But TurboHub, our exclusive dashboard for WordPress sites, gives you a snapshot of your security status and makes detecting vulnerabilities and updating your protection as easy as one click.

Whether you take care of your own website or are an agency or web developer who manages dozens of sites, TurboHub makes reviewing security status and making the necessary updates a breeze.

Advanced WordPress Security From One Easy-To-Use Dashboard

The TurboHub security tab is the fastest and easiest way to keep your site safe. Whether you manage one website or 1,000, it is vital for monitoring site health and security.

Loaded with features to keep you secure, you can quickly review potential threats in one convenient place. Verify your SSL certificates, make sure malware detection and proactive defenses are enabled, and review potential threats.

Plus, TurboHub recommends actions to eliminate security vulnerabilities. From salt key status to inactive plugins or themes, you can take immediate action directly from the control panel. In most cases, you can enhance your security with one click.

What Is TurboHub?

TurboHub is A2 Hosting’s exclusive control panel for WordPress sites. Designed to make managing and protecting WordPress sites easier, it offers comprehensive metrics about the performance, health, and security of your websites.

Improve your efficiency and workflow by reviewing all of your A2 Hosting WordPress sites in one place. Easily view current performance and security snapshots, review recommendations, and make improvements and updates across all of your sites.

TurboHub Security Features

WordPress site security is one of the core features of the TurboHub control panel. From proactive defense to security best practices, it puts the top security features at your fingertips.

SSL Status & Proactive Defense

When it comes to website security, you need to be proactive. TurboHub’s SSL status and proactive defense indicators ensure your SSL certificate is valid and your malware and proactive security defense are active.

SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, is the industry standard in data encryption for information transferred between a web server and a web browser. It protects online transactions and personal information, ensuring data privacy over the Internet.

A valid SSL certificate tells web browsers – and your customers – that your website follows SSL protocols for secure data transfer, keeping them safe.

Malware and proactive security defenses protect your website against malicious attacks that can hijack your website or steal customer data.

Advanced Website Hosting Protection

TurboHub allows you to instantly validate the status of your firewall and DDoS and brute force protection. These ensure you are safe against attacks designed to gain access to your web server.

A firewall is a digital barrier that blocks unauthorized access to your sites from cyber threats. When active, they block malicious traffic based on predefined security rules.

Reinforced Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection prevents malicious attempts to attack your website and take them offline. DDoS attacks use multiple compromised computer systems to slow down or even crash websites, preventing access to legitimate users.

Brute force protection shields against relentless attacks attempting to log into your system. Attackers will systematically try to guess passwords, encryption keys, or other secret information. Brute force attacks are typically automated, allowing them to rapidly test millions of combinations.

A2 Recommended Actions

TurboHub also includes a number of A2 Hosting recommended security actions, like locking editing abilities on plugins and themes or bcrypt password hashing. These recommendations improve your overall website security, lowering the risk that hackers can access your site data.

Common recommendations include:

• Locking the editing for plugins and themes from WP Admin to prevent the misuse of built-in editing capabilities for malicious purposes.
• Deny direct access to configuration files to block bots and web users from directly accessing and potentially exploiting WordPress config files.
• Remove old wp-config.php backups to eliminate unnecessary files with potentially sensitive information.
• Use bcrypt password hashing for a more secure password storing and hashing method.
• Disable XML-RPC services to close a possible entryway a hacker could exploit your site.

You can easily toggle these options on or off from the TurboHub security panel to fit your security needs and keep your website data safe.

Best Security Practices

TurboHub also analyzes your website to ensure you are following the best security practices. You can identify potential vulnerabilities at a glance and take action to secure your sites. Simply review the recommended security updates and follow the instructions to implement these improvements.

When necessary, TurboHub will recommend the following actions:

• Regenerate salt key passwords to protect your account even if your login cookies are compromised.
• Check for and remove insecure SQL backups and files that could be accessed by hackers.
• Reduce potential vulnerabilities and improve site performance by removing unused plugins and unused WordPress themes.

Just follow the steps associated with each best practice to protect your site.

More TurboHub Features Coming Soon

Committed to the fastest and most reliable hosting solutions, A2 Hosting developed TurboHub to streamline WordPress site performance and management.

From personal sites and hobby projects to agencies and developers managing client sites, it offers features that simplest updates and makes everyone a performance and security expert.

But we aren’t done yet. We have an exciting lineup of advancements that will enhance your workflow and your websites.

A2 Intelligent Performance

Optimize your site’s performance with the power of AI. A2 Intelligent Performance monitors critical performance indicators to keep your site performing at its best. Easily review the data and make the most informed decisions about your site’s speed and reliability.

A2 AI Assistant Inside WordPress

Launch new websites quickly and easily with our AI co-pilot. Exclusive to TurboHub, our A2 AI Assistant for WordPress writes content, generates images, and can even design page layouts. Trained on WordPress help documentation, it will answer common questions and help you get the most out of your WordPress site.

Enhanced Staging

Our upcoming enhanced staging feature makes developing, testing, and deploying website updates a snap. This robust tub maximizes compatibility by recording changes on both staging and live sites. And the advanced 2-way sync ensures changes are mirrored in both environments.

Enhance Your Website Security With TurboHub

Enhance site security and improve your site performance with TurboHub for WordPress from A2 Hosting. Quickly review potential security risks and easily make improvements to protect your website. Streamline your WordPress site management today. TurboHub is available on all A2 Hosting WordPress hosting plans.

The post WordPress Security Made Easy With TurboHub appeared first on The A2 Posting.

Many artists have transitioned and began to find new ways to share their talents in order to stay afloat when in-person events and programs were put on pause.

Finding the right hosting plan for your website is essential when starting an e-commerce business. As more people transition to online shopping, especially during a year like 2020, selling goods and services online has become critically important to stay afloat in the modern economic climate. For the music industry, the last year has been a difficult time to connect and create due to lockdowns and limited public events. Many artists have transitioned and began to find new ways to share their talents in order to stay afloat when in-person events and programs were put on pause.

Jesse Neo, a DJ, and entrepreneur, decided to combine his musical and technological talents to create a platform where artists can connect and collaborate online in a new way. Gemtracks is a music and singing website that provides a range of song instrumentals and articles, as well as an exclusive online store that produces unique backing tracks for bands, singers, and songwriters.

Through Neo’s story, you will learn how a man with musical talent, technological skill, and a powerful dedicated server was able to shift the way musicians collaborate and create music digitally.

A Business that is Changing the Tune of Musical Collaboration

Jesse Neo has been blogging and developing web content since 2006. His vision to create Gemtracks, a music-industry marketplace best known for buying and selling instrumental backing tracks (also known as beats), began when he was in college. He wanted to create an online store so that he could sell the tracks that he was composing. When he first began his store, he was selling his music on a first-come-first-sold model and his customers would have full ownership and copyrights placed in their names.

In 2019 Neo moved to Los Angeles and, through the advice from the local talent there, realized that this e-commerce business model might be very lucrative long term. He transitioned his small business from a private store into a public marketplace for freelance musicians to sell their own songs. He also created the capability for artists to book recording studios and submit their songs to other curators that might be interested in the artist. “I am the sole founder of Gemtracks. I personally programmed, designed, and marketed Gemtracks from scratch,” said Neo. “From time to time, I take on interns and contractors, but the major bulk of the company is done with my own two hands.”

Building a Musical Digital Presence

Finding the right hosting provider for Gemtracks was critical when Neo first began to envision his company. “Everything about Gemtracks depends on the website. Without a website, Gemtracks would not exist. This is why I was very concerned about where my server was hosted.”

When he first began searching for a hosting provider, Neo had a few server requirements that he felt were essential to the eventual success of his site, including ensuring sufficient processor capacity to meet business demands, great support, uptime, and reliability. He originally learned about A2 Hosting off of a recommendation from a friend back in 2006. “I remember a friend operating a small blog telling me she paid only a few dollars a month for hosting. She gave me the name of A2 Hosting – and I have been a loyal customer ever since,” said Neo. “ I have also developed friendships with some staff at A2 Hosting; that has also contributed to my reason for staying.”

When asked about his experiences over the years dealing with A2’s support, Neo commented, “I have worked with support many times, to the point I even remember them, and I’m pretty sure they remember me too. A2’s support has always been fast, and I usually get the first reply within an hour.”

Why Dedicated Hosting Works for Gemtracks

Since Neo was a technical user who was able to anticipate rapid growth and lots of content, a dedicated server was the best solution for his burgeoning company. “Gemtracks has turned into, almost like, a service-as-a-product kind of business, where the choice of hardware and architecture that runs my server is very important,” said Neo. “The #1 requirement was to have enough CPU power. I needed to make sure that there was enough CPU and resources to handle sudden influxes of visitors. This was because, based on experience, as soon as the number of visitors went up, so did the number of searches visitors would make on my website. This strained the database, CPU, and slowed down the website.”

Neo also needed to make sure his business stayed at peak performance as he scaled and matured. “My server needed to be compatible with all the latest networking trends, such as content delivery networks, and long polling to ensure seamless delivery.” He required resources that were dedicated just to his website, so he wouldn’t have to worry about “neighbors” potentially interrupting his website’s speed or reliability. “The worst thing that could happen was the website going down during the most profitable hour.” A2 Hosting offers a 99.9% uptime commitment. This gave Neo the peace of mind he needed to start his company on one of our dedicated plans.

Lessons Learned

When reflecting on his digital and entrepreneurial journey, Neo shared advice for other small businesses starting out. He said one of the biggest lessons he learned is how important support has been since his business is based solely online. “Whenever I have issues, the support team will always investigate for me, which includes seeing which script is taking up all my resources and what I can do about it,” he said. “It’s comforting to know that the support team at A2 Hosting has the knowledge and skills, not only to solve problems but to help investigate them too.”

The post Gemtracks: Striking a Chord with the Online Music Community appeared first on The A2 Posting.

A fast and reliable website is very important for small business owners, so choosing the right plan for your business is essential for long-term success.

Managed VPS plans, powered by Virtuozzo, can be a great tool to help businesses level up their digital presence as they outgrow the resources available on shared hosting plans. With additional power, security, support, and flexibility, migrating to our Managed VPS plan is easy with the assistance of A2 Hosting’s Guru Crew support. This case study will share the story of Greg Houston, a successful architect with nearly two decades of experience whose website was beginning to experience some lag in speed with the growth of his company, GMH By Design. Read his journey about how choosing the right Managed VPS plan for Greg’s website improved his user experience for his customers.

An Architect on a Mission to Bring His Designs to Life

Greg Houston founded GMH by Design, a residential and commercial architecture practice based out of Denver, Colorado, because of his love of architecture and his passion for working with clients to help bring their visions to life. His company specializes in quality workmanship, simple design, and modern convenience. “We offer the benefits of a large firm at the cost of a small design office,” said Greg. “We work with residential and commercial clients to envision and design their space to suit their needs as we guide them through the process.”

Improving Greg’s Digital Experience

“Our website showcases the work we’ve done, who we work with, and our vision. It’s our salesperson twenty-four hours a day,” Greg shared. “It’s important because it’s the primary way we share our work with potential clients.” His website is one of the main ways his clients find his business, which makes its pictures and content important when optimizing for search engines. As his website has continued to grow over the years he noticed that the speed of his site has been on a steady decline. This led Greg to start looking into changing hosting providers to find a better plan that would improve the performance of his website. Greg shared, “The front end and the backend of our website have been slow which made it hard for our potential clients to navigate and for us to update.”

GMH by Design is currently on WordPress. Greg initially tried to combat the site speed issues with a caching plug-in as well as some other optimization plugins he found. This helped a bit, but it was not enough improvement for his company’s site long term. Because of this, he set out to find a new solution.

When searching for a new provider and plan Greg had some specific requirements he was looking for. “First is reliability, then speed. The website needs to be up for our potential customers to reach and it has to be fast, even with the large images we use on our site to showcase our work. We need to rank well and we want customers to feel the site is professionally hosted,” said Greg.

GMH by Design was looking for a new host that offered stability, speed and was affordable. As a small business owner, Houston wants to prioritize time to devote to his business rather than worrying about the stability of his site or the speed of his page load times.

Greg was initially referred to A2 Hosting by a friend that was already working with us. “I was hesitant to move providers at first because I was worried about the migration process. I eventually decided on A2 because my friend who was a current customer with A2 Hosting recommended your plans. I also read reviews and while searching I saw you had a reputation for fast servers.” He evaluated a few other shared packages with rival hosting companies, but in the end, decided on an A2 Hosting’s Managed VPS plan.

Transferring to a VPS Plan with A2 Hosting

When asked about his experience getting started with A2 Hosting, Greg commented, “It was very easy. The free migration was simple and fairly hands-off and my experiences with the support team so far have been great.”

Greg was interested in A2’s Managed VPS plans (powered by Virtuozzo) because he knew he needed more power overall to improve his website. “I would say investing in a Managed VPS over a Shared Hosting plan had several advantages that I wasn’t aware of, speed being the primary one.” Not only do VPS plans offer more resources over a shared hosting package, but they also can provide GMH by Design with more independence from noisy neighbors on the server who could affect Greg’s site’s performance when they get heavy traffic. “I wasn’t aware of how beneficial dedicated resources can be for a site,” Greg said. “With a VPS the overall function of my website on average is increased because of not sharing resources with other business sites.” VPS servers offer users their own disk space, RAM, and CPU. They come with significantly more space to store website-related files, images, and folders. This is something that will be important for Greg as he continues to work on new projects and post large images to his site.

Lessons Learned

“My best advice would be not to wait to migrate your site to a faster host, even if it seems like it will be a lot of work before you get there,” Greg shared. “I thought migration would be difficult or time-consuming but it wasn’t. If I had known, I would have moved my site much sooner.” Greg’s overall migration took less than a day with no downtime. “Since the move, my website has been faster and much easier to manage.”

The post GMH by Design: Architecting the Perfect Hosting Solution appeared first on The A2 Posting.

Website speed and security are essential in 2021, so finding the right hosting provider and plan is an important task for many small business owners

Katie Davis is an accomplished author, with over a dozen traditionally published books for children, launched two guides for writers at #1 on Amazon, a TEDx and conference speaker, writing coach, and A2 Hosting Customer. She’s the co-founder of the Picture Book Summit, and most recently the founder of The Writers’ Block, a virtual community that helps both experienced and new writers fine-tune their craft through live critiques. She’s known she wanted to be an entrepreneur since the beginning of her career.

“I’ve always wanted to be my own boss,” Katie says. “I didn’t do well working for other people. In my 20s I started my company, Dirty Dishes making hand-painted ceramics. As long as I could pay the bills, I was happy.” She started her career in advertising and marketing, later pivoting to selling hand-painted ceramics, and then moved into writing and illustrating children’s books and novels. She’s sold almost a million copies of her books by this point. Though she has many talents, her secret superpower, and where her passions currently lie, is teaching writers about writing, and coaching them past any procrastinating talents they may have.

Building Katie’s Digital Presence with A2 Hosting

Katie founded her site back in 1999 and she’s been using it to connect with her readers and other writers ever since. When asked, Katie shared, “My website is my home online.” At the beginning of her career, she was in charge of handling the front and back end of her website, but as she progressed she realized that extra help could benefit her business. She hired WPOnline Design to take charge of her site. She had been experiencing a lot of malware and DDoS attacks which were crippling her webpage. Most attacks had been targeted at her previous host so her web developer told her to make a change. Though he also offered hosting through his own company, he recommended A2 Hosting because of its good prices, stability, reliability, and faster load times. We’ve now been working in tandem to ensure Katie the best site. “WP Online Design has had a great experience working with A2’s team on multiple occasions to keep Katie’s site running as smoothly as possible,” they commented.

When selecting her hosting provider, Katie chose A2 Hosting because she said she “wanted to make sure that my site was strong enough to handle growth and able to take the weight of what I put on there.” She’s since stayed with A2 because she “values transparency and honesty in a company” and she continues to see that here. She appreciates her interactions with A2 chat and phone support. Katie said, “I’m techy, but when it comes to hosting issues – forget about it! It can be frustrating so I appreciate A2’s support staff.” She had a situation recently where her SSL certificate had issues due to misconnections with a payment system, and when she called support the issue was resolved in minutes. It’s interactions like these that have kept her with A2 Hosting for the past decade.

The Writers’ Block

Katie’s latest venture is The Writers’ Block, a virtual support community for writers. The Writers’ Block is a place for writers to take their craft to the next level through twice-monthly live critiques (only by her, not the other members) and monthly “Writers Playground” sessions, where she shares tips, give encouragement, and answers questions. Through this community, Katie is able to help fellow writers grow as she reads and annotates their manuscripts. Katie describes it as “a virtual community—a private clubhouse—offering you writing inspiration and support, publishing instruction, experts’ knowledge, marketing skills, and more. It’s a place to get encouragement to keep you going when the going hits a dead stop; it’s a welcoming front porch when you just can’t seem to continue or even get yourself started.” She runs the community through her website, holding bi-monthly workshops, guest expert interviews, and live community sessions. “My business is helping writers develop their skills. My bread and butter is teaching people what they need to know about their work and the business.” To accomplish this every day she relies on optimal performance from her site.

Configuring Her WordPress

Katie chose to migrate to a Turbo Max Shared Hosting plan when moving her WordPress site to A2. For Katie, a faster site is not a “nice to have” portion of her business, it was essential. With faster loading times she gets better SEO rankings, lower bounce rates, and higher visitor satisfaction. Turbo provides her site with up to 20x faster performance. A2’s Turbo Max servers are made faster through a combination of NVMe drives, AMD EPYC Processors, LiteSpeed Servers, and built-in caching with Memcached, turbo caching, and APC/OpCache. All of these in tandem help her site load faster for her writers each day.

As a WordPress user, Katie also has access to the A2 Optimized WordPress plugin that pre-configured her setup to optimize performance and security settings. This includes WordPress login page protection, Easy W3 Total Cache configuration, Minify HTML, CCS, and JS. It also helps with image optimization which is important due to some of the larger images of her books that she houses on her site.

In the last couple of years, Katie has begun to improve her website as she focuses more on her online business, The Writers’ Block. She’s been working on improving site appearance and adding more content. When asked what online tools and plug-ins have been most valuable, she had a few to share with fellow WordPress users. She relies on WooCommerce, Stripe, and LeadPages for her daily use. “Stripe is super easy. It lets me manage and handle all financial transactions, whether just payments or if I need to refund a member. I haven’t had a billing dispute, but everything with Stripe has been easy,” she says. “Simplifying the experience is key for small businesses. I had too many different services and it was too complex and I’ve been working to make it simpler.”

In addition to her efforts, A2 Hosting’s Turbo Shared Plans also help with the backend function of her site. Performance Plus, offering traffic spike protection, applies additional resources so that Katie’s site retains performance even during traffic surges. This is a great service if Katie publishes a popular blog post or offers a new book to her audience. A2’s free SSL certificate provides free HTTPS encryption and contributes to the security of katiedavis.com. Finally, A2’s DropSuite Backups offer offsite backups and are recommended for Katie’s peace of mind that may come from disasters or hardware.

Katie’s Advice to Other Small Businesses

Katie shared advice from her experience as a small business owner of twenty years in order to shed some light on how others can succeed long term: “When you’re a small business owner, it’s easy to work harder than when working for someone else. If you’re your own boss, you still have to tell that boss––aka YOU––when you need a day off. A silver lining of the lockdown for me was learning to de-stress about work,” Katie said. “I don’t have to work every minute of the day.” When asked about starting out she had some great advice for writers trying to make it in 2021. “Figure out who your audience is and build a mailing list. Even if you’re not yet published, it will enable you to keep in touch with your fans. It keeps your fan base connected. And if you’re thinking, ‘Yeah, but I do that on Facebook/IG/Twitter/Whatever, remember that’s just building your house on someone else’s land. Own the land.”

She also recommends taking the time to choose the right hosting provider for your needs. For Katie, A2 Hosting has been the right choice for the last ten years and counting. Between Katie, her web designer, and A2 Hosting, her small business has continued to thrive through 2021.

The post Katie Davis: For the Love of Writing appeared first on The A2 Posting.

Deciding what hosting plan is right for your business is not always an easy task.

Everyone has a dream, but only a special few make it a reality. Mark and Niamh are passionate cyclists from Scotland and Ireland, but it was always their dream to turn their love of cycling into a business. When the Pyrénées Cycling Lodge, a bed and breakfast situated in the heart of the Pyrénées mountains in France, came available for purchase in 2017, the pair decided it was time to take action. “It was always our dream to go to the mountains in France,” said Niamh. “If we had waited any longer we would have missed our chance…so we just decided to do it.”

The Lodge, which is centrally located along the route of the Tour de France, offers a warm bed, hearty meals, local ales, and a chance for cyclists to join together with others who share their passion for cycling. The accommodation is nestled in the small town of Saint Savin in the Hautes Pyrenees. It’s surrounded by breathtaking mountain backdrops, curving mountain roads, and medieval architecture. “It was a complete change of lifestyle for us, working for ourselves, doing what we love in amazing surroundings,” said Niamh. “Meeting so many like minded, positive people from around the world… it’s a dream come true.”

Creating the Digital Experience

When Mark and Niamh took over the lodge and its digital properties, the business already had a name and established domain. “Having the domain name was really important to us,” said Niamh. “It’s a really important thing to have as it has “cycling” and “Pyrénées” in the url.” This allowed those searching for an adventure in the famous region to zero in on their business quickly. “We depend on our website for a lot of our direct bookings,” said Niamh. However, when they took over the website it needed a lot of work. The website was hosted on a small local provider and Niamh didn’t feel like it had enough power behind it to reach the global audience she was targeting.

Niamh set out on Google to find a new home for her digital presence. Her requirements? Reliable service, speed & performance, and good customer service. “I can work my way around cPanel but I’m not very technical so I depend on customer service.” After reading several reviews, looking at some of the other players in the space, and evaluating pricing and package features, she ended up deciding on A2 Hosting. “A2 was at the top of a lot of the reviews that I had read,” said Niamh. “Packages were comparable between providers, but it was the customer service and package offerings that eventually swayed me.”

Niamh initially chose the Shared Turbo Max plan. It came with cPanel, advanced NVMe storage options, 2X more resources than the standard plans, and a LightSpeed enhanced web server. It also came pre-optimized to get the most speed and performance out of WordPress, the CMS her website was built on. As her business grew though, she would eventually make the move to Managed VPS hosting.

Working with A2 Hosting

As a customer for more than four years now, Niamh has had a number of interactions with the A2 Team. “I’ve worked with support, sales, and billing a few times and I’m always impressed with the speed and efficiency that my ticket is dealt with,” said Niamh. “They have provided me with constant communication and the technical teams are very knowledgeable and always supportive and patient.”

Covid-19 has made this past year especially hard on the business, which saw a reduction in bookings causing added stress and financial strain on Mark and Niamh. “Billing has been especially helpful this year. They are always approachable and have been supportive with our renewals,” said Niamh. “I know they didn’t have to do that.”

“I can’t find fault in any of my experiences with A2 Hosting,” said Niamh. “Our business relies on the speed and customer services offered by A2 and it has exceeded my expectations on both accounts.”

Getting the Most Out of WordPress

While the previous site had been built using WordPress, it was a very basic deployment. “WordPress let’s me build my own site and I depend on the themes available for it to guide the aesthetics of our site,” said Niamh. The Lodge uses the Sucuri plugin to help with malware, Checkfront to manage the online booking system, and Monster Insights to help understand their web performance and usage patterns. Additionally, they leverage Slider Revolution for photo galleries and an Instagram feed plugin to help aggregate their social content. “We are quite active on social media,” said Niamh. “Instagram and Twitter are big drivers, there’s lots of interaction there and we get a fair share of bookings through it.”

The Future of the Pyrénées Cycling Lodge

Despite having success on the Shared Turbo Max plan, Niamh has been considering a move to Managed VPS Hosting (powered by A2 Partner Virtuozzo) for some time and as the business would be positively impacted by switching to A2’s VPS plans. She has decided to migrate over this year to receive all the added benefits that come from this upgrade.

VPS offers the Lodge the ability to have resources dedicated to just them instead of sharing with the other parties on the server. This means that they can count on the speed and performance of their server to be consistent throughout the year and not risk any performance dings that may be caused by a “neighbor” sharing resources.

VPS also provides the Lodge a greater level of security, more control over their environment, and more peace of mind for the small business owner. Shared is a great, low cost hosting option for personal websites and blogs, but VPS is always the better option for a business who depends on their website for revenue.

What advice would Mark and Niamh give a business owner who is about to walk down the similar path of taking over a business and reinventing it to make it their own? First, they recommend that you take some time to understand what the backend will look like before making your final choice. “I’ve used hosting providers before but didn’t have that much experience,” said Niamh. “Having a user friendly dashboard that is easy to work with… one you can work your way around, is important. A2 has made that easy for me.”

In addition, “You have to understand how important reliable customer service is when looking for a hosting provider. A2’s customer service has been right there or they get right back to you. For my needs, it has all worked out.

The post The Pyrénées Cycling Lodge: Cycling in the Heart of the French Pyrénées appeared first on The A2 Posting.

Focus Area 1. Auditing Your Site

Creating a positive user experience for potential customers on your website
is important for any online business. Before you begin to change elements of your website, one of the first steps is to check out what you have so far in order to approach your redesign with a fully informed eye.

Investigate the Front End

First, investigate the front end of your website. Click through the different pages and elements of your site and see what pops out at you. Is there a block of text that can be written more concisely? Does your image in the top right not seem
to match as well with the rest of your content? Make a list of all the things that come to mind as you deep dive into the front-facing part of your site. Check out this blog that talks about how to perform a thorough content audit for your site if you’re looking for help making a start!

Investigate the Backend

Next, it’s time to investigate the backend of your website. The first question to ask yourself: how are you currently tracking metrics? Are you using tools like Google Analytics? If not, that’s the first place to start! Check out our blog that talks about how to integrate Google Analytics into your WordPress site.

If you’re already utilizing a tracking tool, there are a few important metrics you should look at:

What pages are most popular? This metric will help show you what is currently working well for your site.

What’s your average bounce rate? The overall goal is to avoid a high bounce rate. By looking at this statistic you can better understand if customers enter your site and immediately find what they’re looking for, or if they leave quickly to go look at another source.

What’s the most popular customer journey? Where are people dropping off and what pages are they navigating to most often? Depending on these answers, you can often tell how well your site’s UI/UX is working and whether there are places you need to edit and improve.

Some aspects that could affect this are page speed, appropriate content on each page, and how user-friendly your website truly is.

During this process, take notes on what you notice when looking at your tracking tools to help you decide what to focus on when you start your editing process.

Perform A/B Testing

Next, it may be smart to work in some A/B Testing. This is a great way to organically test whether some elements you noticed in your audit are legitimate issues or not. To perform an A/B test begin changing certain elements of your website like text size, colors, and images one at a time and see if each edit makes a difference in your conversions. By changing one element at a time, you will quickly know which elements are working and which aren’t.

Ask Your Audience What They Want

You have the best resource at your disposal: your existing customers! Set up a poll directly on your homepage or social media or even send an email or create a survey to obtain your customers’ opinion on aspects like fonts, navigation, and graphics.

See if they have any comments on how they think your site could flow better or be more appealing to a future audience!

Focus Area 2: Updating Your Look: Branding Guidelines

Now that you’ve done some research and you’ve armed yourself with areas to focus on, it’s time to start the actual editing process. The first aspect to consider is the aesthetics of your website. Having a tool like branding guidelines can establish consistency in your branding. Fonts and Sizing

First off, be intentional and strategic with your typography. Keep your font and sizing variations to a minimum. For font changes and sizing, less is more. Some strategic variations can look cool but use with discretion.

Images

An easy place to start is with obvious stock photos lurking around your website. Avoid staged pictures (i.e. portraits of individuals staring into the camera or fake group high fives). If you must use a stock photo, choose natural, realistic poses, creative camera angles, and lighting. Choose photos that align with your brand. Want to layer text over your photos? Make sure the text stands out. Here’s a guide on how to create custom graphics for your site if you decide you’re feeling creative and want to experiment with your own!

Colors

The colors displayed on your website are also important. By using colors strategically you can help guide your customers through your website, carefully choosing where their eyes go to first and the pattern of things they notice as they scan your various pages. Certain colors have certain meanings to users and there is an entire color language called Pantone. Here are some examples:

• Red: passion, anger, love, confidence
• Orange: youthfulness, cheer, warmth, hunger
• Yellow: sunshine, happiness, energy, optimism
• Green: nature, fertility, balance, cleanliness
• Blue: water, tranquility, trust, power • Purple: nobility, power, elegance,
• wisdom
• White: peace, balance, purity, simplicity, winter
• Gray: neutral, sophistication, balance, wisdom
• Black: exclusivity, modern, power, sophistication, mystery
• Brown: earth, stability, tradition, nature
• Pink: love, romance, femininity, baby girls, humanistic
• Turquoise: tranquility, clarity, compassion, healing

Logo Usage

Your logo is you. Give it top billing! Logos set the tone, value, aesthetic, and recognition of your brand. You want it to be remembered! Many companies choose to display their logo in the upper left corner of their website.

WordPress Themes

Using an updated WordPress theme is an essential part of any WordPress website. WordPress themes can even impact the loading times of your whole site. Browse the many free themes available to you in case you decide your site needs a complete refresh.

Focus Area 3: Enhancing Your Website User Experience

At the end of the day, how your users interact with your website can be the difference between a conversion and a missed opportunity. The user interface and user experience, better known as UI/UX, is an important thing to consider when committing to redesigning and refreshing your online presence! Below are some ways you can make sure yours is working in your favor rather than against you.

Simplicity/Spacing

Using white space, also called negative space, can help you bring attention to details of your site that are most important. Spacing around titles can even improve your customers’ experience by 20%. More white space helps separate sections and guides your customers’ eyes down the page. Less white space can indicate that elements of your site are supposed
to go together. Through the yin and yang of content and spacing you can control how your user experiences every part of your page.

Website Navigation and Menu

Another important element of website design is your navigational system. The most important thing to remember when building your website’s navigation is that your users need to be able to find what they are looking for quickly and easily. Make sure your search tools stand out (normally located in the upper right corner) and that your colors are working together for readability.

Your menu should be located at the top of the page and should have no more than seven items (not including dropdowns). There should be ample space in between menu sections for aesthetic reasons. It can be helpful to use a fixed navigation bar as well so if your customers want to move to another section of the site they don’t have to scroll all the way back to the top of the page. A good rule of thumb for your overall design is that users should be able to access any point in three clicks or less. This ensures both efficiency and lack of confusion.

Mobile Responsive and Optimization

In 2021 it’s important your website is both mobile-friendly and responsive.
On average, 80% of users are searching on their smartphones so speed is vital. Though WordPress automatically makes sure your page is responsive (scales up and down with screen size changes and various browsers) it can be helpful to place buttons in the middle of your page for optimum mobile use. It’s also important to ensure a similar experience on both mobile and desktop viewing. This will help with consistency and return customers.

Hosting Choice

53% of people will navigate away from a page that takes more than
3 seconds to load. This means who you choose to host your website will have a major impact not only on your speed, but also on your website storage, uptime, and responsiveness to any future problems. That’s why we recommend going with A2 Hosting. Not only do we have a 99.9% uptime guarantee but our Turbo plans can increase your load times by 20x! This will improve your bounce rates, SEO scores, and conversions.

Speed

Explore these steps for a faster user experience with your chosen host:

• Optimize images
  Reduce plugins
  Clean up your themes
• Use a CDN
• Check as you grow to make sure you don’t need more resources (VPS Hosting can help!)

Selling Yourself and Your Website

Now that you have cleaned up the look and feel of your website and optimized your site for speed, it’s important to make sure you’re selling yourself and converting your customers! Below are helpful considerations.

Blog Posts and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Today, the way to win the web is through quality content and proper SEO procedures. Good blog posts keep your customers engaged and eager for more content. To achieve this, a solid SEO foundation is necessary. Start by targeting keywords to move your site up the ranks on Google searches. You want to generate as much traffic as you can and build credibility within your chosen industry. Check out our guide to SEO-Friendly blog formatting to see what you can do to improve your next post! Plus check out these three SEO mistakes to avoid.

Social Sharing

At the end of each blog post (and preferably at the bottom of your website), there should be links for social sharing. This will allow your followers to share your valuable content on different social media platforms. This is critical to help you build your following and to create an easy way for people to find your site.

Social Proof

You should also have areas of social proof somewhere on your website. This can be anything from written reviews to videos of customer feedback. These areas of true customer engagement lend your brand and your site credibility. They help potential customers trust that you will do what you say you do based on the positive feedback of others. We recommend you try and implement videos because these are a great way to keep your customers engaged with your website and fortify/strengthen human connection.

Calls to Actions

Finally, calls to action are where you close the deal and help your website convert potential customers into customers for life. Make sure they are

strategically placed in places like the top of your navigation, below sections that specifically require action, and at the bottom of the web page. They can be in banners, buttons, or whatever form you like the most! Some good examples include:

• Sign up for our email list!
• Shop in our store!
• Fill out your own lead form.
• Click for more info.
• See pricing.

Conclusion

Refreshing your website can be a long process, but we hope with the help of this guide it’s both easy and successful. Make sure to check out A2 Hosting for great hosting plans for your website and subscribe to our newsletter for future helpful content.

The post Three Areas to Focus on to Ensure Website Redesign Success appeared first on The A2 Posting.

Deciding between Shared Hosting and VPS, Turbo or Standard, Unmanaged or Managed… What is the right choice for you? The answer (as it always is) depends on your situation.

The first step in making this decision is to understand the differences between Shared and VPS.

The Differences Between Shared and VPS Hosting

Imagine you are living in an apartment building. Your building has 10 apartments total. Think of Shared Hosting like this apartment except that the size of each unit changes based on the needs of each tenant. For example, if Dale in Apartment 3B decides on Saturday night to have 50 of his closest friends over for a party his apartment will automatically grow from 800sq feet to 2000sq ft during the time of the party. Similarly if Beth in Apartment 4B throws an equal sized party at the same time, you may find yourself and all your possessions squeezed into a room the size of a hall closet. Turn on the faucet for a glass of water?… Sorry Beth and Dale are using all that too. Want to turn on a light to read?… Sorry about the blinking, Dale bought a disco light.

You may be thinking, why would I ever want my hosting to be in a situation like that? One of the key features of A2’s Shared Hosting is that we limit the number of people who you can share your server with. This reduces the chances of a resource draining scenario like this from happening to your site. Plus, Shared Hosting also limits how much of the resources can be used by any one individual. If your neighbors have extra space to hold parties and everyone is happy with their portion of the resources available, then you would most likely never have a problem.

But even in the best situations when everyone gets along, there is always a chance that one of your neighbors may need to take more and it could affect your website if you are also in a peak period at the same time. This is why Shared Hosting is the most inexpensive hosting option and for many is a perfect, low cost solution for their website.

Using the same analogy, VPS (or Virtual Private Server) is also like an apartment The difference? While you are still sharing the server hardware with other people, all of the specifications of the portion you are alloted are fixed. If you have an 800sq feet apartment, it is always there and doesn’t change… the walls never move. It’s dedicated to you and you alone. You have increased security, guaranteed and fixed resource allocation, and you know that won’t change.

It all Depends on What Type of Website You Are Running

If you are running a website to show off your photography, a collection, or maybe even selling some items on the side, Shared Hosting is probably just fine for you. This type of hosting is made for the individual, the blogger, and the simple website. It allows those who want to have a cost-effective presence online to have one! Most Shared Hosting users use WordPress and A2 has a one click option to install it when you set up your account. To keep the apartment analogy going even further, with the options available it’s like choosing what you want to furnish it with at the time as signing the lease.

But if your website is a mission-critical or key component of your business then Shared Hosting is most likely not the best option for you. Why? Because using a more dedicated environment increases stability, performs better (generally speaking), and it is more secure and not affected by the noisy neighbor. These are all things you want to have when hosting a website that includes handling credit card transactions, sales leads, etc. Now this is not to say that Shared Hosting is not secure, stable, or performant. In fact, I’d put A2’s Shared Hosting toe-to-toe against any other hosting provider in any of these areas and we would compete. It is just that there is more control and more options with a VPS hosting plan than with Shared.

In addition, while a Shared Hosting plan may “give you” enough resources to run your site, if the site begins experiencing a spike the resources may, in reality, not be available… because your neighbor may be using them.

Our VPS partner, Virtuozzo, recommends that you ask yourself these questions when trying to decide which is right for you…

• Is the website a core part of your business?
• Is your website performing as well as you would like?
• Do you sell products or services online?
• Do you drive traffic to your website through paid advertisements, social media or through other means?
• Are search engine rankings important to you?

If the answer is yes to any of these items, then VPS Hosting is most likely a better option…. BUT, there’s a caveat to this you should think about…

Do You Have the Technical Chops for VPS?

Shared Hosting is designed to be simple. With each step of the journey A2 tries to make it as easy as possible. This means that you will have a graphic interface (or GUI) throughout the process. Whether it’s cPanel or the WordPress Admin, most of the interactions you will have with a Shared plan will be by clicking on stuff on a screen to make things happen.

VPS, on the other hand, requires a bit more technical knowledge. Because a virtual machine can use a number of different operating systems and underlying software, it does not come with a cPanel (although it is available as an add-on). This means that the initial interactions with the server (to set up any operating systems, tools, or applications) will be done through a Command Line Interface (or CLI). Using a CLI requires specialized knowledge and training and is usually only something a SysAdmin, Server Admin, or Developer would most likely undertake.

To use our apartment analogy one more time, while you have a nice 800sq foot apartment with the water and electric allotment you need there really aren’t any doors… that is except the secret one that only the technical folks know how to use.

This is Where Managed Comes In

So, what if you are a cake-and-eat-it-too kind of person? You want to have the security, performance and stability of VPS but you don’t have the technical skill set required to set everything up or maintain it. For this A2 offers Managed VPS hosting plans. These plans offer you all the benefits of an unmanaged plan with additional support to help you get things setup and keep those things up-to-date.

Managed VPS plans also come with a cPanel license giving back the GUI interface to make things easier on you from a technical perspective.

With the additional help from the A2 Guru Team, Managed VPS is a great option if you don’t have or don’t want to have to hire someone with those extra technical skills required to make it successful.

Comparing VPS vs Shared Hosting

Whether to choose Shared or VPS for your hosting is largely based on your situation and use case. Here are some of the pros and cons to consider to help you choose the one that’s best for you.

Shared is Fine, But I Want More Performance

So if you start down this path and find yourself realizing that Shared Hosting is just fine for what you are doing,
but you still want to have increased experience for your users, A2 offers Turbo Boost and Turbo Max plans. These shared environments offer better hard drives (NVMe which are 3X faster than standard SSD), improved processors, and built-in caching. They also offer LightSpeed, which is a software application designed to improve the performance of the server you are on by up to 11X.

One thing to remember, however, is that it might not be the server that is making your website run slowly. To get best performance you should remember to optimize your site. You could have very large images that are taking time for your site to load. If you are using WordPress there are several plugins that can help with image compression and caching that can improve the speed and performance of your website. It would be a good idea to look at these options and see how that helps before making the move to a faster hosting plan.

If that sounds daunting, For WordPress users we offer Managed WordPress hosting plans that give you extra help and support while on a Shared Plan.

VPS Hosting may seem a little daunting for the non-technical user, but if you are running a website that is key to the success of your business or necessary to provide income, Managed VPS Hosting is the right choice.

A Note From the CEO

In late 2020, A2 Hosting launched a series of new VPS hosting products.These new VPS offerings took us to the next level when it came to performance, stability and security.

A2 made the strategic decision to partner with Virtuozzo, a market-leading provider of container virtualization. Utilizing their modern software and it’s included toolset, we are now able to offer our products state-of-the- art virtual environments.

Once we implemented the new solution, performance on the new servers increased by more than 40%, furthering our brand promise of Our Speed, Your Success. We are committed to providing the fastest, most stable hosting experience because, as the world moves faster, search engine algorithms seem to change on a weekly basis and visitor attention spans continue to shorten. This all impacts metrics like cart abandonment and bounce rate. The last thing our customers want to worry about is their web hosting. Our customers rely on us to provide hosting speeds that give them the edge for better rankings, better conversion rates and better bounce rates, which we deliver consistently.”

We promise to continue to improve the performance of our VPS offerings.
– Bryan Muthig, CEO

A Word from Our Partner

As a shared hosting customer, when do you know you should switch to a different type of hosting?

In my case, I switched when it became painfully obvious. I am not a technical web developer, but I have experienced a lot as a nascent, hobbyist, and small business owner over a 20-year period. During this time, I have volunteered to build numerous websites, one of which was for a new charitable foundation. It was ( I thought) the best I had ever built. My excitement was quickly diminished when I went to demo the website and it just sat there, failing to load.

While the person I built the website for was ecstatic. For me, I was disappointed as I spent more time trying to “fix” the website and the issues related to the speed than it took me to build the website itself.

With years of experience as a business user and many of those years working within the hosting industry, I still find myself reluctant to spend what I fear as hours working on migrating my entire hosting account or just a website to something that will perform better.

A2 Hosting gives a good recommendation; right from the start on the front page of their website, Shared Hosting is a “great solution for a blog or a personal website.”

That is what shared hosting is best for. Even with a blog, if you are expecting higher traffic and to monetize the website, you should think of it as a business website. If your website is for a business, you need a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or higher. If you are not a technical user, you need a Managed plan.

Whether or not you made the decision recently or many years ago, if you are like me, when is it time to make the move to a better hosting solution?

My personal decision can be attributed to a few different factors. I was running a WordPress website on an account with multiple other WordPress websites and other types as well. It was too much.

WordPress can be tricky to optimize and you might not ever get it to where you want it to be with all of the plugins tried and image compression. Shared hosting resources can have a tough time keeping up with the demands and VPS is a great option to give your website a boost.

There are ways you can check the performance of your website and receive recommendations of how to make improvements. To start, you can use free tools like Pingdom and GTmetrix, with the latter now powered by Lighthouse, Google’s latest set of tools for website developers.

If you are still experiencing performance issues, once you feel you have done all you can on your own you may want to find a freelancer to help you with continuing to improve your website.

In the end, it is really simple, if your website is a core part of your business, Shared Hosting is probably not the best option for you. If you are selling something, this becomes even more important. Whether it is Magento, PrestaShop, Woocommercem or another eCommerce option, you will be better off using VPS over Shared Hosting.

The post Choosing Between Shared and VPS: A Guide appeared first on The A2 Posting.

However, if you know how to incorporate video into your website, you can use it to maximize engagement and drive conversions. With the right approach, video can act as a powerful Call To Action (CTA).

In this article, we’ll talk about some of the latest video content trends, and then go over three tips to incorporate videos into your website. Let’s get to it!

What the Latest Video Content Trends Are

It’s likely that many of your users spend a significant part of their day watching videos on one platform or another. On average, users consume around 100 minutes of video per day. If you can seize even a fraction of that time through your content, it can help increase conversions.

If the primary goal of your videos is to drive sales or conversions, shorter is usually better. Despite the massive amounts of video content that customers consume, it’s safe to say that attention spans are getting shorter. At the end of 2019, up to 66 percent of video ads were approximately 30 seconds long. Although that might sound short, there’s a lot that you can say about a product or service in half a minute.

Thanks to the rise of social media stories and platforms such as TikTok, users are getting increasingly comfortable with shorter video ads as a part of their online experience. Moreover, there’s massive interest in User-Generated Content (UGC). If you can get consumers to share their experiences with your products or services in video format, that’s a huge marketing win.

There’s also a growing interest in educational videos. If your website focuses on online learning, video is a channel that you can tap into to expand your audience.

3 Tips for Incorporating Video into Your Website

If you’re ready to start incorporating videos into your website, there are several factors that can help you maximize their effectiveness. Let’s look at three tips you can use to make the most of your video strategy.

1. Add an Intro that Highlights Your Brand

If you go to your favorite YouTube channel right now and open a random video, we’re willing to bet it has an intro:

The goal of intros isn’t to pad video length, but to take the opportunity to reinforce brand awareness. An intro can accomplish that in several ways, including:

• Reminding you of the brand’s name
• Showcasing the brand’s logo
• Reinforcing the brand’s style and the type of content it focuses on

In this case, your website or business is the brand. Even if your videos are only 30 seconds long, adding a short intro that includes your name and the site’s logo can only benefit you. This is particularly the case when users end up watching those videos outside of your website.

Depending on which video marketing tools you use, adding intros to your content might be easier than you think. A lot of tools provide you with templates that you can use and edit, as well as the ability to upload your logo and incorporate it into the video.

2. Choose a Performance-Oriented Hosting Provider

If you plan on uploading videos directly to your server, you should use a performance-oriented web host. A lot of websites choose the cheapest hosting provider they can find, which often translates to slow loading times and a frustrating User Experience (UX).

If visitors have to spend minutes waiting for a video to load, and then wait for it to buffer every two seconds, they are much less likely to watch it in full. Even worse, that poor user experience can reflect badly on the rest of your website.

To ensure the best video experience, we recommend avoiding shared web hosting. At the very least, you’ll want to use a Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting plan, which in most cases provides better performance as well as dedicated resources for your website.

3. Create Videos that Target Your Website’s Audience

You probably have a pretty good idea of who your website’s target audience is, such as:

• Where your users are visiting from
• The average age of your audience
• What their interests are and what content they want to see or read about

This information is critical for video creation. You can have an amazing idea for a marketing video, but if it doesn’t speak to your website’s audience, it won’t get the results you want. In other words, the video won’t get you conversions.

When you’re working on video content for your website, it’s important to consider whether it’s something your audience will be interested in. If the video provides or promises solutions and answers to questions they might have, it will likely succeed in its goal.

Conclusion

Knowing what the latest video content trends are is a solid starting point for creating your own media. Your website is the perfect channel to deliver those videos because it already has a built-in audience, some of whom may appreciate a different kind of content.

If you’re not sure how to approach video creation, you can start off on the right foot by keeping the following three tips in mind:

1. Add an intro that highlights your brand.
2. Choose a performance-oriented web hosting provider.
3. Create videos that target your website’s audience.

Do you have any questions about how to incorporate video into your website? Let’s talk about them in the comments section below!

Image credit: Pixabay.

The post 3 Tips for Embedding & Adding Video into Your Website appeared first on The A2 Posting.

Fortunately, there’s no shortage of CSS frameworks that can fast-track the design and development process. By opting for a framework, you can create standardized, higher-quality code, with less time and hassle.

In this post, we’ll discuss what CSS frameworks are and why you may want to consider using one for your next project. We’ll then share advice on how to find the framework that’s right for you, before exploring six popular CSS frameworks. Let’s get started!

An Introduction to CSS Frameworks

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) controls the presentation of a document that’s written in a markup language such as HTML. Unlike some other languages, CSS creates a separation between presentation and content. This gives you more flexibility in how you display your content.

This language also promotes code reuse, as multiple pages can use the formatting defined in a single CSS file. This can reduce complexity and repetition, while also improving your project’s performance, such as by reducing your website’s page loading times.

Many different systems use CSS. This includes WordPress themes, which uses CSS to output the data generated by this popular Content Management System (CMS). Every WordPress theme contains a single style.css file:

Although you can write pure CSS, many designers and developers choose to use a CSS framework. This is a collection of stylesheets that provide a basic structure and classes for common elements.

You can use these pre-prepared stylesheets as a reference for resolving problems of a similar nature. Alternatively, you can override the framework’s generic functionality for your specific use case.

There can be some confusion about when to use a framework, and when it makes more sense to opt for a library. With libraries, you control when this technology performs a particular function. The rest of your code exists independent from that library. However, with CSS frameworks the control flow is in the framework, and you’ll customize it in places to better suit your project.

Why You Might Want to Use a CSS Framework

CSS frameworks can reduce the amount of code you need to write. Instead of programming everything from scratch, these frameworks provide all the tools you need to spin up a basic UI.

You can then spend your time perfecting this interface to meet your project’s exact requirements. Since you’re not starting every project with a blank slate, you’ll have more time to focus on the specific features that make your site or app unique.

A CSS framework can also be useful for agencies and freelancers who manage multiple client sites. Using this tool, you can create a theme and then deploy it across countless websites. This can help you onboard new clients more quickly, and grow your business without drastically increasing your workload.

If you’re collaborating on a project with multiple people, a CSS framework can help you achieve consistency. For example, instead of each team member inventing their own class names, a CSS framework implements standardized naming conventions. This typically results in higher-quality code that’s easier to read and maintain.

When your code is consistent, you’ll also find it easier to onboard new team members or freelancers. It’s also worth remembering that just because your staff are happy in their role now doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll stick around forever.

It’s smart to ensure that even if your head developer leaves, your project can continue. To make sure your project is never wholly reliant on a single person, it’s a good idea to implement a standardized approach that’s clearly defined and understood by everyone. A framework can help you achieve this uniformity across your project.

Factors to Consider When Using a CSS Framework

A CSS framework can be a valuable addition to your project. However, if you have little previous experience with CSS, then it’s important to familiarize yourself with this language before jumping into the world of frameworks.

By taking the time to master pure CSS, you’ll be better equipped to identify issues with your syntax. When you know how to achieve the desired results in pure CSS, you’ll also find it easier to scan your framework’s documentation for the information you need. This can boost your efficiency, particularly when it comes to problem-solving and troubleshooting.

We always recommend taking some time to sharpen your CSS knowledge before you start shopping around for a suitable framework. Depending on your previous experience and knowledge, this may require a significant amount of time and effort.

A CSS framework will also add to your project’s overhead. Depending on your project, this may include lots of unnecessary or irrelevant code that you don’t even use. Bloat is never good, but it makes zero sense to increase your project’s size without adding any value.

Since your project exists inside the CSS framework, this may be limiting for your application or website. If you rely on a framework too heavily, there’s also the risk that your finished project will look similar to other sites and apps that use the same framework. This can make your project blur into the background, when it should be standing out from the crowd.

How to Choose the Right CSS Framework

To start, your chosen framework should meet all of your project’s technical requirements. It’s also smart to look for characteristics that make this framework a good fit for your project. For example, a lightweight framework may be the perfect addition to a mobile-focused design, but it may be less ideal for a large, complicated application.

Over time, your project’s requirements will likely change. Although it’s impossible to predict the future, it’s always worth considering how your project might develop over the long-term. Your chosen CSS framework should be able to support your site or application as it evolves over months, and potentially even years.

When choosing any technology, it’s always smart to consider its ease of use. Even if you’re fluent in CSS, learning any new technology requires a big upfront investment. Every moment that you spend familiarizing yourself with your new framework is time that you could have invested directly into your project.

Ideally, your chosen framework will be intuitive, user-friendly, and have a gentle learning curve. This will minimize the time between installing the framework and starting to reap the benefits. If a framework is user-friendly, then you’re also much less likely to encounter major issues, including stumbling blocks that require you to pause development in order to research the problem.

When considering ease of use, it’s important to find out what support is available. Ideally, the framework will be backed by official documentation, tutorials, and perhaps even professional support.

You should also consider the level of community resources available, including third-party blogs, forums, and social media sites. An active community can be an invaluable source of additional support. You could even put your questions directly to the community via channels such as Stack Overflow.

6 Popular CSS Frameworks (And When To Use Them)

With so many CSS frameworks to choose from, picking just one isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve compiled this list of the six most popular CSS frameworks. Along the way, we’ll help you make the right decision, by suggesting the kind of projects each framework is perfect for.

1. Bootstrap

Originally named Twitter Blueprint and developed as a tool for internal teams, Bootstrap has since grown into one of the most popular CSS frameworks. Today, Bootstrap is used by around 22 percent of all websites, and its GitHub consists of over 20,000 commits from more than 2000 contributors.

To get started, you can download Bootstrap’s source Sass and JavaScript files from either Composer, Meteor, or the Node Package Manager (npm). You can also use the npm template repository to quickly generate a Bootstrap project, or check out any of the official examples, that are supported by extensive documentation.

All of this makes Bootstrap a great choice for anyone who’s new to CSS frameworks, or has limited pure CSS experience. This may include back-end developers who want to make some changes to their projects’ User Interface (UI). For these designers, Bootstrap provides templates for all of the most popular UI components, including alerts, tabs, forms, and dropdowns.

Bootstrap is also designed for responsive, mobile-first front-end development. This makes it a good fit for mobile projects.

If you do require additional support, Bootstrap has a large and active community on Stack Overflow. You can also access real-time support via the Bootstrap Slack channel.

2. Foundation

Foundation is a front-end framework for building websites, applications, and emails. Thanks to its Sass compiler, the responsive Foundation framework is ideal for creating projects fast.

Foundation favors clean, semantic code and takes a mobile-first approach. After ensuring that your project is fully compatible with mobile devices, you can add in more complexity for a fully-responsive design.

Foundation provides HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which is great for rapidly prototyping websites. If you’re using Foundation to create emails, this framework provides tested patterns that work with all of the major email clients, including Outlook. This can help you create emails that display and function correctly, regardless of how the recipients choose to access them.

Despite its speed, Foundation is far from a limited framework, and many developers use it to create large applications. It’s also highly customizable, which makes Foundation a good choice for designers who want to create a unique experience for their end users, and who aren’t afraid to dig into Foundation’s more complex features in order to achieve the desired result.

Despite its current status as an open-source project, Foundation was originally maintained by ZURB. Today, ZURB continues to offer a full program of tutorials, online courses, custom training, and even an official Foundation certification.

3. Skeleton

The Skeleton framework is a small collection of CSS files that you can use to rapidly generate clean code and simple layouts. Coming in at under 400 lines of code, this bare-bones framework is a good fit for smaller projects, or projects that don’t require the utility of a larger, heavier solution.

As a lightweight framework, Skeleton shouldn’t add unnecessary bloat to your project, which can be particularly valuable for mobile designs. If you’re creating a mobile project, Skeleton has a well-structured grid that enables you to create a responsive layout with minimal hassle.

Skeleton provides a 12-column fluid grid with a maximum width of 960px. This grid shrinks according to the browser and device. However, if you need to alter the maximum width you can make that change with a single line of CSS.

Skeleton serves its scalable grid using media queries. It also provides a list of mobile-first queries for styling your project across multiple devices. All styles outside of a query apply to all devices, so larger devices are targeted for enhancement. This prevents small devices from having to parse large amounts of unnecessary CSS.

If you’re new to the world of CSS frameworks, Skeleton’s simplistic approach makes this a good framework for beginners. For CSS newcomers, it can even be a valuable learning tool before progressing to more complex and feature-rich frameworks.

Unlike some of the other CSS frameworks on this list, Skeleton is designed as a starting point that you can develop into something more substantial. It’s also worth noting that Skeleton’s lack of templates may become an issue if you try to use this framework in larger or more complex projects.

4. UIKit

UIKit is a responsive, lightweight CSS framework that you can use to create clean and professional-looking interfaces. This framework defines all the core components such as table views, buttons, labels, and navigation controllers.

UIKit is also extensible, and supports a comprehensive collection of advanced components that are not bundled with the core framework. This includes parallax girds, dynamic pagination, and sliders.

Alongside CSS files, UIKit provides an autocomplete package for Sublime Text and Atom editors. Since users don’t have to repeatedly look up UIKit markups and class names, this framework is great for your overall productivity.

Unlike other frameworks such as Bootstrap and Foundation, UIKit breaks the layout into three components: grid, flex, and width. Instead of restricting you to a 12-column grid setup, UIKit gives you the flexibility to create as many columns as you require.

Over at the UIKit website, you’ll find extensive official documentation and a series of video tutorials. Despite these useful learning resources, we find that UK Kit is a more complex framework that’s best suited to experienced developers.

5. Semantic UI

Semantic UI is a framework for creating responsive layouts. Based on natural language principles, Semantic UI aims to make code readable and easier to understand by creating a shared vocabulary around UI.

To achieve this, Semantic UI treats words and classes as interchangeable concepts. All classes are human words and use syntax from natural languages, including noun/modifier relationships and word order. Semantic UI also uses plurality to link concepts intuitively. As a result, its code often resembles regular text.

Human-readable code and ease of use makes Semantic UI a great choice for anyone who’s new to the world of frameworks. If you do have previous experience, it’s worth noting that Semantic UI integrates with React, Angular, Meteor, Ember, and various other frameworks.

In addition to the functionality you’d typically expect from a CSS framework, Semantic UI provides simplified debugging and performance logging. This enables you to track down bottlenecks without digging through stack traces. These added extras make Semantic UI suitable for larger projects, including enterprise apps and websites.

6. Pure

Built on Normalize.css, the Pure framework is a set of small, responsive CSS modules that provide layout and styling for native HTML elements. This includes many common UI components. Pure has a minimal and unopinionated design, so you should have no issues adding new CSS rules and overriding Pure.css with your own styles.

Coming in at 3.87B minified and gzipped, this is a simple, lightweight framework. If you only require a subset of Pure’s modules, you’ll save even more bandwidth. This makes Pure ideal for smaller projects, or any project that has modest requirements.

Its small footprint also means that Pure is a good choice for mobile projects, where you’re typically working with less memory. Even better, this framework is responsive out of the box, thanks to its use of Pure Grids and Vertical Menus. With Pure CSS, you can be confident that your UI will look and display correctly across a range of mobile and tablet devices.

Conclusion

Building applications and websites from scratch can quickly start to feel repetitive. Instead of wasting time coding the same elements over and over again, a CSS framework can handle this busywork for you.

If you’re still unsure which CSS framework is right for you, here’s a quick reminder of the six frameworks we covered earlier:

1. Bootstrap: An open source framework that’s perfect for responsive, mobile-first front-end web development.
2. Foundation: With an emphasis on speed, Foundation is ideal for rapid prototyping.
3. Skeleton: Coming in at under 500 lines of code, this CSS framework is designed with mobile devices in mind.
4. UIKit: A lightweight, modular framework that targets highly-experienced, professional developers.
5. Semantic UI: This theming framework contains pre-built semantic components that can help you create professionally-designed, responsive websites.
6. Pure: A collection of responsive CSS modules that have much to offer for mobile developers.

A CSS framework can be your secret weapon for developing professionally-designed websites and applications in record time. However, once you’re ready to send your project out into the world, you’ll still need somewhere to host it.

By choosing a provider that’s optimized for web frameworks, you can ensure that you’re getting the very best out of your finished project. At A2 Hosting, we’ve optimized our plans for a wide range of frameworks, including Bootstrap. We even offer 1-click framework setup!

The post What Is a CSS Framework? (And When to Use 6 Popular Options) appeared first on The A2 Posting.

So, Does Website Migration Affect SEO? 

Any server change carries a slight SEO risk with or without modifications to your website,  but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You see, migrations primarily affect site speed. So if you’re migrating to a host like A2 Hosting, you’ll notice increased site speed. As loading time is a top SEO ranking consideration, this can only help you, not hurt you. Unfortunately, this means the opposite for migrating to a slower host (maybe it’ll make you think again about migrating to a cheaper host?). 

When users experience slow loading times, they’re less likely to revisit your site in the future, especially when more than 50% of visitors abandon a website if a page takes over 2 seconds to load. Since 2010, speed has been a ranking factor for desktop searches on Google. When researching new hosts, look for speed optimizations or determine how the web hosting company optimizes its servers for speed. 

For example, at A2 Hosting, we use only SSD and NVMe storage. “Our speed, your success” is our motto because we believe that speed is the most critical factor in attracting, maintaining, and increasing traffic and conversions. Additionally, our Turbo servers offer Litespeed caching, and specific servers also offer the AMD EPYC processors. When combined, these three elements contribute to lightning-fast speeds.  

Changing web hosting providers can also come with risks, especially if you lose certain functionalities at the new host or move from Apache to Nginx or IIS (Internet Information Services). If you’re wary about changing hosts, talk with someone on our sales team about the process and ensure your server needs match up with what we can offer you. 

Now that we’ve discussed how website migrations affect SEO, let’s review the migration process. Use our SEO checklist to prepare your website for its migration:

• 1. Set up a staging site on your new server. Before canceling your other web hosting plan, compare your existing site’s page load speeds against the new server’s load speeds. Hopefully, the new server improved your site speeds! 
• 2. Pick a slow time. After testing your new site on the server, pick a quiet time to perform the DNS propagation. Your site may be down for up to 24 hours as the DNS propagates around the world, but choose a time when you experience low traffic, so you’re not missing opportunities for leads and conversions. 
• 3. Perform checks on your site. For example, check the organic health of your website. Is there any penalization for spammy backlinks? Are your current backlinks relevant for the content? We recommend tracking your site’s domain authority with Moz Pro. 
• 4. Crawl your site. With Moz Pro or ScreamingFrog, you can crawl your website to receive a full URL and content inventory. Then, you can fix issues while you’re staging your site and map old URLs to new URLs in your 301 redirect map.  
• 5. Update Internal Links. Test your website and update internal links to avoid internal redirects or broken links. ScreamingFrog allows you to find internal links and their attached anchor text and their respective pages.
• 6. Create a custom 404 page. When visitors experience a broken page, engage them with a custom 404 page. It should direct them to your homepage or additional pages on your website. Otherwise, a blank 404 page frustrates users and makes them want to close the browser tab altogether and find a site that works. 
• 7. Update your Robots.txt file. The robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages the crawler can or can’t request from your site. It lives at www.yoursite.com/robots.txt. 
• 8. Test your website on mobile. Is your site responsive or rendering correctly on a mobile device? Google offers a Mobile-Friendly Test tool to determine if Google views your site as mobile-friendly. 
• 9. Measure your performance post-launch. Once you’ve ensured your site launches appropriately, there are no broken pages or backlinks, your site is mobile-friendly, and you’ve updated your robots.txt file, analyze your performance after you launch your website. Check your ranking performance, organic traffic users/sessions, check for site crawl issues, and monitor your backlink profile. Track any 404 page traffic in your Google Analytics post-launch to catch and add any redirects to your 301 redirect file. 

SEO doesn’t need to be significant when migrating your website concern. With a few preparations, you can efficiently execute a website migration plan without worrying about lowering your website’s ranking. 

Related articles:

• How to Migrate a WordPress Website to a New Host
• Tips for Migrating to Joomla 4
• How to Switch Your Domain Name Without Damaging Your Site’s SEO
• A Total Beginner’s Guide to Website Hosting
• Who Has the Fastest Web Hosting? Matching Your Need for Speed

The post Does Website Migration Affect SEO? The Definitive Website Migration SEO Checklist. appeared first on The A2 Posting.