Tag Archive for: Wordpress

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What makes the best WordPress hosting?

At first glance, it may seem easy to choose the best. Although, in reality, it’s quite a frustrating process when you don’t have pointers that could help you decide what is the best choice for you. So, let’s get straight into it.

The first thing to check is if the host, which you’re considering to use, meets recommended requirements for WordPress support:

  • PHP 7.3+. In this case, I would recommend PHP 7.4. WordPress websites present faster execution times and less memory usage when using PHP 7.4, compared with previous versions. Just make sure that your WordPress theme and plugins are updated for the recent release. Also, it’s worth mentioning that PHP 7.4 comes with many other exciting features.
  • MySQL 5.6+ or MariaDB 10.1+. Make sure that your potential host uses a secure and high performing relational database management system (RDBMS). An industry-standard like MySQL or MariaDB with its cutting edge features like GIS support should do the trick.
  • HTTPS support (SSL/TLS). HTTPS is a secure extension of HTTP. Websites that install and configure an SSL/TLS certificate can use the HTTPS protocol to establish a secure connection with the server. The goal of SSL/TLS is to make it safe and secure to transmit sensitive information, including personal data, payment, or login information. SSL/TLS is a must whenever confidential information such as usernames and passwords or payment processing information is being transferred.
  • LiteSpeed web servers (LSWS). I would definitely recommend this, although it isn’t a requirement. LSWS increases the performance and scalability of web hosting platforms through its event-driven architecture. So, it has the capability of serving thousands of clients simultaneously with a minimum usage of server resources such as memory and CPU. To put a cherry on top – WordPress has the LiteSpeed Cache plugin developed by LiteSpeed engineers. It vastly improves the loading speed of your website.

Since many of the hosts meet these recommended requirements, it shouldn’t be hard for you to find an attractive web host. After you’ve done that, there are other things to check:

  • Price. Keep in mind that you don’t need to choose the most expensive hosting or plan to get the best quality. There are hosting providers that are perfect for WordPress hosting, and for a simple website that doesn’t require many resources, you can get a deal from KES550/month. So, your budget doesn’t have to be huge!
  • Uptime. One of the most influential aspects when choosing a web host. What you should settle for is a host with an uptime of at least 99.9%.
  • Support. Time to time, things get complicated or confusing. In this case, hosting providers have customer support agents who do their best to help you out. What you should look for is if they provide 24/7 live chat support. I believe that this kind of support is the most effective when solving technical problems. Sharing structured, easy to read instructions, making it easy for a client to follow, even without much technical knowledge.
  • Easy WordPress installation. If you’re merely a beginner, using a CMS could be overwhelming. So, it’s a bonus if a hosting provider offers WordPress auto-installer. Just fill the required fields and click “Install”!
  • WordPress tutorials. Some web hosts got your back on that part – many WordPress and web hosting related tutorials (*). Not a must but a good thing to have within a hand’s reach.

(*) Artkenya hosting includes a full suite of WordPress video tutorials.

Artkenya hosting meets all of the above requirements. Click here to check out our competitive hosting plans.

The last thing left to do is to choose the right plan for your website. It isn’t too hard of a task when you know what each plan is best used for:

  • Shared hosting. The most popular type of hosting. It isn’t the best option for websites receiving lots of traffic but a really excellent and cheap choice for blogging and small businesses.
  • VPS hosting. With Virtual Private Server (VPS) you get dedicated server space, so it’s a more secure and stable solution than shared hosting. However, it’s smaller-scale and cheaper than renting an entire server. Perfect for high-traffic blogs and established websites.
  • Cloud hosting. This type of hosting uses multiple different servers to balance the load and maximize uptime. This means that if one server fails, another kicks in to keep everything running. The main benefits of cloud hosting include a significant focus on uptime, isolated resources, easy scaling, and a dedicated IP address. If a website is mission-critical, meaning that the company can’t function without it, then cloud hosting is a good idea. It’s also chosen by many e-commerce stores, lead generation sites, corporate websites and high-traffic projects.

Artkenya offers all of these hosting plans (VPS hosting on request). In addition, we offer ‘Managed Web Hosting’ on our Cloud server, which includes a full suite of maintenance, SEO and security tasks.

In the end, it all comes to many choices when trying to discover the best. As you can see, there are numerous things to consider, but it’s well worth it to dedicate time for some research and make sure that your website is in the care of the most significant web hosting company you could find. Hopefully, this answer will aid you in finding the best fit for your project.

Go ahead and contact us today to find out more about web hosting, email hosting and web development!

 

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WordPress Now Runs 30% Of All Websites

By Michael Rojek, Founder at Husaria Marketing

According to a survey of the most popular content management systems by W3Techs, since February of 2018 WordPress is being used on 30% of all websites on the net, up from 25% in 2015. Its market share of the content management industry is over 60% as a result. WordPress is the market leader and also the fastest-growing CMS, beating SquareSpace and Wix combined by threefold in new website statistics. W3Techs bases their statistics off of data collected from the top 10 million websites ranked by Alexa, averaged over a three month span.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a free and open-source content management system developed by the WordPress Foundation. It makes publishing content online simpler through an easy-to-use and customizable GUI, and a wide range of themes and plugins that give nearly endless possibilities to developers.

WordPress Themes

WordPress websites employ themes, which let you change the look of a website without having to do any changes to the code. WordPress requires at least one theme to be active, but you can keep as many as you like on reserve, and shuffle through them to decide which is the best fit for you.

WordPress Plugins

WordPress is approaching 55,000 officially recognized plugins. Plugins let users further extend the capabilities of the WordPress CMS, and have dedicated developers around the world. Plugins let you do everything from creating a temporary pop-up notification, to integrations with other business systems you use like MailChimp, and can support an agile and flexible e-commerce storefront.

WordPress makes content management systems more accessible

What Are My Options?

WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS for a good reason: it’s free, open-source, and highly flexible. You can build complex sites in minutes, and have nearly endless opportunities for how you want your website to look and feel.

Here at Husaria Marketing we build our website in WordPress, as well as those for numerous clients. We offer our clients the flexibility and reliability of Divi, the most popular premium theme and visual page builder. Among other useful plugins offered alongside it is Bloom, which is responsible for the e-mail signup popup that showed up on the bottom right (at the time of writing this of course).

Additional plugins to consider for your WordPress installation, and those we install for our clients are the WooCommerce ecommerce platform built for WordPress, AIOSEO Pro for making SEO optimization a breeze, WordPress MultiLingual (WPML) for multi-language sites, as well as more niche options for delivering PDF invoices, handling e-mail signups, and map integrations.

 

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Is it necessary for a new WordPress blog to use SSL?

By Sandra Jocic, Digital Marketing Manager at theiuvo.com

Google’s intention to debunk and penalize potentially unsafe websites is going further.

The recent Chrome 56 browser release introduced a novelty, making sure that non-techie users understand that the green padlock hanging in the left-hand corner of the address bar is not a mere gimcrack, as many users perceived it so far.

Google announced the change last fall, and there it is.

 

There’s hardly a possibility to ignore or misinterpret the “Not secure” label that now hangs on the websites without the safe protocol. A few visitors to a flagged website might understand that this means it simply lacks the SSL certificate – but if they weren’t about to enter any confidential info, it would still be OK for them to hang there. However, a great majority will probably take it for an alarm and just make a U-turn from the website, not willing to take any risk.

HTTPS became a ranking signal on Google as early as 2014, but these days the new Chrome version showed us that they are serious about boosting the “HTTPS everywhere” campaign. They started penalizing all non-secure websites, rather than just rewarding the secure ones, as before. By some estimations, this means that up to two thirds of all the websites on the Internet will suffer the consequences.

Which is fair enough. If you are ignoring your website’s and its visitors’ security, the search engines (and therefore, the users) will be encouraged to start ignoring you. Therefore, users’ confidential information won’t be jeopardized in any way, but it will be your SEO which will take the shot. It seems that the only way to persuade people to raise the safety level is to strike them where it hurts most – on the profit side.

So, let’s wrap it up. What does the SSL certificate that Google so strongly recommends you to obtain actually mean?

Opening any website is done by establishing a communication with servers. Just like any other communication, this kind can also be intercepted by potential attackers (who may be human, but in most cases they are actually human-operated programs), who try to steal any valuable or confidential information either by eavesdropping or redirecting you to their own website that is identical as yours.

Now, if you have enabled the HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure), instead of the traditional HTTP, this means the communication is being encrypted in a way that is decodable only by the computer that is sending the request and the server that’s receiving it. Anyone else would only get an unintelligible code that they can’t put to any use.

The process of obtaining the SSL certificate should be quite easy. You don’t have to enter the mishmash by yourself – the first thing you should do is contact your hosting provider. Some of them even offer SSL for free. Even if you have to pay additional fees (typically ranging from about $100 up to as much as $1.500 per year), just think about the potential damage you’re avoiding, which will soon be measured by decreasing numbers of visits because people got averted from your website.

So, if you care about your online business, the first thing you should have in mind is protecting it by raising its security.

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13 Impressive WordPress Stats Worth Bookmarking for Clients

WordPress powers one in every four websites you visit online. Huge, right? It’s safe to say WordPress is no longer just a blogging tool – it’s by far the most popular content management system online and we’ve got the numbers to back it up.

If you’ve ever had trouble convincing clients WordPress isn’t just for bloggers, here are 13 facts that proves its dominance – and are worth sharing at your next client meeting.

1. WordPress Powers 25.5% of the Web

WordPress’ remarkable growth isn’t slowing down any time soon. WordPress hit 20% usage just two years ago and if that trend is set to continue, we could see WordPress reach its next milestone, 30%, in 2017.

In October, 29.7% of all new sites used WordPress.

2. WordPress Powers 30.3% of the Top 1000 Websites

If you don’t think that figure is impressive, consider this: using a standard CMS is not very common among the top 1000 sites, and more than 90% of them are using custom solutions. That 30.3% has some weight behind it now, huh?

Drupal comes in second with 19.7% and Adobe Experience Manager this with 11.8%.

There's no questioning WordPress' dominance.
There’s no questioning WordPress’ dominance.

3. WordPress is the Most Popular CMS

Among the 300+ content management systems that web technology survey service W3Techs routinely monitors, WordPress dominates with a whopping 58.7% market share.

It’s worth noting that 57% of websites don’t use any identifiable CMS, so there’s still a lot of room for WordPress to further make its mark.

4. WordPress is the Fastest Growing CMS

Every 74 seconds a site within the top 10 million starts using WordPress. Compare this with Shopify, the second-fastest growing CMS, which gains a new site every 22 minutes.

5. WordPress Powers Some of the World’s Biggest Brands and Names

These include Sony, Microsoft, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Time Magazine, The New Yorker, Mashable, TechCrunch, Coca Cola, Mercedes Benz, Samsung, Star Wars, PlayStation, General Motors, NFL, Bloomberg, MTV, Facebook, eBay, Google, LinkedIn, Flickr, NASA, and TED.

Then there’s Jay Z, Beyoncé, Katy Perry, Justin Timberlake, Kobe Bryant, The Rolling Stones, Malala Yousafzai, Sylvester Stallone, just to name a few.

WordPress.com’s VIP service hosts many of these brands and names. WordPress.org also showcases some of the Fortune 500 companies that use the CMS.

6. There Have Been 143 versions of WordPress to Date

This figure includes both major and minor (security, maintenance etc.) releases.

Volunteers all over the world contribute to the WordPress project, ensuring it is regularly and continually updated to improve both its functionality and security. WordPress 4.4 alone had 471 contributors.

The latest version, WordPress 4.4, has been downloaded more than 6.5 million times since it was released just three weeks ago.

7. WordPress is Available to Download in 57 Languages

WordPress can deliver your content to visitors worldwide in a variety of languages. If English isn’t your native tongue, you can download WordPress in Bengali, Danish, Esperanto, and Icelandic, just to name a few of the translations on offer.

If the language you prefer isn’t available, it probably will be soon – the WordPress translation team has almost finished translating the CMS into 12 other languages, with even more translations underway.

According to W3Techs, 37.3% of English language websites use WordPress, while usage numbers are between 38% and 40% for Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish sites, and they reach 51.3% for Bengali and 54.4% for Bosnian.

If the language you prefer isn’t available, it probably will be soon – the WordPress translation team has almost finished translating the CMS into 12 other languages, with even more translations underway.
If the language you prefer isn’t available, it probably will be soon – the WordPress translation team has almost finished translating the CMS into 12 other languages, with even more translations underway.

8. There Are 42,000+ Plugins for WordPress

And that’s just the plugins you can download for free. There are more than 100 premium plugins on our site, another 4000+ hosted over at CodeCanyon, any many developers release their own plugins for free on GitHub or on their personal websites.

With many thousands of plugins available, there’s no end to how you can extend and expand the functionality of WordPress.

9. Tuesday is the Most Popular Day for Downloading WordPress

According to WP Central, users are more likely to download WordPress on a Tuesday than any other day of the week. Saturday is the least popular day.

10. WordPress.com Gets More Monthly Visitors Than Apple

On average, WordPress.com receives visits from 35,910,572 people each month, compared to less than half that number, 16,837,476, at apple.com. To put it into perspective, that’s the population of Canada inundating WordPress.com monthly to start new blogs, write new posts, or visit existing sites.

11. WordPress Developers Earn $50 an Hour

In his 2012 State of the Word, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg revealed 6,800 self-employed people had built more than 170,000 sites personally, and charged a median hourly rate of $50. If each site took only 3 hours to make, that’s $29.5M of work at the average hourly rate. Combine that with data from the 2014 State of the Word, which showed a quarter of the people who filled in the annual WordPress Survey make a full-time living off the CMS.

Over at Quora, WordPress contributor Mark Jaquith puts the $50 figure into perspective, saying a “WordPress consultant” could be someone who can copy-paste some basic theme modification for $30-$60 an hour, to someone who can code a plugin from scratch ($80-$150 an hour), to high-end consulting on performance, security, scaling and deployment ($200+ an hour).

Freelancer, a popular outsourcing marketplace, lists 739,794 WordPress developers worldwide and reports 393,250 projects have been completed, worth $71,020,304.

Upwork lists “WordPress” as one of its top skills, with an average project cost of $194 and an average project duration of 5+ weeks.

According to SimplyHired, the average salary for “WordPress jobs” is $40,000.

12. 18 New WordPress Posts Every Second

In an average month, bloggers who use WordPress.com or have Jetpack installed on a self-hosted setup post 53.1 million new posts. That’s 1.7 million new posts every day, 71,000 every hour or about 1000 every minute.

All up, bloggers produce 43.5 million new comments each month.

Traffic-wise, more than 409 million people view more than 20.3 billion WordPress.com pages each month.

WordPress.com regularly publishes traffic stats.
WordPress.com regularly publishes traffic stats.

13. WordPress Takes Care of 80-90% of Google’s Crawling Issues

According to Matt Cutts, the former head of Google’s web spam team, sites built with WordPress are capable of ranking higher in search results because the CMS takes care of 80-90% of Google’s crawling issues.

That’s most of the hard work done so you don’t have to worry about the small things and you can get on with creating quality content for your site.

Do you share any other WordPress stats and facts with clients? Have we missed any of your favourite stats? Let us know in the comments below.

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