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What Is phpBB Hosting?

Posted on May 21, 2019 by Hosting

The post What Is phpBB Hosting? appeared first on HostGator Blog . The idea of community used to be much more tied to geography. For a group of people to come together to have discussions, share information, and learn from each other, they had to live close enough to do so in person. The internet has changed all that. The idea of connecting with people in online communities is now second nature to us. And one of the common options for creating and maintaining communities online is the forum software phpBB. Below we dive into everything there is to know about phpBB hosting , from how it works to why you might choose it to power your own forum. What Is phpBB? phpBB , which stands for PHP bulletin board, is an open source forum software that enables users to create a space online where communities can gather and share information in an organized format. Forums created with phpBB let creators define the main categories and topics the community forum will cover. Users can create accounts, load their own questions and contents in the appropriate categories, and respond to the posts of other community members. All participants in the discussion board can track the number of conversations and posts in all of the categories, and click to view each category and conversation they’re interested in. The forum model is basic and intuitive, making it easy for just about anyone to use. And for individuals or businesses interested in starting a forum, phpBB makes setting one up relatively simple as well. 6 Reasons to Start a Forum phpBB is best used for the specific function of building and running an online forum. Before you decide if it’s the best application for your purposes, you should figure out if creating a forum is right for your particular needs. It’s possible to create a discussion board for its own sake, in order to create a gathering place for people with common interests. It’s also common to create one as part of a business or brand that already exists, to give your customers or followers a place to connect with each other. If you already have a website and are wondering if a forum makes sense, there are a few main benefits it can offer. 1. Forums create community. Humans are social animals who have always sought out community and connection. An online forum gives people a chance to get to know other users, help each other out, and feel like a part of something. In some cases, that will take on a straightforward and professional tone, and in others it will have a more fun or emotional one. In either case, when you can provide people with a sense of community, you’re adding real value to their lives. And if you become a regular participant in it as well, you may find it brings value to yours also. 2. You can get to know your site visitors better. For brands, this is a big benefit. For both businesses and media sites, understanding your audience is a big priority. In order to deliver information and products that are relevant and useful to the people you want to reach, you need to know who they are and what they care about. When your audience comes together to interact with each other in a forum, they’ll voice the common questions and opinions they have. All that information you’re always trying to learn about them when crafting buyer personas or creating a content strategy? With a forum, they’ll bring it straight to you. 3. Your visitors can learn from each other. For many tech and software products, this is one of the big roles online forums play. When you’re struggling to figure out how to take a particular action in your software and head to Google to find the answer, often what you’ll find is a forum page where one user of the software asked the same question, and a fellow one provided an answer. This is a major reason why we have forums here at HostGator : That use case extends beyond tech products to any type of issue your forum users might be able to help each other with. A forum for teachers could include advice about lesson plans or how to handle particular student issues. A forum for fans of a TV show could include conversations about the show’s influences or themes that introduce ideas some fans hadn’t considered before. In every case, both the people learning something new, and the people providing the information (and in many forums, members will take turns in each role) are getting something valuable out of the interaction. 4. Forums can increase traffic to your site. If you add a forum to your website, you give all the members that participate reasons to keep coming back again and again. And when users have questions that relate to content you already have on your website, you have the perfect opportunity to share the link and drive more traffic to those pages on your site. All that adds up to more visits to your website. And even better, much of it will be return visitors who are actively engaging with your brand during their visits. For website owners, that’s a big win. 5. Forums can improve search engine optimization (SEO). The search engine algorithms like fresh content. When they see that a website is updated often, it shows that the website is current, which suggests it has more value than one that’s potentially outdated. Forums generate tons of fresh content—every time someone posts a new message or response, they’re creating new content on your site. And if your forum is available to the public, it creates a lot of new pages that can be indexed by the algorithms and show up in search themselves. If one of the conversations in your forum answers a question searchers have better than other websites do, it could get onto the first page of the search results, driving more traffic and increasing the authority of your website. 6. Forums help you generate new content ideas. One of the best ways to improve your website’s authority is to consistently create content your visitors care about. But creating large amounts of high-value, relevant content is challenging. In order to keep it up, you need a way to brainstorm topics your audience are most interested in. A forum gives you a window into the topics your audience is thinking and talking about. You can learn the common questions they have, and then create content that answers them. And by spending time following the conversations they have and the language they use, you’ll get better at creating content in a style that they can relate to. Why Use phpBB? If a forum sounds like the right choice for your website, you do have a few different options to choose from in selecting your software. But there’s a reason that phpBB is one of the most popular options—a good number of reasons in fact. In particular: It’s free. Setting up a forum with phpBB costs nothing. You can save your money for hosting and marketing. It’s open source. The code for phpBB is freely available to use and change as you need. And because it’s open source, other users can also develop features and extensions you can benefit from. It’s secure. The team behind phpBB runs security audits and work to quickly release updates to the software anytime they spot a vulnerability in the code. As long as you keep your software up to date and take basic website security measures , like choosing a trusted web hosting provider and using strong passwords, you’ll be able to keep your website safe from hackers . It enables user preferences. For your forum to attract the community you want and get them to stick around, you want it to be user friendly. phpBB allows individual users some control over their experience of the forum. For example, they can load unique avatars and signatures to personalize their accounts, and customize the order they view categories in.   It gives you the power of moderation. In our era of spam bots and trolls, a good community is a well moderated one. To keep your forum valuable, positive, and on topic, you need the power to review and approve the posts that go live. phpBB allows both the forum owner and any users you assign moderator status to the ability to remove or approve specific posts. It offers public and private messaging options. Much of the value of a forum is the visibility of the conversations to all members, but sometimes individual members may want the ability to take part of the conversation private. phpBB allows the option of private messaging between members as well as public discussions. It allows posters to include rich features. These days, online conversations are rarely just text. phpBB lets users complement their written messages with popular gifs, images, and emojis, as well as adding rich media like video or interactive features like polls. It has anti-spam features. It’s hard to go anywhere online without encountering spam, but phpBB can help you avoid dealing with too much of it in your forum with features like captcha confirmation and the ability to ban users as needed. You can customize your forum’s look. You can use your own coding skills to change up the design of your forum, if you’re able. Or you can choose from the hundreds of styles other phpBB users have developed and made available, mostly for free.   You can control permissions. Ther forum owner, administrators, and moderators will need different types of access and abilities in the forum than everyday users. phpBB makes it easy for you to determine which users are able to access which features. There are lots of extensions available. The functionality available in the core phpBB software is rich enough, but many users have created extensions that add additional features and functions to phpBB, many of them for free. You can expand what you and your members are able to do, based on your priorities. What Is phpBB Hosting? phpBB hosting is a type of web hosting that’s compatible with the phpBB software. phpBB provides a lot of the important functionality you need to build a forum, but it doesn’t come with web hosting. For your forum to become available online and accessible to your members, you’ll need to invest in application web hosting . If you already have a website, you may be able to get started by adding your phpBB forum to the hosting plan you already have, but if you didn’t choose an application web hosting plan specifically designed to work with phpBB, there’s a chance you’ll face compatibility issues. A good phpBB web hosting plan will promise easy one-click installation, so you can spend your time focusing on getting your forum started, not on messing with complicated technical processes to get everything working. Here’s a look at how easy it is to install phpBB with HostGator: A phpBB web hosting plan will be 100% compatible with your phpBB forum—so there’s no chance of surprise issues down the line. Plus, a strong phpBB hosting choice will provide adequate security through strong firewalls and security software options, so that you can trust your forum will remain active without the threat of malicious hackers or viruses. Finally, you’ll also want to be sure you choose a web hosting option that provides enough bandwidth for the website to handle regular visits from all your users, especially if the community starts to grow in the months and years to come—which is exactly what you want! While a number of web hosting plans may work for hosting your phpBB forum, your life will be a little easier if you go with a reputable web hosting company that offers a phpBB-specific plan. Get Started with phpBB Hosting Services With the right phpBB hosting plan, you can get your forum up and running fast, and keep it running functionally without issues for as long as you want. When considering your options for phpBB hosting, make sure you go with a web host that has a strong reputation for providing quality service. HostGator can promise 24/7 customer support, a 99.9% uptime guarantee, and a great reputation in the industry . Many of the benefits of having a community forum fall by the wayside if your visitors can’t access it at the moment they need it. With the right phpBB web hosting plan, you can be confident that your forum will deliver on the speed and accessibility that your users want and expect. Get started today with HostGator application hosting . Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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What Is Wiki Hosting?

Posted on May 20, 2019 by Hosting

The post What Is Wiki Hosting? appeared first on HostGator Blog . When you’re seeking out information on a topic online and you head to Google, in most cases the top result you see will be from Wikipedia. The massive Wiki has become the go-to source for knowledge of all types online. But Wikipedia is just one example of a larger category of websites: wikis. What are wikis, and how can you host one of your own? We explain everything you need to know about wiki hosting plans below. What Is a Wiki? A wiki is a popular type of website  that enables open collaboration from users. The main thing that sets it apart from other websites is that anyone with an interest in the topic at hand and relevant knowledge can go in and add or change information on the page. In addition, the structure of wikis centers interlinking between related topics. This both encourages visitors of one page to move to related pages to gain additional knowledge, while also making it easier for people to learn contextual information that improves their understanding of the topic at hand. As many fans of Wikipedia, the most dominant of all online wikis, are well aware, the wiki format can inspire meandering and varied—but fruitful—explorations of knowledge. There’s even a term for this kind of exploratory knowledge gathering: the wiki rabbit hole , likening the experience to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland moving from one interesting experience to the next. Wikis are therefore great tools for sharing, organizing, and gaining knowledge through many types of resources. And for learning from the minds of many who can bring a diversity of experiences and knowledge to the format. Why Should You Start a Wiki? If you’re at the stage of trying to decide what kind of website to start, you should know that a wiki isn’t right for all possible websites. For example, if you’re building a business website, you want to keep control over what information goes on each page. And while providing helpful information may be part of your business website strategy, it wouldn’t be the central focus—getting people to buy your products or services is. Wikis aren’t for every use case, but for the particular situations where they do make sense, they can be a great choice. If you want a website that matches these four main attributes, then a wiki may be for you. 1. Wikis are collaborative. This could potentially be the main benefit or the biggest reason not to start a wiki, depending on the type of website you’re building. Whether you want strangers who share your passion to be able to add their knowledge of the subject your website is centered on, or if you want to allow employees or colleagues to weigh in on the business information provided, a wiki allows for that. If a colleague has a great idea for improving one of the business processes you describe on a wiki page, they can chime in in a format where everyone can see their contribution and build upon it. Or if a visitor that shares your love of your favorite TV show or author remembers a key point not initially included on a character’s page, they can add it to make the description more thorough. If your goal is a site that collects as much relevant knowledge as possible from multiple sources, then a wiki makes a lot of sense. 2. Wikis enable wide accessibility. A wiki can be easily accessed by anyone with internet access on any device they have. For businesses or organizations that want a centralized location where everyone can access all the company’s important information, a wiki provides that benefit. You can keep all your documentation, including the comments and responses other people have shared, in one place where anyone can get to it at the moment they need it. Wiki platforms provide accessibility both in terms of making it possible for everyone relevant to weigh in on the topics covered, and when it comes to where and how people can view the information included. 3. Wikis are an intuitive way to collect and organize information. Part of the success of sites like Wikipedia is that they organize information in a way that makes it easy to get the exact information you’re looking for. Wikis break information up into individual pages that each have a clear focus. Instead of packing all the information about a TV show into one page, for instance, you have separate pages about each character, each episode, each actor, and each of the main themes in the show. While the information is divided into one page for each topic, the related pages are also interlinked to make it easy to find additional relevant information as you go. As an example, if a character’s page mentions that they’ve married another character, it would include links to the spouse’s character page and the episode the marriage happens in. All of this makes it easy for anyone visiting the wiki to quickly find answers to the particular question they have, and any related information they decide to seek out as well. 4. Wikis are easy to set up. With the available wiki software, building out a wiki from scratch is fairly easy and intuitive, even for someone new to the whole process. And installing the wiki software on your web server is simple if you choose a Wiki hosting plan (more on that in a bit).  You will want to spend a little time planning out the kind of information you want your wiki to cover and how to organize it, but getting a wiki up and available to other users isn’t all that hard. 6 Main Types of Wiki Software Once you’ve decided to create a wiki for your website, you have two main choices to make: which wiki software to go with, and which wiki web hosting to choose. For the first question, you have a number of different options. These are the most popular wiki software solutions to consider. 1. MediaWiki MediaWiki is the most popular and well known of the wiki software options, as it’s the software behind Wikipedia. It’s a free and open source software that’s powerful enough to host a wiki of virtually any size. It’s relatively easy to use and extremely scalable, with hundreds of configurations and extensions available. Mediawiki is best for wikis that you intend to make publically available to anyone interested. It doesn’t provide good features for restricting access to a particular group of people. If you’re building a wiki for business purposes or to enable collaboration between members of a specific organization and you want your wiki to have a level of privacy, then Mediawiki probably isn’t the best choice for you. For any publically available wikis though, it’s a popular choice. 2. Tiki Tiki is another open source, free wiki software that’s been downloaded over a million times. It’s primarily developed for businesses to help enable collaboration between employees and departments. Tiki’s wiki features make it possible to create and edit a virtually unlimited number of pages, but unlike MediaWiki, it lets the wiki creator set permissions for specific pages and lock pages to keep others from editing. It also tracks the version history for each page and allows you to restore a page to a past version. For businesses or organizations wanting a wiki they can control access to, Tiki is a good choice. 3. PmWiki PmWiki is another popular wiki software that provides useful features for businesses, while remaining free to use. It’s a fairly basic version of wiki software, providing the most essential functions you need for a business wiki. You can easily change the appearance of your PmWiki site using skins—either ones you design yourself, or pre-made options that are available. As with Tiki, PmWiki lets you control which users have editing access to specific pages of your wiki site using password protection. If you’re looking for a good software to build a simple business wiki, PmWiki is a solid option. 4. WikkaWiki WikkaWiki is a lightweight wiki software that provides similar functionality to many of the other wiki engines mentioned on this list. WikkaWiki makes editing wiki pages simple for a variety of users, and like the other business-friendly wiki options, allows the wiki creator and administrators to control which users have access to specific pages both for viewing and editing. It also allows you to track and view a page’s revision history and restore prior versions as needed. 5. Dokuwiki Dokuwiki is a free and open source wiki software that boasts a simple design. The core features are basic and intuitive, but the software is also extensively customizable using available configurations and plugins. Dokuwiki is a popular choice for business use cases, including collaborative corporate workspaces and project management. As with many of the other options, Dokuwiki has access control features that allow wiki creators to limit who can view and edit particular pages, as well as specific sections of pages. And they provide revision tracking and management. 6. Matterwiki Matterwiki is a simple, easy-to-use wiki software made specifically for small businesses. All wiki articles are stored under a specific topic for intuitive organization. The software also tracks revisions, as well as who made each change. The editor is easy for employees at all levels of knowledge to use, so for small teams that want a simple interface for their wiki, Matterwiki is a good option to consider. What are Wiki Hosting Services? Wiki hosting is any web hosting plan that has the specific features and compatibility to work with wiki software. All websites need web hosting in order to be published to the web and accessible to visitors, and there are a wide range of web hosting options available when it comes to choosing a plan for your website. Application web hosting plans are specifically designed to work effectively with the particular type of application you used to build or run on your website. Wiki hosting is a type of application web hosting that promises support for wiki websites, whatever type of wiki software you choose to go with. What to Look for in a Wiki Hosting Plan If you’ve picked out your wiki software and are ready to choose a wiki hosting plan to launch your website, there are a few specific features to look out for: Easy installation One of the benefits of going with wiki hosting services, rather than a more general web hosting plan is that adding your wiki software to your web hosting account will be a breeze. Look for wiki hosting plans that provide one-click installation for your wiki software. Specific compatibility Most wiki hosting plans should work with any of the top wiki software options, but to be safe, check and make sure that the web hosting plan you consider works with the specific wiki software you’ve selected. HostGator wiki hosting supports many of the wikis we mentioned above, including MediaWiki hosting, Tiki hosting, PmWiki hosting, and WikkaWiki hosting Proper bandwidth This is especially important if your wiki will be publically available on the entire web, but also matters for private business wikis as well. Bandwidth will affect how much information (especially media and images) you can include on your wiki, and how many visitors the wiki can handle. If you expect a lot of people to access and use your wiki, then select a web hosting plan that can handle a lot of traffic. 99% uptime Whether your wiki will be for the broader public or just for a select few, you want it to be reliably accessible. Uptime is the term that describes how much time a web hosting provider keeps its websites up and available. The best web hosting companies promise at least 99% uptime, but a select few go further and offer 99.9% uptime with a money-back guarantee.   Customer support While building a wiki is relatively easy, with any type of website there’s always the chance you’ll face occasional technical snafus or issues you need help with. Find a wiki hosting company that provides 24/7 customer support so you can always trust there will be help available at the moment you need it. Find the Right Wiki Hosting Plan for You Building a wiki can offer a range of great benefits. It helps you connect and collaborate with other people, and enables a number of people to build upon each other’s knowledge. Whether your wiki provides information about a hobby or piece of culture you love, or helps your company manage projects and organize documents more effectively, it’s the right tool for a number of jobs. To make sure your wiki site is available to everyone that needs it, reliably and consistently, make sure you choose a wiki hosting plan that’s up to the task. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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Benefits of Magento Hosting

Posted on May 17, 2019 by Hosting

The post Benefits of Magento Hosting appeared first on HostGator Blog . Your eCommerce business is starting to come together. You have your business plan and an idea  of what the design of your eCommerce website will look like. But you still need to figure out the right eCommerce software and web hosting plan to get your eCommerce website working and ready for business. When considering your web hosting options, you may come across an option that addresses both needs in its focus: Magento hosting . What Is Magento? Before you can know if Magento hosting is right for you, you need to decide whether you’ll use Magento for your website. Magento is the third most popular eCommerce platform on the market (falling only behind WooCommerce and Shopify). It supplies the main functionality you need to run an eCommerce site, namely: A shopping cart Check out functionality Account creation and guest check out options Integration with payment processing apps to accept payment Ability to list your products and track availability Those are the basics you need, but Magento has a vast array of features that go beyond the basics. Between the core functionality of the platform itself and the extensions you can add to it , the software packs a lot of power into the framework it provides for your eCommerce store.   Why You Need eCommerce Software You know now that Magento is a type of eCommerce software, but maybe you’re wondering if you can get by without an eCommerce platform to begin with. eCommerce websites have unique needs that won’t be served by a web hosting plan or content management system alone. If you want to make sales through your website, then you need a way to list your products, track inventory, provide a secure checkout, and accept payments. If you think about the online stores you buy from the most often, they probably have additional eCommerce features like the ability to set up a wishlist, mark your favorites, set up subscriptions, or take advantage of coupons. For all of that, you need the right software. If you’re building an online store, consider eCommerce software a necessary part of the process. 12 Reasons to Use Magento for Your eCommerce Website Magento isn’t your only option, but it’s one of the most popular CMSes for eCommerce websites for a number of reasons. 1. Magento is free. Few things in life are free, and it’s even rarer for something with as much usefulness as Magento to be free. But the Magento core is freely available for anyone to use. You may incur some costs for extensions you add on, or for developers you hire to help you use Magento. But the platform itself won’t cost you a thing. 2. It’s open source. Magento is open source software which means that anyone with the skills to develop a new module or extension can do so. Magento boasts a community of over 300,000 developers. They have an active forum with thousands of contributors, all working to make Magento do as much as business owners need and want it to. One of the nice things about using an open source solution is that you can count on it to improve in quality and functionality over time as people work to make it better for the benefit of all users. 3. Magento’s advanced security is ideal for eCommerce. Website security is important for all website owners, but when you run an online store that regularly takes sensitive financial and personal information from customers, security takes on an extra level of necessity. In the eCommerce community, Magento is widely considered a strong choice for security. And while the core software provides security against hackers, you can make your Magento website more secure with any of the hundreds of security extensions available. In addition, Magento lets you control how much access you allow each person who updates your website to have. Security permissions help you limit the risk of an angry employee making malicious updates to your website, or someone accidentally breaking something on the site due to ignorance. 4. Magento supports huge eCommerce product catalogs and order volume It’s understandable to wonder just how much a free product can actually do, especially if you have big goals and expect to see significant traffic numbers or list a high number of products. Magento really can handle a lot. You can add up to 500,000 products to your store on one Magento site. And the platform can handle over 80,000 orders every hour (as long as your web hosting plan is also up to the task). Plus, Magento’s reporting dashboard shows you at-a-glance how those sales are translating to your bottom line: That means it should work for you in the early stages of building your business, and allow you tons of room to grow as your sales and customer numbers increase. 5. Magento’s flexible extensions make it easy to customize your online store. Magento is extremely customizable, especially when it comes to the changes you can make using the large library of extensions. You have a lot of power to make the backend of your website look the way you want it, as well as making the website itself intuitive for your visitors. And Magento has a lot of different features you can choose to incorporate if you so desire, such as using categories to better group your different products, allowing different payment options, and letting you manage orders through the platform. With Magento, you can configure your website to have the features you want it to, both on your end and the user end. 6. Magento’s shopping cart functionality is responsive. With over half of all web use now happening on mobile devices, it’s integral that all online stores make their website mobile friendly . Magento’s shopping cart functionality is fully responsive, which means it works just as well on tablets and smartphones as it does on desktop computers. The last thing you want is for half of your visitors to bounce because they find your website difficult to use on their particular device—or worse, bounce right before a sale because the checkout process is a pain on the small screen. Magento will help you avoid that fate. 7. Magento’s powerful product search helps customers quickly find what they need. Nothing else about your eCommerce site will matter if customers find using it more difficult than it’s worth. Your website has to provide an experience that’s intuitive and pleasant from the moment they first land on the site, to when they complete their purchase. Magento helps you realize that by letting you organize your products in user-friendly ways, so visitors can browse and filter results based on their particular preferences. You can enable features like auto-suggestion for search terms or display popular search term clouds that can further help customers find what they need. And you can load multiple high-resolution images for each product to help customers make a better decision. 8. Built-in features are designed to boost your conversion rate. Magento also has a number of options you can use to increase conversions and upsells. You can offer free shipping and discounts to incentivize sales. You can also add in areas for customers to add their own promo codes at checkout: You can enable one-click purchases (just like Amazon!) with their Instant Purchase feature: You can set up your website to display recently viewed products, so customers are more likely to go back and buy items they’d considered. You can have your website show related products , or items commonly bought together, to encourage customers to buy more products at once. Finally, you can make it easy for customers to share items they like on social or with friends. 9. Magento follows SEO best practices. The minds behind Magento knew the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) for a website and built a platform that made optimizing your pages for search simple. You can easily customize your URLs, fill in the relevant meta information on each page, and create an auto-generated sitemap to submit to the search engines. 10. Magento enables personalization. Personalization is an eCommerce tactic gaining steam and showing significant results. Magento’s core platform provides some personalization options, but you can go even further with tailoring the way customers experience your website with extensions that offer additional personalization features. With the Magento core, customers can create unique accounts so you can better track their behavior over time and show them products and ads based on past purchases or views. You can automate the process of serving up personalized recommendations for each visitor. With extensions, you can generate automated recommendation and reminder emails based on their past behavior and deliver personalized ads across other sites to help get past visitors back on your site. 11. Magento works with third-party applications. Magento helps power a lot of useful features and functionality on your own website, but what happens on your own website is only part of running an online store. You also need to think about marketing your store in various channels around the web to get customers to your website to begin with. Not to mention all the work you have to do to keep up with your business’s finances. Magento is compatible with a wide range of third-party applications that help with those parts, including email marketing software, Google analytics, accounting software products, and payment processing apps. Easy integration with the various apps you need to run your business make all the extra business tasks you have to take care of easier. 12. Magento tutorials abound online. Nothing is perfect, and one of the downsides of using Magento is that it has a learning curve. If you’re not a professional developer, or you don’t have the budget to hire one, learning the ropes of using Magento can take some time and work. But you can find a lot of useful information to help you get started online. Free tutorials are available on sites like TutorialsPoint . Or for a more thorough introduction, you can take one of the courses offered at Magento U for a fee. What is Magento Hosting? Magento hosting is a web hosting plan that provides compatibility with the eCommerce software Magento. While Magento is free and provides a lot of useful features for running an online store, one thing it notably doesn’t provide is web hosting. Magento hosting plans will often provide the additional important business features an eCommerce website needs such as an SSL certificate and compatibility with third-party solutions commonly used by businesses, such as email marketing and Google Analytics. While many web hosting plans that aren’t specifically Magento hosting may make it possible to use Magento, an application web hosting plan that provides specific functionality related to using Magento can often better meet the needs of eCommerce stores that depend on the shopping cart software. 5 Benefits of Magento Hosting When choosing the best web hosting option for your eCommerce store, you’ll benefit from prioritizing Magento compatibility upfront. There are five main reasons to specifically seek out an application hosting plan that works with Magento specifically. 1. Easy installation With a Magento hosting plan, you can trust that adding Magento to your web hosting account will be quick and easy. With HostGator’s Magento hosting, you can add the application in one click once you’re signed into your web hosting account. You can focus your time on building your website, rather than figuring out how to get your eCommerce software and web hosting service to work together. 2. Assured compatibility If you’ve already made the choice to power your eCommerce options with Magento—and especially if you’ve already put the work into using it in designing your website—you really don’t want to realize after you sign up for a web hosting plan that there are compatibility issues in getting Magento to work right with your plan. Save yourself the trouble of having to work to get the two programs to support each other, or worse, having to switch over to a new web hosting provider after you’re already eager to launch. Start with a plan you know will work seamlessly with Magento from the get go. 3. No performance issues One of the complaints you’ll occasionally see about Magento is that some sites face performance issues, such as slow loading times. In fact, the issue isn’t usually Magento when that occurs, it’s that the website owner went with a web hosting plan that wasn’t up to the task of running the Magento site. To avoid performance issues, find a Magento web hosting plan that provides the degree of power and bandwidth you need. 4. No hidden fees Some web hosting plans will advertise an upfront price, then hit you with unexpected fees when it comes time to add the apps you need to your account.  With Magento hosting, you not only know that your web hosting plan will be compatible with your Magento site, you can also trust that you won’t have to pay anything extra to use Magento with the plan you buy. 5. Proper security As we’ve already established, security is paramount when you’re running an online store. Choosing a secure web hosting provider like Magento is one step to making your eCommerce site secure. Finding a web hosting plan that also promises top-notch security is another. A good Magento hosting plan will have strong firewalls in place to protect your website from hackers and offer additional security features, like an SSL certificate and security software you can add to your website. Get Started with Magento Hosting Starting an eCommerce website is a big deal. If you make the right choices, it can put you on the path to big profits. Early on, two of the most important choices you can make are which eCommerce software to go with and which web hosting plan to choose. If you go with Magento, picking a Magento hosting plan to go along with your choice just makes sense.Get started with HostGator’s application hosting . Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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How and Why to Keep Your Website Fresh

Posted on May 9, 2019 by Hosting

The post How and Why to Keep Your Website Fresh appeared first on HostGator Blog . Want to keep visitors coming back to your site? Keep it fresh. Stale content, outdated site technology, and passé design can cause visitors to move on in search of more timely information, a faster-loading site, or a site that doesn’t look like a time capsule from a bygone era. Freshness can help you earn new visitors, too. Frequently updated content gets crawled more often by search-engine bots, so your site is less likely to get buried by newer items in search results. Keeping up with the latest technical standards, like fast-loading pages and mobile-friendly design, can help your site’s search results performance, too. 1. Keep Website Content Fresh with a Content Calendar Content is what visitors come to your site for, whether it’s new blog posts, photos, videos, or products. If you don’t already have a content calendar—a schedule for creating and adding new content to your site—start by making one. Your content calendar can be as simple as reminders in your existing Google calendar or as comprehensive as a WordPress plugin like Editorial Calendar that lets you schedule, edit, and publish your WordPress posts easily. 2. Bring Older Content Up to Date Of course, the more new content you publish, the bigger your archive of older content will be. Don’t let that material get stale. You can get more views for your older content by linking to it in some of your new posts. You can also use the related content feature in the free version of the Jetpack WordPress plugin to find and display related posts at the bottom of each new post you create. Your older content may need updating to keep it reliable and relevant. Information changes, links get broken, and you may have new insights to add to your previous posts. If your archived posts number in the hundreds or thousands, keeping it all updated may seem like an impossible task. That’s why it’s a best practice to start your update program with what’s called your “cornerstone content”—the best performing and most relevant articles on your site. Build reminders into your content calendar to update these pieces every 6 to 12 months. Once you’ve got that cornerstone content up to date, add reviews and updates to your content calendar for your non-blog content, too, like your About and Contact pages. 3. Repurpose Your Older Content Let’s say your foodie blog has an old post about sous vide cooking basics. Now that sous vide cooking is trendy, think about how you can repackage the information in that old post to grow your audience. You could turn the basic steps into an infographic or slide deck to share on social media. You could also create a video based on your post to share on social media and YouTube. Got a bunch of short posts about sous vide tips and tools? Try combining them into one big new post. Or maybe now’s the time to put all that information into an eBook that your visitors can download if they sign up for your newsletter. 4. Keep an Eye on Keyword Data Check your Google Search Console data to see what keywords are bringing visitors to your site. If your content doesn’t already contain the most popular keywords your site visitors are using, it’s time to revise some of your posts to include those keywords—where they’re a natural fit. You can also use those keywords as a list of potential topics for new content. 5. Update Your Web Design It’s not only your content that you want to keep fresh and interesting. The appearance of your site will get stale over time, too—especially to frequent visitors. It may also be time for a web design makeover if: Your site doesn’t look good on mobile browsers. This is huge. If your site is hard to read or navigate on a smartphone screen, you need to make finding a mobile-friendly theme your top priority. You’re rebranding your blog or business and have a new logo, tagline, and colors. You’re adding a lot of new functionality to your site (a blog, an online store, online courses) and you want to visually cue visitors in to the fact that you’ve made big changes. The easiest way to update the look of your site is with a new theme. You can buy a theme or find one for free. HostGator’s managed WordPress hosting and Gator Website Builder plans include access to free themes. And we’ve recommended some of our favorite WordPress themes here on the blog. Before you make any live changes to your site theme, install a few themes and preview them to see how they look with your content. Before you activate your new theme, back up your site in case you need to revert to your old theme while you make some adjustments to the new one. 6. Upgrade Your Website Functionality We’ve already mentioned mobile-friendliness as a website must-have. As a site owner, you also get to stay on top of SEO best practices, tools like schema.org markup for rich results in search, and your site’s performance compared to the benchmarks set by Google, so your site doesn’t get left in the dust by newer, faster alternatives. Yoast SEO is a popular SEO plugin for WordPress sites , because it delivers frequent updates and provides lots of user education. To help you format rich search results for your content, All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets lets you build markups without coding and then preview the results before you publish. As for speed, it’s smart to regularly test your most important pages for mobile and desktop speed using Google’s Test My Site and Page Speed Insights tools. Each test will give you a score and detailed suggestions on how to speed up your site if you need to make improvements. Is It Time to Update Your Website? Together, these regular updates and checks will help you keep up with your visitors’ expectations for up-to-date content, visual interest, and a site that meets current performance standards. When did you last freshen up your site? What do you plan to update next? Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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How to Use Facebook Messenger for eCommerce

Posted on May 7, 2019 by Hosting

The post How to Use Facebook Messenger for eCommerce appeared first on HostGator Blog . Facebook Messenger is no longer just an app you can use to message your friends. Now it’s an app where you can chat with your friends and shop at the exact same time. That’s right, Facebook Messenger is also a powerful tool for eCommerce. According to Statista, there are now 1.3 billion monthly active Facebook Messenger users worldwide. That’s a ton of users that you can interact with. But, don’t open Facebook Messenger and start messaging your followers at random, telling them to buy your products. Not only is that time consuming, but it’s also ineffective — and weird. So, how do you use Facebook Messenger successfully to impress your customers and grow your sales? Here’s how to use Facebook Messenger for eCommerce. 1. Convenient Customer Support With the advances in technology we have today, customers are no longer interested in calling your customer service line or waiting hours for you to answer a customer support email. In fact, 12% of Americans rate their number one frustration with customer service as “lack of speed”. They want lightning fast customer service and support, so your business needs to adapt. Luckily, with Facebook Messenger you can provide quick and convenient customer support to consumers around the clock, no matter where they are. But this doesn’t mean you need to be sitting around, Facebook Messenger app open, and answering customer support questions all day, you can use a Facebook Messenger chatbot to handle customer service for you. With a tool like Many Chat , you can easily create a Facebook Messenger chatbot to answer all of your customers’ pressing questions and concerns — without having to touch a line of code. With this tool, not only can users access your customer support right from Facebook, but you can also add a Facebook Messenger Customer Chat window to your eCommerce website . This way, all of your customers will be aware of your convenient customer support option, not just the ones who follow you on Facebook. 2. Generate Leads and Deliver Content Most users that visit your website will not buy anything from you on their first visit. They might be checking out what you have to offer, comparing prices, or reading reviews before they make the decision to purchase. So, instead of risking losing these visitors, take the opportunity to turn them into a lead. A highly effective way to turn consumers into leads is by offering a free gift like a coupon or exclusive content through an email signup optin on your website. But, for those users who would prefer not to get content via email, you can send their content via Facebook Messenger instead.   OptinMonster , a powerful lead generation tool for your website, now has a chatbot integration feature that allows you to do just that: Simply connect your OptinMonster account with your ManyChat account and you can drag and drop the Facebook Messenger block right inside your optin form. The users who previously would avoid signing up for your email list have a whole new avenue available to them, giving you more opportunity to generate leads. 3. Personalized Recommendations Personalization is important in eCommerce. In fact, 33% of customers who abandoned a business relationship last year did so because personalization was lacking. Luckily though, you can use Facebook Messenger to enhance personalization for your customers too. By using a chatbot for Facebook Messenger, you can give personalized recommendations to give your customers exactly what they want. That will not only impress them, but boost your sales as well. Take a look at this example from Lego. Their chatbot, named Ralph, can help customers find the perfect products by asking questions such as where they’re located , how old they are, budget, and interests. This added level of personalization will help prime your potential customers for checkout and make their overall shopping experience with your online store a breeze. 4. Offer Easy Checkout What if customers didn’t even have to visit your website to make a purchase? After all, the more options your online store provides for your customers to buy, the more opportunity you have to boost sales. Well, you can make that dream a reality with Facebook Messenger. With Facebook Messenger chatbots you’re not limited to giving users product recommendations; you can actually allow users to browse products and checkout right from the app. This option eliminates steps for the consumer; instead of asking them to visit your site to make the purchase, the checkout button is right there, making them more likely to take action. You can even send abandoned cart messages via Facebook Messenger that include a checkout button. So, no more losing out on potential sales. Consider adding urgency with a message like “Last chance to claim this offer!” to increase conversions even more. Your customers will love having the ability to shop at your online store without ever having to leave the Facebook Messenger app. Boost eCommerce Sales with Facebook Messenger Your target audience is probably on Facebook multiple times throughout the day — aren’t we all? Why shouldn’t your eCommerce business be there too? Don’t miss out on using this powerful social media messaging app for your eCommerce business. When you use Facebook Messenger for your eCommerce business you can increase customer satisfaction, generate a ton more leads, and boost your sales. Plus, it’s easy and affordable too. Start turning your instant messaging conversations into sales today. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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