Tag Archives: content

Swiss Unmetered CDN solutions by RIPE LIR. Servers for streaming. SEO IPs.

Posted on February 28, 2019 by Hosting

Hello! Content Delivery solution and Streaming at Swiss, Germany and USA. Our advantages: 1) 1x to 4x CPU servers, > 256 RAM, 1-20Gbps… | Read the rest of http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1754360&goto=newpost Continue reading →

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What is a Content Management System?

Posted on February 5, 2019 by Hosting

The post What is a Content Management System? appeared first on HostGator Blog . To be a successful business owner, one of the important skills you need is the ability to identify the right tools that enable you to run your business effectively. For many businesses, that will include using a content management system (CMS).   What is a Content Management System? A web content management system is software expressly designed to help you create, edit, organize, and publish your content online. It provides an intuitive interface for editing your web pages that saves you from having to deal with coding directly, or call your developer each time you need to make an update. And it makes it easy to provide the right level of access to every person in your company that contributes or makes changes to the website. Within a CMS, you can store all the content you’ve already created and any media you want to include on your website. You can easily keep track of which content is published, which is scheduled, and which is in draft form. And many CMSs allow you to track changes to pieces of content, so you can see how versions differ and revert to an earlier one if needed. Does My Business Need a Content Management System? For small businesses, “need” might be too strong a word here, but most businesses will benefit from having a CMS. A CMS will particularly be useful for any business where: Anyone in charge of making updates to the website lacks coding skills . Whether you have a one-person business or over 100 employees, if anyone in a position to add content to the website or make tweaks to the pages already there isn’t skilled at coding, they’ll struggle to do their job without a CMS. And since small coding errors can sometimes bring down a whole site, you don’t want to take that risk. Multiple people have access to the site, each of them for different tasks. A CMS lets you set up accounts for the different people in your company that need some level of access to the website, but you can define what level of access they have with WordPress user roles to improve security . If you hire a blogger to write and publish blog posts, you don’t have to give them the ability to make changes to your home page. A CMS gives you control over who can change what, and helps you protect your website from accidental errors and malicious changes alike. You already have or plan to create a lot of content. If your business is doing a content marketing strategy , a CMS provides a centralized location for you to store and manage all the different pieces of content you have. Everyone involved in content creation, editing, and scheduling can easily access everything they need and keep track of its status. A good web content management system will make managing your website a lot easier—both for you and anyone else you employ to help out. And it will help you keep your content and web pages organized and looking the way you want them to.   How Much Do Content Management Systems Cost? As a business owner, it sometimes feels like you can’t go a whole day without hearing about some new product or service you need. You only have so much money to spend, so even if the argument is persuasive, learning that there’s one more product you should invest in is often dispiriting. So here’s the good news: almost all of the most popular content management systems are free. They have add-ons and plug-ins that cost more, if you want additional features. And in some cases, hiring a web developer or someone to help you get your CMS set up or get more out of it is worth it. But a good CMS in and of itself doesn’t have to cost you anything. Even with a CMS though, you will still need to invest in web hosting and register a domain name , if you haven’t already. And a CMS isn’t usually the best tool for doing web design—you’ll want a professional web designer or a good website builder for that part. But once you have those basics covered, a CMS enables you to maintain and update your website over time without any added cost.   What to Look for in a Content Management System Every business is different, so what your business will value most in a CMS depends on your particular goals and needs. Even so, there are a few main features most businesses will want to consider when deciding which CMS to go with. Look for a CMS that: Is within your budget. This may seem strange to mention when we just told you that most content management systems are free, but there are potential costs involved you need to consider. To start, a couple of CMS options that provide specialized features or functionality do have a price, so there’s a small chance your best option won’t be free. Secondly, even with free CMS tools, you’ll likely want to use some plugins or extensions to get the full functionality you need. So before you make a decision, research the cost of the additional tools you expect to invest in, so you get a more accurate picture of the full cost of your choice.   Is intuitive. Some content management systems are more user friendly for beginners than others. Sometimes that means a tradeoff: a CMS that’s harder to learn and work with could provide more options for customization, if you know what you’re doing. If you value ease of use over being able to realize a very specific vision, then you want to look for a CMS that you’ll be able to start using without having to spend a lot of time learning the ropes. Lets you define permissions and roles. If more than one person will be involved with updating the website, you want the power to control who has access and what kind of access they have. A CMS that makes it easy to set up other users and define their level of permissions reduces the risk of letting people into the backend of your website by making sure each one can only make the kinds of changes you’ve assigned. Makes it easy to apply proper formatting. Strong copywriting can improve your website tremendously. Generally speaking, good writing for the web includes using headings and formatting to organize your content for readability. Applying that formatting with HTML can be confusing, so a good CMS should provide easy options for doing so within its interface. Adding headings, italics, bolding, and list options should be a simple as clicking on a button. Helps you organize your content and media. The more web content you create, the more important it will be to have a good method for keeping it all organized. Consider if your CMS provides options for categorizing the content, blog posts,and media you upload, and easily finding the specific piece you need at the moment you need it. Provides support. Technology is complicated and you’ll inevitably hit up against questions or challenges when using your CMS. Choose an option that has plenty of online resources for helping you find the answers you need and/or customer support staff you can reach out to. Because the most popular content management systems have huge communities of users, you can usually find good support resources in spite of not paying for the software. Is compatible with your other software. If you already have software you use for things like e-commerce, website analytics, or customer relationship management (CRM), then you want to make sure your CMS will play nice with the tools you have. Provides on-site optimization features. You want people to find your website, so SEO should be a top priority. A CMS can simplify optimizing your web pages for SEO with features that allow you to customize page URLs, title tags, headings, and alt tags—all without having to touch the page’s code. Has an extensive library of plugins. The CMS will provide the basic functionality you need, but most businesses will want access to an array of different features that don’t come with the CMS itself. For that, you’ll need plugins or extensions. The most popular content management systems have huge libraries of plugins made by hundreds of developers that you can use to add functionality to your website. Offers security options. The flip side of choosing a CMS that’s popular is that it could become the target of hackers. But you can protect yourself from that risk by making sure the CMS provides basic security options such as two-factor authentication, security software and plugins, and regular updates to fix any security vulnerabilities they find. You may not need every one of these features, but consider which ones you’d like your CMS to have and how much of a priority each one is. Once you get set up with a CMS, it’s easier to stick with it than to switch to a new new one, so making the right decision to start will make your life a lot easier.   5 Most Popular Content Management Systems When starting your search for the right CMS for your business, there’s a good chance one of the most popular content management systems out there will satisfy your needs. Here are the main ones to check out.   1. WordPress Easily the most popular CMS, with well over half of the market share, WordPress is a great choice for many websites. There are endless benefits of WordPress as a content management system . Because of its popularity, there are loads of experts and developers working to provide a vast library of resources for the CMS. That includes over 50,000 popular WordPress plugins , thousands of themes to choose from, dozens of thorough WordPress blogs , and a huge community of users who can help with any questions you have. WordPress itself is free. Many of the plugins and themes will cost you, although often the cost is reasonable. And you can even find WordPress web hosting plans specifically designed to work well with this content management system. For lots of small businesses, WordPress will provide just what you need.   2. Joomla Joomla is one of the other most popular content management systems out there. While its community isn’t nearly as large as that of WordPress, it still boasts over 2 million sites and 1,400 volunteers who help keep the CMS running smoothly and improving over time. Joomla has a reputation for being a little harder to learn than WordPress, but it’s still pretty easy for beginners and advanced users alike. And they provide a comprehensive library of resources to help users learn how to get started with Joomla and get the most out of it. Like WordPress, Joomla is free, but you can invest in extensions that add functionality at a cost.   3. Drupal Drupal is the third most popular CMS option, with over 1 million websites using it. They have a reputation for being better suited for developers with some skill than for beginners, and for providing more options for customizing your site and powering more complex solutions. Like the others, Drupal itself is free, and there are many integrated modules you can use to customize your website that are also free. But since taking advantage of the CMS’s flexibility to do more with your website requires skill, you may need to spend money on a developer to get your site where you want it to be.   4. Magento Magento is a CMS that’s specifically designed for ecommerce websites. Magento has both a free open source version and paid versions that pack greater functionality. The free version includes ecommerce features like mobile shopping and integrated checkout, payment, and shipping functionality. The paid version includes additional analytics and marketing features. For ecommerce businesses, it’s worth looking into.   5. Blogger Blogger is a simple and straightforward CMS for anyone primarily interested in learning how to start a blog . It’s free and easy to use, but somewhat limited in its functionality in comparison to the other content management systems on this list. It’s not an open source CMS, which means there’s less flexibility and fewer plugins or other add-ons you can use to customize your website or add functionality. For simple websites, it can be a good enough choice. For many businesses, it won’t offer enough features for your needs.   Choosing a Content Management System for Your Website The easier it is to update your website, the more power you have to improve how well it works over time. The right CMS will put control of your website into your hands, without having to learn complicated programming languages. Determine which of these solutions makes the most sense for your business and get started. HostGator supports all of the most popular content management systems with our web hosting plans, including WordPress, Magento, Drupal, and Joomla. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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How to Strengthen Your Content Strategy with Customer Input

Posted on January 21, 2019 by Hosting

The post How to Strengthen Your Content Strategy with Customer Input appeared first on HostGator Blog . One of the first things you learn when you start doing content marketing for your business is how important it is to learn who your audience is. Marketers use a lot of different techniques and tools for this—reviewing analytics, turning to market research tools , investing in social listening . But surprisingly, research from the Content Marketing Institute found that 58% of marketers are skipping the most obvious tactic of all for getting to know your audience: talking to them directly. The Importance of Talking to Your Customers Analytics can show you trends in what products customers buy, or which content topics they respond to, but they can’t always tell you why. And social listening can alert you to complaints about your products online, but they often leave out key information you need to understand the problem and provide a satisfying solution. Most of the tools and tactics you can use to learn about your audience are second hand. They can help you see overall trends, but they leave out important context. By asking your customers direct questions—or even better, actually having a two-way conversation with them—you can fill in the gaps in your knowledge and hear directly from the source.   How to Get Customer Input The why of talking to your customers is pretty self-explanatory: you want to get to know who they are and what they care about. The how is what makes it a challenge to do at all and, more importantly, do well. For those in the 58% of marketers that could use some help to start communicating with your customers, we talked to Cathy McPhillips, Vice President of Marketing at the Content Marketing Institute for some tips on how to do so.   1. Make sure you ask the right questions. First things first, if you’re going to make an effort to start listening to your customers more, you have to be strategic about the questions you ask. “Definitely have questions planned in advance and definitely take those questions and cycle them through the whole organization,” Cathy recommends. One person shouldn’t be deciding what to talk about in a vacuum. Consulting other departments ensures you’ll get a wider view of what you need to know and that you’re not overlooking important information other people in the company need And don’t just stick with that same list of questions as you go. Each person you talk to is unique, so tailor the questions you ask where relevant. And use the feedback you get early on to make changes to your questions that make them more useful.   2. Use social media. “The easiest way to [start getting input from customers] is to start using your social media and use places you’ve already started building an audience,” Cathy suggests. The whole point of social media is to be social, so treat it like a platform for two-way communication with your followers.  Ask questions via LinkedIn groups or Twitter chats, or wherever you’re already connected with people. Listen to what they say and make an organized record of what you learn. Social media may be a good place to hear from your audience, but it’s not the greatest place for organizing that information or finding it again later. You definitely don’t want to stop with social media, but it can be a good place to start communicating more directly with your audience and may help you spot some of the best customers to reach out to for more detailed conversations.      3. Conduct a survey. A survey is one of the easiest places to start getting more direct feedback from your customers. If you’re worried about getting people to actually spend a few minutes taking a survey, Cathy has two main suggestions: Give them a clear time frame upfront of how long it will take (and make sure it’s a pretty short time commitment —5 minutes or so). Offer to enter them in a drawing for a $50 gift card. That lets people know that the commitment is low, and the possible reward is high. 4. Identify and call your most devoted customers. Social media and surveys can be good for playing the numbers game—you can reach a lot of customers at once with minimal effort. But to really fill in the gaps in your knowledge and learn the context behind the answers you get there, you want actual conversations over the phone or in person. To identify the best customers to talk to, look to your data to learn who your best customer advocates are. They’re a good place to start because they’ll often be happy to give you their time. “I’ve spent 30 minutes on the phone with people before and they want nothing in return other than knowing that we’re caring enough to listen to what they have to say,” says Cathy. Your happy customers can supply you with valuable information on: How they use your products The specific problems they solve The specific products or features they like or use the most Any new products or features they’d like to see What type of promotions they’d be most likely to respond to What types of content they appreciate the most What their day to day looks like Other products they use and like If you come into the call prepared, you can usually cover a lot of territory in a short amount of time, but you might want to leave your schedule open in case they have a lot to say.   5. Identify and call your least enthusiastic customers. Another important category of customers to talk to is those that aren’t happy with your products. You may think getting them on the phone to talk would be a hard sell, but Cathy suggests you might be surprised. “If someone cared enough to listen to why I wasn’t taking an action, I feel like to most customers that’s enough of a reward for them,” she says. Your unhappy customers can provide some of the same type of information your happy customers do, but with some additional valuable insights about what doesn’t work for them and how your products or service would need to be different to satisfy. The call may give you room to help save the relationship, but even if not, it can help you either better clarify who your target audience is by excluding the people your product isn’t a good fit for, or identify opportunities for ways to improve your product or services to better meet people’s needs.   6. Use what you learn. Once you’ve done the hard work of gathering all this valuable information, you won’t get anything out of it unless you put it to use. Record all the answers you gain throughout the process and get it all into a database or other format that makes it easy to organize and sort. Make sure you get the right information to the specific people in the company it will benefit. Any feedback on changes to the product should go to your product development team, and complaints about a customer service experience need to get in front of your customer service department. For marketers, commit to spending time using what you’ve learned to: Update your personas to improve their accuracy. Re-work your content strategy to ensure you answer the common questions that came up and address the topics your customers expressed interest in. Identify content pieces that should be updated based on the new information you’ve learned.     The better you know your customers, the more successful you’ll be at creating content they care about . But only if you make an effort to actually listen to them, and incorporate what they tell you into your content strategy. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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7 Ways to Improve Site Speed and Performance in 2019

Posted on December 28, 2018 by Hosting

The post 7 Ways to Improve Site Speed and Performance in 2019 appeared first on HostGator Blog . You go to a website and it feels like it is taking forever to load. What do you do? Do you wait patiently for the webpage to load in its entirety? Or do you simply close the browser tab and move on with your life? The fact of the matter is that page load time not only has a dramatic impact on user experience, but it also greatly impacts conversion rates, as well as search engine optimization. Regardless of the type of website that you have —whether it’s a blog, an e-commerce store, an online forum, or an affiliate landing page—it is in your best interest to provide the fastest site speed and performance possible. But how do you get there? Here are seven tips that you can use to reduce those load times and boost the user experience on your website in 2019. 1. Use a Content Delivery Network There are certainly a lot of steps you can take in terms of the actual content on your website. You can shrink images and optimize your JavaScript. But you also have to consider where your servers are located relative to the users who are accessing them. The Internet isn’t wholly virtual, because physical space must still be traversed. It is substantially faster for someone in Los Angeles to access to a server in San Francisco than it is for that same person to reach a server in London or even Chicago. The goal of a content delivery network, or CDN for short, is to improve website performance by picking a server that’s closest to the end user. We recommend you take a look at the way a CDN works , to get a better understanding on not only how the concept works, by also why it’s being used my the majority of top sites on the internet today. That’s where there’s a whole network to deliver this content. The best CDNs take this further by offering higher-speed storage, optimization tools, intelligent and dynamic caching, and security features to optimize performance even further. You’ll want a CDN with great global network coverage and high availability solutions. The pro plan from Incapsula starts from $59 per site per month, while the business plan goes for $299 per site per month.   2. Smush Your Images It probably won’t surprise you to learn that loading images can be one of the most taxing activities in terms of site speed and performance. Part of this has to do with resolution, but it also has to do with the level of image compression and other factors as well. There’s no real reason to upload and display a massive 20-megapixel photo if you’re just going to resize and show it as a thumbnail that’s only 200 pixels wide. You can start from the images you actually upload to your server in the first place. Generally speaking, you don’t need images that are several megabytes in size. Depending on circumstances, you can get away with 200 KB or less with no real discernible loss in quality for most users. Another great approach is a WordPress plugin called Smush . The goal is to cut “all the unnecessary data without slowing down your site.” 3. Shrink Your JavaScript and CSS One of the first and easiest places for you to look in terms of improving page load times is by addressing unnecessary inefficiencies in your site’s code. More specifically, JavaScript (JS) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can be very inefficient in their default code. There’s a lot of white space, for starters, and several lines of redundant code can be reduced down to something much shorter. As you can imagine, the less code a browser (and server) need to run through, the faster the page should load. If you have a WordPress site, it’s easiest if you use a plugin like WP Super Minify to do this for you. You’ll want to make a full website backup before you do, of course. As recommended by many of the top CSS sites , if you have a different kind of site or you’d rather just do it manually, there are several online tools that can do this to. Minifier is one such example. The tool works by removing whitespace, stripping comments, combining files, and optimizes/shortens a few common programming patterns.   4. Reduce HTTP Requests All else held constant, the simplest sites are going to be the ones that load the fastest. If you have a simple, plain HTML page with plain text and minimal images, it’ll probably be quite quick. If you have a dynamic page that calls upon a number of other factors and content types, you’re going to get bogged down. You can dramatically increase the speed of your site by reducing the number of HTTP requests. The cleaner the code, the better. Perfmatters is a performance-oriented plugin for WordPress that can automate most of this for you. It starts from $19.95 per year for one site, going up to $99.95 per year for unlimited sites. While many site owners and bloggers might not understand what each of these settings or commands actually are, the tool makes it extremely easy to check on or off which performance options you would like enabled.   5. Upgrade to Dedicated Hosting Most people who are just starting out with their first website, and indeed many veterans too, typically opt for shared hosting because it is usually the most cost-effective option. What this means, though, is that you are sharing resources (server and bandwidth) with other customers and you have no control over how they are using those resources. If another website on the same server suddenly sees a monumental influx of traffic, the site speed and performance of your website will suffer. There are many variables outside of your control. To overcome this, you might consider getting an advanced dedicated server . They have managed and unmanaged solutions, but the long and the short of it is that you get a server all to yourself. This allows for much greater customization, should you so desire. More importantly, you get dedicated hardware and much more consistent performance. That means faster speeds overall, especially when you opt for dedicated servers with better hardware too.   6. Enable Lazy Loading Generally speaking, when someone arrives at a webpage, the entirety of that webpage will try to load. Some elements can load simultaneously, while others must load sequentially. Depending on how the site is designed and laid out, users may experience really long loading times due to elements that they can’t even see yet (and they may not ever see). Or they’ll notice that the site is still loading in their browser, even though it looks as if the content of interest is already available. In both cases, this detracts from the user experience and hampers site speed. A way to overcome this is something called lazy loading. When lazy loading is enabled, elements on a webpage are loaded on an as-needed basis. In this way, items further down the page don’t get loaded until the user scrolls down there. This results in the perception of faster load times, as elements higher up the page are prioritized. There’s a great guide on the Google Developers Web Fundamentals section for more on this technique.   7. Minimize External Scripts Widgets can be great. They can be wonderfully convenient, updating your website with all sorts of dynamic content. Maybe you’ve got a Twitter widget in your sidebar that displays your latest tweets. Maybe you use a widget from Amazon to display featured products. There’s a world of possibility. The problem is that when you rely on these external scripts, you are also at the mercy of these external scripts for page load times. If Twitter happens to be hanging for whatever reason, then your site speed suffers as it waits for that widget to load correctly. And the same is true with all sorts of “hidden” elements on your page that rely on external services too. While it may not be completely practical to eliminate all external scripts altogether — you’d want to keep Google Analytics , for instance — it is prudent to minimize their use as to minimize their impact on page load times.   Better site performance tends to improve user engagement . Implement these tips in 2019. Your website visitors will thank you! Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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Stop Domain masking / stealing content ? !

Posted on November 30, 2018 by Hosting

Okay – so i recently found out that some websites are simply either masking our domain with theirs or using rss to leech the content – or ma… | Read the rest of http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1742166&goto=newpost Continue reading →

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