previews taking ready html file, updating its colors and adding the section to a real Coderick AI project

Keep your own styles

You can tell Coderick to apply a file directly. Your uploaded HTML becomes the basis for your homepage. The styles you uploaded get used across the project. Coderick reads the source and rebuilds it inside your project – your structure, your styles, your specific elements.

Before, you needed to describe any existing work you’ve done with words – the spacing, the columns, the hover effects, any visual element you care for. And anyone who’s tried to describe design specifics to AI knows how that usually goes: you get something that’s 80% of what you wanted, and the last 20% is a long fine-tuning through follow-up prompts.

Push your work live faster

Uploading your files to Coderick AI turns your work in progress into a live project faster. You save the time you’d spend re-prompting what you’ve already built, and put it into turning the design into a real, live site or web app.

What file types Coderick AI supports

Coderick AI accepts the text-based file types you’re most likely to already have:

File typeWhat you’d typically use it for
.htmlPage structure, landing pages, exported templates
.css, .scssStyling, layout, design systems
.js, .jsxJavaScript behavior, interactive elements, React components
.ts, .tsxTypeScript logic, typed frontend files, React + TypeScript components
.mdDocumentation, specs, content briefs, project notes

You can upload up to 30 files at once, with a combined size of 500kB. Image uploads stay separate and support up to 10 images.

Getting the most out of file uploads

File uploads give Coderick more to work with, but how you use them shapes the result. 

You still need to be specific: “Apply this design as the homepage” beats “use this file” every time – Coderick reads what you upload, but it still needs you to say where the file goes and what role it plays.

Upload all relevant files together: If your design is split across an HTML file and a CSS file, upload them together so Coderick gets the full picture.

Clean your files from unnecessary elements: A quick check on your source files before uploading is worth the time: unused styles, leftover comments, and wrapper code from other tools can all get mistaken for intent. Cleaner files in, cleaner work out.

One thing worth knowing – file uploads aren’t a way to import a full project (yet). They’re for the specific files you want Coderick to focus on: a page, a component, a stylesheet. Pick the parts that matter, and let Coderick start there.

Go to Coderick AI and drop in what you already have – a Claude export, a template, or a component you’ve been refining. Build from there.

START BUILDING WITH CODERICK AI
Posted on

How to build 15 websites in 5 months with no team and win an award for best SMB design agency

Quote from Marc Jukes of yourdigitalalchemist.com: "I'd recommend Coderick AI to any creative individual that has an idea, has a spark, whether it be a mobile app, a web app, a CRM system. They would be foolish not to give it a go." Shown alongside a screenshot of his web design work.

If you’ve ever looked at web design and thought “I’d need a developer for that”, Marc Jukes used to think the same thing, until he started using the right tool: SiteGround’s Coderick AI.

Marc runs Your Digital Alchemist, a fully managed web design and SEO service for small businesses in the UK beauty and aesthetics sector. Only, he works alone, from home, and he builds every website with Coderick AI.

From December 2025 to May 2026, he built 15 websites, won a regional award for best small business website design agency, and received four enterprise award nominations. 

Infographic summarizing client results with Coderick AI: 15 sites built in 5 months, 1 award and 4 nominations, site build time reduced from 7–14 days to 24 hours, and 6+ weeks with no need for support.

The tools that were supposed to work

Before Coderick AI, Marc tried the platforms most freelancers and small agencies reach for first: the popular drag-and-drop builders. He paid for more than one, and found all of them clunky, painful, and slow: 20, 30, sometimes 40 hours per website, and still not the result he had in mind.

The time cost alone makes those tools hard to justify when you work solo. And when the output doesn’t match what you promised a client, it makes the work harder to sell, and harder to repeat. That’s not a skill problem. It’s a tool problem.

The workflow that changed everything

When SiteGround launched Coderick AI, Marc was among the first to use it. There were early rough edges, especially having in mind the dynamic world of AI and LLM development. But within a few weeks, something had clearly shifted.

“SiteGround’s team is listening and improvements are happening every day.”

His approach is methodical. Before he opens Coderick AI, the prep work is done: 

  • Content collected from the client
  • Competition researched
  • Images resized and named
  • Logo ready

Foundation first. Then he feeds everything in and lets the tool build, refining from there by talking through sizing, layout, nav menus, padding, margins, mobile responsiveness. When he’s not sure what to tackle next, he just asks. Coderick AI walks him through the rest of the process until the site is done.

He builds a landing page prototype before a client has committed to anything, showing them exactly what’s possible using Coderick AI’s free trial credits.

“You’re not only showing your client your expertise, you’re showing them what the platform can do. And you’re saying: you could do this yourself, but I’m the expert. I will save you time.”

Show your clients the prototype before they’ve signed anything, and the conversation tends to take care of itself.

Price fairly. Earn loyalty.

When your pricing is fair and your clients know exactly what they’re paying for, word of mouth does the heavy lifting. Marc charges a fraction of what agencies typically ask for the same result — and doesn’t hide which platform he uses to deliver it.

“Too many people are getting charged thousands and thousands of pounds for something you can actually build with Coderick AI very cost-effectively. It’s all about fairness and transparency.”

Transparency about what you use and what you charge tends to come back around. For Marc, it’s why most of his new business comes through word of mouth. Website clients become SEO clients, recurring revenue builds, and two to three new websites a month adds up fast.

Practice what you preach

If you’re going to sell web design services, your own site should be the first proof of what you can do. That’s exactly how Marc approaches it: his website is built with Coderick AI, and it’s all the more proof of what the platform is capable of.

He updates it regularly, pushing the tool further each time: testing animations, custom JavaScript effects, layouts he hadn’t tried before. 

The first website he built with Coderick AI looks nothing like the ones he’s building now. When building and iterating takes hours instead of months, keeping your own site current stops feeling like a luxury.

One person. Real results.

Not everyone starting a business has the perfect setup: a dedicated office, a full schedule, or a technical background. Most people are figuring it out within whatever constraints they have.

Marc got registered disabled a few years ago. Working from home isn’t a preference; it’s his reality. He built this business within those constraints, and Coderick AI is a significant part of why it works.

“It’s something that can help many like me — people that have got a creative skill, that can’t leave the home, that have a disability. If they want to learn, they could actually set up their own small agency doing what I do.”

Since December, he’s built 15 websites, won a regional award, earned four enterprise nominations, and has two active referral partners signed up through a portal he built himself, also using Coderick AI. What made all of this possible?

“Time. Coderick AI saves you a lot of time, a lot of heartache, and money.”

Who Coderick AI is actually for

The answer is broader than you might expect. 

“I’d recommend Coderick AI to any creative individual that has an idea, has a spark, whether it be a mobile app, a web app, a CRM system. They would be foolish not to give it a go.”

The 50,000 free credits are enough to see what’s possible before committing to anything. And once you’re in it, the tool rewards patience — talking to it clearly, breaking down what you want, asking what comes next. The more you put in, the more it gives back.

The gap between “I’d need a developer for this” and “I can build this myself” is smaller than most people think. It’s all about how big your imagination and your motivation is. Marc has both of these in plenty. He just needed an ally — and we’re proud that he found one in the face of SiteGround and Coderik AI. 

And so can you.

[96]

Posted on

SiteGround patched 5 critical Linux kernel exploits in 48 Hours, with zero downtime

A developer works at a laptop displaying kernel source code, with security icons including a shield, padlock, and patch symbol overlaid in green.

The last few weeks have been busy for anyone who runs Linux servers for a living. Between late April and mid-May, security researchers disclosed five serious kernel vulnerabilities, each one giving any logged-in user a path to full root access on the machine. Several of them came with working exploit code published on day one.

SiteGround applied fixes for every single one of them on our hosting infrastructure without rebooting a single server and without interrupting a single customer’s service.

What this would have meant for your sites

In plain terms: if any one of these vulnerabilities had been exploited on a server before being patched, an attacker who already had even the smallest foothold (a compromised WordPress plugin, a leaked FTP password, a vulnerable script) could have escalated from a single low-privilege account inside one site to full control of the underlying host. From there, the usual playbook: read other tenants’ files, plant persistent backdoors, harvest credentials, pivot deeper into the network.

These aren’t theoretical risks. Public exploit code existed for every single one of these flaws. Copy Fail in particular was being actively used in the wild within days of disclosure.

What actually happened

In rough order, here’s what hit the Linux world:

April 29, Copy Fail (CVE-2026-31431) Disclosed – A single 732-byte Python script could turn any normal user into root on essentially every Linux distribution shipped since 2017. No timing tricks, no guesswork, just a logic bug in the kernel’s crypto subsystem. CISA added it to their actively-exploited list within days.

May 7, Dirty Frag – xfrm/ESP flaw (CVE-2026-43284) Disclosed – A flaw in the kernel’s IPsec ESP networking code that lets an attacker write arbitrary data into the memory copy of read-only system files. Often referred to as “Copy Fail 2.”

May 7, Dirty Frag – RxRPC flaw (the second half of the chain) – A companion bug in the kernel’s RxRPC networking module. Chained with the xfrm/ESP flaw above, it gives a normal user full root.

May 13, Fragnesia / Copy Fail 3.0 (CVE-2026-46300) Disclosed – The third bug in three weeks, same family as Dirty Frag, also in the kernel’s IPsec subsystem. A working proof-of-concept was published the same day.

May 14, ssh-keysign / chage pidfd flaw Disclosed and patched by Linus Torvalds – A different kind of bug – not root escalation, but it let any unprivileged user read root-owned files like /etc/shadow (the password hashes) and SSH host keys.

How we fixed it without downtime

Four choices we’ve made about how SiteGround operates made this manageable, and given what’s coming, all four are going to matter even more, not less. 

We watch the threat landscape constantly. Our security team monitors kernel mailing lists, CVE feeds, and disclosure channels around the clock. We knew about Copy Fail the day it was disclosed, Dirty Frag the day it dropped, and Fragnesia within hours of the proof-of-concept being posted. There’s no substitute for having eyes on this in real time. By the time these stories hit mainstream tech news, the exploit code has usually already been out for days. As AI-driven discovery accelerates the disclosure cadence, this kind of constant monitoring becomes essential rather than optional.

We have engineers on call 24/7. Critical kernel patches don’t wait for business hours, and neither do we. For every one of these vulnerabilities, we had patches built, tested, and rolled out across our fleet within 48 hours of public disclosure, which is usually well before most distributions had even released their official packages.

We use live kernel patching. This is the part that matters most for you. Traditional kernel patching requires a reboot, which means downtime for every service running on the machine. Live patching applies the fix to the running kernel in memory, so the vulnerability is closed without restarting anything. Your websites, databases, mail, and SSH sessions all kept running through every single one of these patch cycles. When patch frequency goes up, the cost of “just reboot the server” goes up with it — live patching is what keeps that cost at zero for you.

We keep our kernels lean. A big part of why these bugs are dangerous is that the vulnerable code ships enabled by default on most distributions. Copy Fail lived in the AF_ALG kernel crypto interface. Dirty Frag and Fragnesia lived in the esp4, esp6, and rxrpc modules — IPsec and AFS networking code that the vast majority of web servers will never use in their lifetime. We don’t load kernel modules we don’t need. That means a chunk of the attack surface for these exploits simply didn’t exist on our machines in the first place, giving us extra breathing room to apply the proper fix.

The AI factor, and why this is only the beginning

One detail in the Copy Fail disclosure deserves special attention. The bug wasn’t found by a human researcher staring at code for weeks. It was surfaced by an AI-powered code auditing tool (Xint Code) in roughly one hour of scan time against the Linux kernel’s crypto subsystem. The same scan also surfaced “other high-severity bugs, still in coordinated disclosure,” meaning more disclosures are already in the pipeline.

This is a major shift in how vulnerabilities get found. For years, the bottleneck on discovering critical kernel bugs was the limited number of expert humans willing to spend months reading kernel source code. That bottleneck is gone. AI auditing tools can now scan entire subsystems at machine speed, and they’re finding things that have been sitting in stable kernels for nearly a decade.

What this means practically: the rate of serious vulnerability disclosures is going to keep climbing. Three universal local-root exploits in three weeks isn’t a fluke; it’s a preview. The reactive patching cycles that worked when one critical kernel bug landed every six months are not going to work when one lands every two weeks. The ability to detect, react, and patch within hours rather than days is no longer a nice-to-have. Instead it’s the baseline for staying safe.

The takeaway

Linux is going through an unusually rough stretch for kernel security: three universal local-root exploits in three weeks is not normal, and it’s not slowing down. With AI-powered auditing tools now scanning the kernel at speeds no human team could match, we expect the discovery rate of serious vulnerabilities to keep accelerating. The bugs that have been sitting quietly in stable kernels for years are getting found, one subsystem at a time.

What we can promise is that the way we handled these is the way we handle every serious vulnerability: monitor early, patch fast, fix live, and keep the attack surface as small as possible in the first place. Your sites stay up. The exploits don’t. And as the cadence picks up, that’s only going to matter more.

Posted on

200+ client websites managed. Zero support calls in a year.

Storm Design founder smiling with arms crossed next to a quote about retaining and winning back clients after switching to SiteGround

Most web agency owners don’t think about hosting until something goes wrong. Jesmond Darmanin thought about it for two weeks straight: during a “holiday” in Greece, on his phone, with 85 client websites to move.

Jesmond Darmanin has been running the web design and branding agency Storm Design since he was 17. Twenty-five years later, it’s one of Malta’s most established digital agencies. For years, he managed his own servers through cloud providers. It worked, until it didn’t.

That was enough. He moved everything to SiteGround, and the hosting emergencies that used to be a regular part of his life simply stopped. But it wasn’t always that way.

Infographic showing Storm Design's results with SiteGround: portfolio grew from 85 to 200+ websites, with zero client churn, zero hosting emergencies, and zero support calls in the past year

What self-managed hosting really costs you

For a technically capable team, managing your own cloud server seems like the smart, cost-effective choice. Full control, low monthly bill. But what it comes down to is that every security gap is yours to catch, including the ones introduced by a routine software update.

The hack that took 85 sites offline

A dreaded update had opened a vulnerability. One hour before his flight to Greece, Jesmond got the notification: his server had been compromised. Eighty-five client websites were down or barely loading.

  • Emergency remote cleanup by an external company: €1,000
  • Server back online for only two days
  • Then compromised again, through a backdoor the cleanup had missed

The maintenance problem

The emergencies were just part of it. Every software update required a server restart, and every restart meant downtime. With clients in different time zones, there was no safe window to take things offline. Complaints accumulated.

“I did lose clients because of the downtime. They told me we’re going to have to switch hosts.”

The client cost

Hosting issues were costing Storm Design somewhere between 5–10% of its client base every year. When other businesses depend on you to keep their websites running, that’s not just lost revenue. It’s trust you don’t get back easily.

The checklist that led to SiteGround

With 85 sites needing an immediate new home, Jesmond wasn’t shopping casually. He needed something specific: 

  • Security handled at the hosting level, not by his team
  • Reliable, automated backups
  • One back-end for managing all client sites
  • A migration process that didn’t require moving databases by hand

SiteGround wasn’t a completely unfamiliar name. He’d worked inside a client’s account before and had seen the tools. When he cross-referenced it against other well-known providers, the reputation held up, and he decided to give it a go.

What followed was not the relaxing Greek holiday he’d planned. He completed most of the migration from his phone, on buses and trains, while the trip carried on around him. 

The tools that cut hours from the weekly workload

The improvements Jesmond noticed after switching went beyond traffic and rankings. They showed up in the day-to-day work of managing a growing portfolio of client websites.

Tools that previously required third-party plugins or manual setup were now built into SiteGround’s backend:

One-click WordPress login, no individual site logins needed

“The option to simply go into the account and click WordPress login and not have to manually log into the websites: that was a huge time-saving.”

Team access got simpler too. He could set up accounts for colleagues and limit each person to only the sites they were working on: a small thing that makes a big difference when you’re managing multiple clients across a shared environment.

Security handled at the platform level

On the security side, the difference became very real when a client’s site was recently compromised due to a weak password. SiteGround Site Scanner caught the malicious files and blocked them before any damage was done, and Jesmond got an immediate notification.

“Getting a notification about malicious files right away — that’s not something I would have been able to do myself.”

For anyone managing sites on behalf of clients (especially ecommerce) that kind of automated catch is the difference between a minor incident and a very bad phone call.

Coderick AI: Jesmond’s new favourite tool

Beyond the day-to-day tools, Jesmond found an unexpected favorite in SiteGround’s Coderick AI. He’d been looking for a task management tool that could handle client requests and integrate project costing: something he couldn’t find off the shelf. So he built it himself.

“I described what I needed, and let’s say we’re 80% there. It’s already open on my second screen. It became one of my favorite tools very quickly.”

The tool he built lets clients submit change requests directly, which then feed into his to-do list. He can add costs, send approval links to clients, and once approved, tasks move automatically into an in-progress table. He’s now waiting on his next round of credits to keep building.

“I got into the idea of always looking: how can I build something new? It’s a fun tool to work with.”

A year with zero support calls

When a hosting platform is working the way it should, you stop noticing it. No alerts, no emergency calls from clients, no late-night troubleshooting. For Jesmond, that’s exactly what happened: he hasn’t needed to contact support in over a year.

The client retention picture changed just as completely. The downtime complaints that had been a regular part of the job stopped. Some of the clients who had walked away came back.

“Once I moved to SiteGround, I managed to retain all of the clients I have, and I also managed to get back some of the clients that had complained before.”

Of course, some businesses closed down along the way (that’s the reality of working with startups), but hosting hasn’t been the reason anyone walked away.

Storm Design now manages over 200 websites. Jesmond travels without a knot in his stomach about what might break while he’s offline: something that anyone who’s ever managed a client portfolio remotely will recognise as no small thing.

“I don’t want to deal with this anymore. That peace of mind was a very, very big one. Compromising on hosting is not a mistake I want to make again.”

Reliable hosting = clients retained

The lesson Jesmond carries from the Greece incident isn’t just about hosting. It’s about what happens when other people’s businesses depend on your infrastructure choices.

“You cannot live a type of life where you’re constantly thinking: is the server okay? Am I getting hacked? That kind of stress, especially once your client base starts to grow, is something no business owner should underestimate.”

The monthly invoice might look cheaper with a self-managed setup. But when hosting issues start costing you clients year after year, the math stops working in your favour. SiteGround ends up paying for itself. Not in traffic spikes or overnight transformations, but in the clients you keep and the emergencies that never happen.

[86]

Posted on

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.

TRY FREE

Posted on

From bold idea to production: the story behind our new Ecommerce Platform

For the past months, multiple teams across SiteGround — engineers, designers, product managers, QA specialists — have been tirelessly working toward a shared goal: the launch of our Ecommerce Platform. It started with a complete redesign of our Website Builder with a grid-based drag-and-drop editor that gives users full creative control over their site, and on top of it, they layered a full set of tools for online store building and management. Why? To let anyone go from zero to a working online store without plugins, third-party tools, or weeks of setup. On March 17, both went live.

True to our mission to help anyone, anywhere, manage a complete online presence with ease, we built both platforms entirely in-house, from scratch. But how did we make it happen? We asked the two main leads behind the development: Hristo Pandjarov, Product Innovation Director, and George Penkov, Engineering Director. 

What was the single biggest bet we made with the Website Builder & Ecommerce Platform, the one decision that shaped everything else?

Screenshot

Hristo: Honestly, it was our decision not to compromise on quality and excellence, regardless of how much development that required.

In the early stages of planning and development, we explored using existing solutions, but we quickly realized that nothing available would meet our needs or deliver the architectural quality we required. So we started from scratch and built on the knowledge we’ve gathered over two decades of hosting websites at the scale and quality we’re known for.

What does ‘from zero to launching an online store in hours, not weeks’ actually require on the engineering side?

Screenshot

George: Having been in web development for 20+ years, it still amazes me how many setup steps are now engineered away: like getting an SSL certificate, setting up DNS records, installing a CMS, and many more. And that’s before you even think about content. Nowadays, even choosing a domain name is simplified with the power of AI. A couple of clicks and you have a fully set-up website. But on the engineering side, all the steps users used to do manually still need to happen.

To build this seamless experience, we built our Ecommerce Platform on top of SiteGround’s already optimized hosting infrastructure— the same one powering over 3 million domains worldwide.

So, we had the infrastructure in place, then it was all about the content. Underneath our simple Ecommerce Builder, where you choose a ready-made template and customize every element to your liking, sits a robust page-editing and rendering engine. We designed its persistence model to prioritize a mature desktop application feel with keyboard handling, undo/redo stacks, zero latency, and generative AI support. Imagine editing a Google Doc, but for your entire website – everything feels instant, you can undo any mistake, and AI is right there to help.

And finally, on top of all that, comes the e-commerce set of tools, including product management, order management, customer profiles, analytics, marketing, shipping, payments, taxes, and more. Implementing all of those features is a monumental engineering effort, and at the same time, the UX is just as critical — because if a user can’t navigate their dashboard, every store update becomes a headache. We are tackling this challenge with several layers of systems to help. Most of the focus is on the initial steps: a templating feature to give you a complete website in a click, a guided tour through your first steps, and we will soon add a very helpful AI assistant that can handle most tasks across the entire vertical with just a prompt.

What’s the hardest problem your team solved that users will never even notice?

Hristo: Our biggest challenge was to strike a balance between maintaining the platform’s simplicity and adding all the necessary functionalities. That’s something a lot of other platforms neglect as they ship countless features, and, in the end, website owners are stuck with an overly complicated interface. 

George: The fluidity of actually using the Website Builder and E-commerce Platform. Users see a desktop app-like experience — instant previews when dragging the color picker, responsive undo and redo, and complex tasks like dragging, resizing, and arranging elements that feel as smooth as using a graphic design tool. That fluidity was essential, and it took serious engineering effort to achieve. We didn’t just need to make it work — we needed to make it feel effortless, so there’s zero frustration when building a site.

We have more features coming soon that will streamline online store management even further with a helpful AI assistant that can handle most tasks across the entire workflow with just a prompt.

With all the platforms for online store building, why did you decide to build one as well?

Hristo: For the past 20+ years, we’ve been striving to empower small businesses and entrepreneurs to succeed online. We saw that in the landscape of tools, many focus on a rich set of functionalities that overwhelm users, and instead of simplifying processes, they create more bottlenecks. So we focused our efforts on simplifying and streamlining each of the e-commerce business pillars: product management, payments, deliveries, and taxes. This way, we strive to make it easy for anyone without a technical background to build a fully functional website on their own. Our main goal was to support businesses by letting them focus on generating revenue rather than managing their websites.

Our mission is the success of our clients

This launch isn’t just about a new platform. It’s about enabling people all around the world to achieve more without dealing with the technical complexity. Because there are no bad business ideas — just ones that never make it past the idea stage.

If you want to be part of a team where every decision enables millions of users around the globe to create their successful online business, apply to our open positions.