Tag Archives: wordpress hosting

WordPress Vs Joomla Vs Drupal

In this article, I’ll be comparing 3 of the most popular CMS platforms available on the Internet today:
WordPress vs Joomla Vs Drupal. Before that, let’s dive into the history of how Internet changes everything especially in the e-commerce landscape.

For the past 20 years, the Internet has evolved tremendously. Looking back, the internet has changed marketing, the way businesses sell, and the way people buy stuffs in a big way, and still continuing to do so today. Internet and technological advancement over the years have also contributed to the rise of many brand new internet start-ups and successful businesses online.

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8 Simple Steps to Sell Online

Unlike many years ago when creating an online store seems like a daunting task to many, building your own e-commerce store is no longer difficult anymore. This is due to the advancement and creation of many user-friendly tools and affordable web hosting in the market today.

Regardless of whether you are building an online store from scratch or creating an e-commerce website as an extension to your existing brick-and-mortar business, here are 8 simple steps to sell online.

 

1. Establishing Your Business

This means getting the basic stuff of your business all mapped out. For example, you need to determine what products or services to sell at your website. A proper business plan with all the necessary details such as address, phone number and email address would be good to keep you on track. These are obvious and you need to have all these sorted by now.

 

Another thing you need to consider is traffic to your website. The more visitors your website is able to attract, the higher your chances of closing sales or increasing sales revenue. So, how can you increase your website visitor? The answer is through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In order to achieve high SEO ranking in the eyes of the search engines, you will need a lot of good and unique content.  So be prepared to offer informative articles related to your products and service on your website.

 

2. Search for Domain Name & Reliable Web Hosting

The next step is to register a domain name for your website. A good domain name is always linked to your business name. If you have the budget, you can consider registering a few variation of your business name too.

Besides domain registration, you need to subscribe for a good web hosting plan. You can perform your own research easily on Google by typing “top web hosting review”, “best Malaysia web hosting” or “Malaysia web hosting companies” etc.   The search engine results will list down the entire top web hosting providers in Malaysia as well as oversea companies. One of the most reliable web hosting providers in Malaysia is ServerFreak. With many rave reviews from past and existing clients together with their vast experience in the web hosting industry, you can definitely choose ServerFreak to host your website.

 

3. Designing Your  Website

When designing your online store, the most popular choice is to use WordPress. WordPress is a powerful content management system (CMS). The best thing about WordPress is that it is free, user-friendly and allows you to build a professional store easily regardless of whether you understand programming language or not.

Even if you do not have experience in installing WordPress, most hosting providers provide WordPress as part of their package so you shouldn’t have any problems installing it.

For example, ServerFreak’s cPanel and WordPress hosting plan offers Softaculous software that allows you to install WordPress with just a few clicks of the mouse.

 

4. E-Commerce Themes

Once you are done with WordPress setup, you can proceed with theme selection. There are lots of e-commerce themes available for WordPress, both free and premium. Since you are doing online transactions, we would suggest that you choose a premium theme to build a powerful and reliable website that is easy to manage. Free themes’ scripts may not be optimized or updated frequently (if at all) and that can make your e-store a hackers’ easy target.

For WordPress, there are both free and premium themes available for e-commerce. Since you are doing online transactions, I would suggest that you choose a premium theme to construct a powerful and reliable website that is easy to manage. One of the disadvantages of using free themes is that they may not be optimized nor updated frequently, therefore causing your e-store vulnerable to a hacker’s attack.

To overcome this shortcoming, it’s wise to choose premium theme for your e-commerce website. You may consider purchasing a simple and effective e-commerce theme such as the eStore eCommerce WordPress Theme from Elegant Themes. This professional theme can be integrated easily with other e-commerce plugins and very simple to configure. The cost is only USD89/year but you will receive full updates and support from their theme developer as well as full access to all of the themes inside the Elegant Themes library.

 

5. Shopping Cart Applications

Once you have WordPress installed in your hosting account, you can proceed to install a good shopping cart application for your online store.

We recommend Woocommerce as the best shopping cart plugin for WordPress websites and blogs. The greatest benefits of Woocommerce are its simplicity. Business owners already having a self-hosted WordPress can install WooCommerce just as easily as if they were adding another plugin. The setup is intuitive and fast, and within minutes, allows users to add and sell products via their WooCommerce shop.

Other than Woocommerce, you can also consider other famous shopping cart applications such as ZenCart, Prestashop and Magento. Just look under the e-commerce features in your hosting plan for these shopping cart solutions.

 

6. Your E-Store’s Navigation

Once you have decided on your theme or shopping cart application, you can get down to customizing your e-store.

The first thing to look into would be your “Products or Services” category. The navigation through these categories should be concise. You can always create “sub-categories” to make things simple and avoid confusion among visitors or customers. Adding a search box at the top of your website will improve navigation and browsing experience too!

Secondly, name your products clearly. For example, if you are selling a “Calvin Klein’s perfume”, you could list it as “Calvin Klein’s Men Perfume – 2018 limited edition” together with a few clear images of the fragrance. Oh, do remember to put in a detailed description of your product.

Always remember to make navigation and product labelling on your online store to be as simple as possible!

 

7.   Payment & Shipping Methods

Payments are essentially the lifeblood of an eCommerce business and the choice of the right payment gateway is critical to the success of your online store.

Besides accepting payment online through local bank transfer, we highly recommend that you integrate a reliable and secure payment gateway such as Paypal. You can also integrate credit card payment on your online store by using popular local payment gateways such as Ipay88 and MOLPay. For international payment gateways, you may consider WorldPay and MasterCard Internet Gateway Service (MiGS).

Shipping, on the other hand, is pretty easy to manage. Just check with your local post office or courier services for quotes and do up a table according to weight and distance and upload it on your website. Alternatively, you can incorporate the shipping charges into the items and offer “Free Delivery” to your customers!

 

8.   Website Maintenance / Housekeeping

Once your e-store or e-commerce site is up and running, you would still need to perform maintenance work. It is imperative that you update your software and plugins in order to ensure that bugs are fixed and security are intact. You can’t afford to lose your customers’ trust and your reputation!

Do remember to update your product’s inventory as well as the product information too! You do not want your customers to feel disappointed when they find out that your product is already running out of stock!

In conclusion, starting an online web store is not difficult at all as long as you follow the 8 simple steps above. If you need a reliable web hosting to host your e-commerce store, please feel free to contact us at sales@serverfreak.com for assistance or you may choose our Semi-Pro cPanel hosting plan, which is our most popular hosting plan for every businesses and webmasters’ needs.

How to Pick a WordPress Hosting Service Provider

Before building a new WordPress site, you need to consider which hosting options you need to choose from. From bargain shared WordPress hosting options that cost just RM20/month, to self-hosting your WordPress site, or to more costly dedicated WordPress hosting.

The capacity limits, features and practices offered with each WordPress hosting option have a direct correlation on the performance, availability and security of your WordPress website. Majority of the WordPress hosting companies provide fully hosted environments, which is the focus of this article.

 

CPU Limits

CPU limitation is the first criteria to look for in a WordPress hosting plan. It is essential to understand how much of it you are allowed to use in a shared hosting environment since you are buying a fraction of the computing power of the web server after all. In general, most shared WordPress hosting plans have imposed the maximum amount of CPU power that you are allowed to use, along with how many seconds you are allowed to remain at that level. The more traffic your website receives, the more this will matter to you. Hence it is wise to ask how much CPU power your shared hosting account will receive before purchasing the hosting subscription.

 

SSH/sFTP Availability

In order to manage your WordPress site, it is essential to be able to upload and change files on your web server or WordPress hosting account. To secure your connection, you can always choose SSH or sFTP. Before purchasing the shared hosting plan, ask your WordPress hosting provider whether they support the secure access that you need because connecting to your server over FTP exposed you up to significant security risks because this information is sent over the internet in plain text, whereas SSH or sFTP will use encryption during the transfer.

 

Transport Layer Security (TLS)

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is the encryption technology that is used to offer encrypted communication between WordPress web server and your website visitors’ browser. You can easily identify a web page that utilizes the TLS protocol because it will always begin with HTTPS instead of HTTP. To secure your WordPress site, it is highly recommended to run a HTTPS-only website.

At a minimum, you need to ensure your WordPress login page (usually something like https://example.com/wp-login.php) and any pages that accept sensitive information from your users or present it back to them are HTTPS pages. Please take note that most hosting plans will charge extra if you require this feature or you may have to purchase your own certificate, so make sure that you ask your hosting provider first or find out how much it will cost you.

 

WordPress Hosting: Dedicated IP

It’s generally known that majority of the websites on a shared server, including WordPress shared server share a common IP address with their neighbours. This should not be a problem because a shared IP address will not reduce your website loading speed nor impact your SEO rankings. However, there is always a chance that if one of your IP address neighbours engages in spammy and malicious behaviour that may impact you negatively by getting your IP address blacklisted by an organization like Spamhaus. To safeguard your website, it is wise to spend money in securing a dedicated ip address. It is highly recommended for you to know whether dedicated IP addresses are available and that you understand the cost before you commit to a WordPress hosting plan.

 

ModSecurity

ModSecurity is an open source web application firewall that can be customized to augment what a recommended WordPress security plugin like Wordfence does in a compatible way. In the current hosting marketplace, majority of the hosting providers offer ModSecurity in some form. We recommend that you pick a hosting provider that allows this feature and ideally offers you the option to customize how it is configured.

 

Other Security Software

Many WordPress hosts will offer additional security software options but they can be restrictive too in allowing which security software you wish to run. As recommended, always verify that you are allowed to install and run the Wordfence security plugin in your WordPress shared server.

 

Technical Support or Assistance

WordPress script is prone to attacks by hackers in the past and it still does happen till this day. In the event that your site is targeted by hackers, it is imperative that you are able to react swiftly because the faster you recover from the unfortunate hacking incident, the smaller the impact to you and your users. In cases like this, you will definitely require the assistance from your WordPress host in order to help with your recovery efforts. Hence it is very important that you understand how quickly your hosts’ support team responds, how you are allowed to contact them and how competent their support resources are. In view of this, we highly recommend that you choose a top host provider such as ServerFreak that provides competent technical assistance and immediate phone support when needed on a 24/7 basis.

 

Backups Restoration & Log File Access and History

Unfortunately any webmasters know that they can’t avoid website hacking incident effectively. Hence, backups are one of your most important tools in the event of a hack. Backup restoration will help to restore your website to a “pre hack” state which can make it very easy to eliminate malicious code from your site and get your website back up quickly. It is highly recommended to pick a host provider that automatically backs up your site daily and retains backups for at least 30 days. This service is crucial because sometimes your website could have been hacked for days without you noticing, so if you have older backups available then you can recover your website with ease.

 

Meanwhile, server log files are a rich source of information when you are trying to identify the vulnerability that led to a website hack and the total impact it had on your website. At a minimum, you need to purchase a WordPress hosting plan that offers you immediate access to log files going back at least 24 hours. Ideally you should also have the option to archive log files older than 24 hours old for 30 days.

 

Conclusion

In conclusion, this article is written with the hope that you are now equipped with a solid understanding of the specific features you should be looking for in a WordPress hosting plan and why it is important to safeguard your WordPress site at all times.

If you are looking for a reliable WordPress server that contains all the security features listed above, then you are invited to contact us at ServerFreak today! For more information related to our WordPress Shared Hosting plans, kindly drop your questions to sales@serverfreak.com

4 Useful Tips for Beginners to Build the Perfect Website

If you have zero experience in web designing, building and maintaining your own website can be very challenging.  Luckily for you, there are many website builders on the Internet that you can consider today that helps to manage and design your website. Among a wide variety of website tools, WordPress is the best one to use.  WordPress is undoubtedly the industry standard for both beginners and professionals.  The WordPress platform is very easy to learn yet incredibly powerful and has all the features your website might need.  With WordPress, you can construct and maintain your own website in a professional way. This leads us to our first useful tip for building the perfect website.

 

Tip 1 – Using WordPress

Since WordPress interface is easy to use, we highly recommend you to use this powerful content management system (CMS) to get your first website built.  Here at ServerFreak, we try to make managing your website and online presence as simple as possible. You may consider signing up for ServerFreak’s WordPress Hosting solutions which are fully optimized for building and maintaining your WordPress website. With the WordPress hosting package, you can install WordPress easily and get your website up and running in no time at all!

 

Tip 2 – Selecting the Right Design for Your Website

First impression counts! That’s why it is crucial to get a good design for your website. Fortunately, with a WordPress website, changing your website’s design is just a breeze. You can make changes to your website design by changing the WordPress theme. So, what’s a WordPress theme? A WordPress theme is like a design template that allows you to change your website appearance easily. WordPress themes are available for free generally but there are some themes that can be downloaded for a small one-time fee i.e. paid themes. With paid themes, you can find really good and attractive designs that match your website requirements. For example, if you are building an e-commerce website, you can find hundreds if not thousands of great looking e-commerce themes from premium WordPress theme providers such as Elegant Themes, Themeforest, TeslaThemes, Themegrill, TemplateMonster and many more.

 

Tip 3 – Customize Your WordPress Theme with Stock Images

If you choose a nice theme for your WordPress site, chances are your website is probably looking good already. However, a theme is still a template and you are required to customize it even further to make your website’s design your own. A great way to customize your website is to utilize good quality photos. For example, you may consider getting professional stock photos from Istockphoto.com (now acquired by Adobe Stock) to spice up your website. For your information, Adobe contains thousands of images designed to match every type of website out there. What you need to do is to search for photos that match your website’s category and start picking the ones that will appear great on your website.

 

Tip 4 – Customize your Stock Images to Fit Your Website

If you want to get really fancy, you can edit/customize the stock photos to even further fit your website. At the very minimum, you’ll want to crop and resize the stock photos to fit your website. Photoshop is the best software to edit photos, but for beginners with no design experience, you most likely won’t have that. Pixlr and Canva are great photo editing software and the best thing is that both are available for free! Both are actually quite similar to Photoshop and you can really make your photos look great!

 

In conclusion, you are on the right track to having the perfect website if you have followed the tips above. You already have a strong powerful website built with WordPress and hosted by ServerFreak WordPress hosting solution. Furthermore, you have access to hundreds of amazing WordPress themes and thousands of stock photos to fully customize your website’s design. Your website will look amazing and best of all; you were able to build it all by yourself.

3 Intelligent Ways to Offer Live Support to Your WordPress Visitors

Why WordPress is becoming increasingly popular nowadays? The answer is simple: Simplicity.  Anyone from first time WordPress user to experienced developer can now setup a beautiful website by leveraging the ubiquitous content management system (CMS).  At times, it can feel a little too simple. On a side note, there are some non-believers that think WordPress is not be capable of offering some of the features they find on websites of larger brands.  However, WordPress has grown in its capabilities since its early days as a mere blogging platform. Today, few features exceed the capabilities of a WordPress site, and most can be added via a plugin by even the most novice of site builders.

 

In order to keep a website lively, one must allow regular interaction between the site visitor and the website owner. One of the most important features for enhancing a site’s engagement with its audience, live support, can take your brand’s reputation from good to great. To fulfill that objective, we present three intelligent approaches to include live support to any WordPress website.

 

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence or AI is a rage nowadays and one that we will hear a lot more about in the future. What you might not know, however, is that even today AI has already found its way into WordPress. There are a number of WordPress plugins already out there that utilizes artificial intelligence. A good example is the use of WordPress chatbots, which can be found on thousands of sites already. By using chatbots, you can easily create live support for site visitors, thus saving your time and effort to answering simple questions. What you need to do is just simply install a chatbot plugin on your WordPress from your dashboard and train it to answer support questions. Some bots may even respond in a manner consistent with your brand’s voice.

All plugins are not created equal, in which the same goes with WordPress plugins that utilizes AI. These AI plugins vary widely in quality. What we want is a plugin that can handle the tasks you have in mind and that interacts in a natural manner with your audience.  On a side note, there are also some high-end chatbots that act like real human and can easily fool human visitors into believing they are real people. However, the use of such high-end AI plugin is costly and require greater technical prowess on your part to train them. For a start, the use of affordable WordPress chatbots which can simply analyze questions and spitting out relevant answers is more than sufficient for most website owners, even if not in a 100% human manner.  Even though this method offers a cost-effective solution for live support but there are some guests finding automated systems like this impersonal. Hence, the best way is to consider running A/B test, by testing it against the following two solutions to determine which option works best for your situation.

 

Outsourced Support Center

If you are not yet ready to embrace the use of AI in your live support, you may want to consider the human option by engaging a team of outsource personnel to handle your support calls.  There are many advantages of hiring such labour overseas. One of the major benefits is the lower hiring cost due to the advantage of international monetary exchange rate difference.  Since overseas labour rates can be much lower than Malaysia, you will probably pay far less than if you hired a similar service domestically. For instance, you can get an entire team of operators in India for only RM2000 a month, which is less than the average monthly salary of a single web hosting technical staff in Malaysia.  And, because the support center company employs them directly, you do not have to worry about benefits and payroll taxes. The second advantage is their good level of technical skills. With a sound technical knowledge, less focus on training is required since these personnel usually work for a company specialized in providing support. As such, they will have the right infrastructure, training, and management in place to get the job done. However, you still need to install a proprietary plugin or install a bit of code on your site to activate their service. When visitors surf your WordPress site and encounter an issue, they can contact your outsourced support team seamlessly via chat, phone, or email.  By doing so, your support team remains available to your customers around-the-clock, 7 days a week.

You also need to evaluate your budget for hiring these outsourced personnel. These outsourced support services normally charge on either a time-used basis or on a flat monthly fee. Therefore, pick a plan based on expected use volumes. Many newer and smaller sites have fewer customer support interactions; a situation appropriate to a time-used billing model. Larger, more established brands, on the other hand, may save money on a flat monthly fee.

 

However, there is also a downside using this method – which is the perception issue. Some customers may feel turned-off by thick and difficult to understand accents or perceive your company as having overseas ownership. Test the service yourself so you know what customers experience. Also, as before, consider A/B testing this approach to other solutions to make sure it provides the optimal solution.

 

Live Chat

Finally, you can choose to handle the live support on your own. The advantage is getting direct customer interaction, ensures your message stays on point with your brand, and allows the greatest expert on your products (which is you) to answer the questions. However, the downside is this approach is too time-consuming since everything is handled by yourself.

Live Chat and Email Support

WordPress has a broad array of plugins for fully-functional live chat support. You can obtain some of these plugins for free, but more powerful ones generally require some sort of fee (either one-time or recurring). With such a plugin, you can engage with your customers while they visit your site in real time. No chance of losing them to the competition because you took too long to respond or provided an impersonal interaction.

When selecting the right live chat plugin for your needs, consider these questions:

  • How frequently does the plugin developer updates the software?
  • Does it offer the features you want/need at an affordable price?
  • How will the plugin look on your site? Will it blend well, or stick out and look amateurish?
  • How well have other users reviewed the plugin? How many people use it?

The drawback of trying to handle support yourself: your own time. Before implementing your live chat solution, remember that somebody needs to be available when a customer has a question. Research when people visit your site to ensure you or your staff remain available at appropriate times to answer questions. If you cannot offer around-the-clock support, clearly identify hours during which you do on your website. Also, be prepared to change strategies for supporting customers should you grow to a point that individual hands-on responses no longer make sense.

 

Conclusion:

While any of these solutions could work, you will need to find the one best suited to your customer base, budget, and traffic. While they should work on virtually any kind of hosting, any of these that require additional software (like a plugin) can lag without the right environment. ServerFreak’s WordPress Hosting offers the advantage of a hosting platform built specifically for WordPress (and its assorted plugins). With it, chat and AI applications run smoother and faster, making for a better user experience.

5 WordPress Mistakes You Don’t Want To Commit

For a beginner who has zero knowledge on what is a WordPress, they may stare at you with a blank face response. What’s more it may even seem like a daunting task for them to even thinking of installing or operating a simple WordPress blog. However, things are not as difficult as it may seem as long as the newcomers have a reasonable level of technical competence.  Learning how to use or install a WordPress blog is not difficult, even for beginners.  What is more important is that one must have the will to learn, patience and time to learn how to use WordPress. As with most things in life there are a few WordPress mistakes you do not wish to commit. How do we know? Well, we know because most people who have built a WordPress blog before have made at least one of these common mistakes which I’m going to share below at least once.

It’s a fact that everyone makes mistakes in their life. This is even more true when you are exploring something new and exciting where there is likelihood to forget to focus on the details. You may be wondering why you should read this post right now when you’re sure that you are going to make some mistakes anyway?

Well, mistakes can be divided into light mistake and serious mistake. A good example of a light mistake is like leaving the passenger window down in your car when it rains. When you return to your car, some water will have dripped inside which is an inconvenience – but nothing more than that. Meanwhile, the second mistake i.e. serious mistake is like leaving the top down on a convertible during a torrential thunderstorm. That’s a real disaster – the kind of mistake you would like to avoid at all cost.

So, here are the five leaving-the-top-down-in-a-thunderstorm types of mistake that you really want to avoid when dealing with WordPress:

 

  1. Not Backing Up

Not backing up your WordPress website is the most common mistake committed by many lazy bloggers. Many take things for granted and believe that their hosting provider will have at least a backup copy of their website when disaster strikes. If you’re lucky, you may get a working copy of the backup. But there are times when the backup copy is a corrupted version of your WordPress website. A good analogy to describe this scenario is like playing Russian roulette daily. You might survive for years – in fact you might always survive. But there’s also a chance that you won’t.

Based on my past experience, it is too much of a hassle building a website for the second time – so always backup your WordPress website regularly. You can do this manually on your server, you can use free or paid plugins, or you can use a third-party service such as Vaultpress or BackupBuddy.

 

  1. Not Updating / Using Outdated Version

Secondly, using outdated version of WordPress is a common problem among bloggers. Not many website owners have the time luxury to keep updating their WordPress blog to a newer version. Some may deem this action as troublesome. For your information, an outdated WordPress script makes it a favourite target for hackers. Hence, the developers behind WordPress regularly keep patching up their software and release the fixes in the form of updates. The same applies to the developers who create the plugins that you use. If you value your website and your sanity, run the WordPress script updates whenever they become available.

 

  1. Using the Default settings

Never use the default settings inside a WordPress. One common default setting is the default username “admin”.  You need to replace that “admin” username with a unique name unless you want to leave your website exposed to every hacker on the planet. The reason behind this is that hackers love to perform brute force attack on every single WordPress blog by using the “trial-and-error” approach in order to gain access to your WordPress dashboard. Other default settings that require your attention include the permalink structure, the favicon and the website tagline.  In short, the WordPress has lots of defaults and you will need to change most of them.

 

  1. Using Free Themes

It is well known that many WordPress plugins and themes are free for download. However, investment in a paid theme or template is essential. Here’s why: A free template can cause security and compatibility issue and some are poorly designed which renders them difficult to use. In addition, the technical support ranges from useless to non-existent for these free templates. Therefore, it’s highly advisable to invest in excellent premium templates which are normally available for $100 (or below). Rest assured that you’ll get the round-the-clock support from the theme developer once you have made that investment.

 

  1. Not Installing a Caching Plugin

Why do you use a Cache Plugin? The answer is simple – to make your website load faster. With a good website loading speed, this will provide pleasant surfing experience for your visitors and search engines. However, there is no decent in-built caching functionality designed for WordPress – hence you need a plugin for this purpose. Except for the most basic of blogs, every website needs a caching plugin. WP Fastest Cache and WP Super Cache are great examples of excellent cache plugins that you may want to consider for your WordPress blog.

 

In conclusion, you’ll find the experience of building a WordPress website enjoyable and memorable, as long as you don’t commit these 5 mistakes. By following these tips, you’ll have a website that is more secure, one that is easier to build, and one that loads reasonably quickly. This will leave you plenty of time to make other mistakes. But in many ways, it’s the best way to learn.

 

P/S: Interested in getting a WordPress blog but not sure how to do this all by your own? No worries, we at Serverfreak Technologies will get you covered. Contact us at sales@serverfreak.com for more information related to our WordPress Hosting plan today!