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 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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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 haveSiteGround 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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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 flawDisclosed 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.
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.
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:
“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.
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.
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.
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.
If you’ve been building with Coderick AI, you know the drill: describe what you want, and Coderick AI builds it for you. It’s fast, it’s intuitive, and it works. But once your project starts taking shape, not every change needs a full prompt. Sometimes you just want to fix a typo, swap out an image, or adjust a button color – and you want to do it now, not through another round of back-and-forth with the AI.
That’s exactly why we built Visual Edit in Coderick AI.
Click, change, done – that’s Visual Edit
Visual Edit is a new way to make changes to your Coderick AI projects – directly in the preview, with a click. Instead of going to chat and writing a new prompt every time you want to tweak something small, you can now click on any text, button, image, link, or section and change it on the spot.
Update a headline. Fix a typo. Change a button label. Swap a link. Adjust a color. All of it happens right where you see it, with no prompt needed – and zero credits used.
It’s the kind of editing that feels obvious once you have it – and frustrating to live without once you’ve tried it.
Generate images with AI, right where you need them
Building a project usually means you’ll need images – and until now, that meant leaving Coderick AI, finding or creating an image somewhere else, and uploading it back. With AI image generation in Coderick AI, you can now click on any image in your project, generate a new one with AI, and swap it in on the spot. Review it in context and move on – no extra tools, no context-switching, no manual uploads.
And if you already have the right image for the spot, upload and replace it directly. This action doesn’t need AI and costs you zero credits.
Transform sections or update elements at scale with focused AI edits
Some changes go beyond a quick text swap but don’t need a full project prompt either. Maybe your pricing section needs a completely different layout. Or the navigation bar of your site needs a different design direction. These aren’t small tweaks, but they’re not “build me a new page” territory either.
That’s what focused AI edits in the Visual Edit are for. From Visual Edit, select a section or an element, and click Edit with AI. The Coderick AI chat locks onto your selected element – describe what you want changed, and the AI reworks just that part. The rest of your project stays exactly as it is.
The difference from the main Coderick AI chat is simple: the chat is for full-project work like adding new pages or making structural changes. Focused AI edits are for when you already know what needs to change and you just need the AI to do it, precisely, in that one spot or section. Shorter prompts, no unintended side effects, better results.
Save credits for the work that matters
Not every edit needs AI, and now, not every edit costs credits. Quick edits through Visual Edit use zero credits. Your balance stays untouched for the work that actually needs AI – generating new sections, reworking layouts, or creating images. And when you do use Edit with AI, it targets only the section you select, so you get more precise results with fewer credits per edit.
Here’s how credits work:
What you’re doing
How
Credits
Edit text, buttons, links, colors
Visual Edit (direct click)
Zero
Swap or upload your own images
Visual Edit (direct click)
Zero
Generate an image with AI
AI image generation
Uses credits
Rework a specific section
Edit with AI
Uses credits (section-level, not full project)
Build something new from scratch
Chat prompt
Uses credits
How to use Visual Edit?
Getting started takes seconds:
Open any project in Coderick AI.
Click the Visual Edit button to switch from the chat-based builder to the visual editor (preview editing).
Click on any element in your project preview – text, buttons, images, links – and edit it directly.
To generate an image, click on an existing image and use the AI image generation option.
For bigger changes, select a section and choose Edit with AI to rework it with a targeted prompt.
When you’re done, click Save to keep your changes, or Exit to discard them.
Ready to try it?
Coderick AI was built to get your vibe coding from idea to live project as fast as possible. But speed isn’t just about the first build – it’s about everything that comes after. The tweaks, the refinements, the “can you just change that one thing” moments that add up.
Visual Edit makes those moments faster and cheaper. Quick edits cost zero credits. Bigger changes are more targeted. And AI image generation means one less reason to leave your project or your workflow.
Visual Edit and AI image generation are now available in all Coderick AI projects. Open a project, switch to Visual Edit, and see how it feels to click, change, and keep building.
