by Nick Throlson | Sep 2, 2018 | Web Hosting
A hosting provider is a big decision for most online businesses even if it is for a blog, an online shopping store, or an introductory business website. Whatever it is for, you must secure a high-quality, stable, and dependable website host for your online needs.
If you are just starting a website, choosing a reliable website host is crucial. On this post, we?ll share five things that you might want to look into before picking your web hosting service provider.
1. Price
It is always a difficult decision in weighing between the hosting company?s reliability and its affordability. Remember that you will always get the service for the price you paid for. Take a look at the company?s support team, you need to ensure that the team is an in-house one and not an outsourced team.
If you are aiming for a high-performing and trustworthy provider, it may require you to shell out money. It will be worth it if you are with the best provider for your business. Lastly, make a habit to create a comparison between each provider?s fees and offers for your business. In that way, you can know where your money will maximize its value.
2. Site Backup
A single website crash may give inconvenience and huge interruptions while looking at your services, products, etc. There are a wide variety of reasons why your website is crashing. It may range from having a damaged index.php file to having hackers do their thing to your site. It can also be an unplanned glitch.
Whenever you are undergoing this dilemma, you would need to have a backup for your site for easier configuration of your website crash. Having a backup will easily help you to restore your site. It is a thing you need to consider in picking a host because they should be backing up your site regularly.
Here are some questions you need to ask before deciding on your hosting company:
- Do you administer regular backing up of sites?
- Does your admin control panel have a backup feature?
- Do you have a manual backup option?
- Are there any plugins available for site backup?
- Will you be helping us in restoring the website?s backup?
3. Control Panel
If you have prior knowledge on website hosting and other related topics, it will be easier for you to understand your website and how it works. Some basic things like setting up your email and FTP accounts should be done without asking for assistance from your partner company. Your hosting company should be able to provide you a control panel like Plesk or cPanel to make other modifications and configurations effortless. It will help you get the job faster instead of calling for help.
4. Technical Support
According to web hosting secret revealed – A good and reliable hosting company should be able to give an effective and fast assistance and support for different potential problems. Finding a hosting company that offers real-time support is crucial.
You need to consider hosting companies who are visible online and on their social media accounts, as well as visibility on their chat support. These companies should be given more priority to help you in hosting your site than choosing outsourced support services because they easily have a huge gap in time and reliability.
5. Customer Satisfaction
You will not get the answer to the question ?does your company satisfy a lot of customers?? in one click. Intensive research is needed to be done to know more about the customer satisfaction rate of your company. One way is doing a Google Blog search. Another way is looking at their social media accounts, look for a company that has a great social media strategy as they are the one who values more their customer?s experience. Another, is you need to do a social listening activity and look at what their community and customers are saying about them. A creative way is to post in your public account and crowdsource for reviews about a certain company.
Final Thoughts
Getting a web host is your first stepping stone in excelling amongst the online businesses present. Making sure that the company is the one for you is a vital factor in your success. Look for online reviews like this Bluehost web hosting review to help you decide which provider is better for your company. With the five factors we presented above, you?ll be able to narrow down your choices and find the best web host for you.
by Nick Throlson | Jul 2, 2018 | Web Design, Web Hosting, WordPress
The website plays an important role to boost your business performance. Creating a website has never been a burden. If you create a website, it will take time, money and so on. Therefore, you need to spend your budget and time in a right way.
Are you planning to decide between Wix vs WordPress? Both content management platforms are wonderful. But, to select the perfect one is your choice. In this blog, we will compare the?Wix and WordPress and mark the pros and cons.
Let's take a look at the comparison of two platforms.
1. Expenditure to build a website:
The main factor which comes into your mind while creating a website is the cost of a website. The total cost of a website will completely depend on your necessity.
Wix:
Wix is a free content management platform which offers basic website constructor for free. But, you cannot customize your domain name for your website so, the address will be username.wix.com.
The basic plan of Wix does not offer any advanced functionality. To add some additional features, you need to upgrade your basic plan to the premium plan. According to bandwidth, you can select the perfect plan for monthly or yearly. If you want e-commerce store, then you will have to pay additional charges for your store.
WordPress:
?WordPress is free for anyone. The main advantage of WordPress is that you need your own domain name and hosting. There are many hosting providers available in the market, you can choose anyone according to your budget. If you choose Bluehost, then it will cost you $2.75 per month and also includes the free custom domain.
According to WordPress themes or premium plugins, your website can increase but if you select free plugins then you can save more money. So, there many plans available which WordPress provides. According to your need, you can select any plan and you are free to use your WordPress websites in any way.
2.Websites Plugins:
As we know, plugins are the third party extensions which we can use with our website to add more functionality. In wix, we call it apps and in WordPress, we call it plugins.
Wix:
Talking about Wix, it comes with nearly 150+ apps that you can add to your website to increase the performance of your website. Through this app, you can add new emailing list, gallery, comment features and so on. Wix provides both free and premium apps.
WordPress:
There are almost 50,000+ free plugins available on the WordPress official website. For using premium plugins, you can go through the third-party websites. But, by using free plugins, you can also build a membership, creating a form, new email list, for security purpose and so on.
3. For Online business:
Selling products online is an important feature for creating a website.
Wix:
If you choose wix then you will have to pay some amount as Wix offers paid plans to run e-commerce store. With a basic plan, you cannot run your website with e-commerce development platform, you should update it with a paid plan. It allows limited payment gateway for your e-commerce store.
WordPress:
If we choose WordPress for your e-commerce store, then it becomes easy to create your online store. There any many platforms available which you can use for your WordPress website such as Woocommerce, Magento and so on. But, Woocommerce is the perfect platform for your WordPress website to create an online store.
WordPress provides many plugins to sell your product, subscription and more.
4. Easy to use:
If you do not have much time to learn new things then you can go for any platform Wix or WordPress as both offer flexibility to create a website without having programming language knowledge.
Wix:
Wix is easy to use to create your own websites. It offers a drag and drop interface where you can insert in your website and start editing. You can easily rearrange all the things on your website.
WordPress:
WordPress does not offer any built-in environment to edit any content. For this, you need to use a visual editor to write your content. And to customize your theme, there is a theme customizer. There are navigation menus, visual editor, etc also present in the WordPress platform. To get the full control on your website, you need to learn these fields.
Conclusion:
After reading all the above points carefully, you would be able to know which platform is better Wix or WordPress.
WordPress is much higher-ranking to Wix for creating a website. Although Wix is also easy to use for creating a website but to use the more functionality in your website and to make it more attractive, WordPress is better.
We hope this blog is helpful for you to compare Wix and WordPress and to learn about what WordPress and Wix offer.
If you choose a perfect platform, then you can save your money and generate more leads to increase your revenue and growth of your business.
Author Bio:
Tom Hardy is a renowned WordPress developer at ?Sparx IT Solutions: PSD to WordPress Conversion Company?and keeps on searching the innovative ways to improve the speed of websites. He also likes to share the researched knowledge with the audience through engaging blogs.? ?
by Nick Throlson | Jan 4, 2018 | Web Hosting
At Throlson Web Design we host all our clients WP Engine we have not had any issues just success with WP Engine?as our hosting we couldn't be happier for them landing this huge investment and hope this year brings many improvements in this ever-changing Web Hosting community.
WP Engine secures 0M investment and announces revenue milestone.
Web Hosting is vital for websites success and sticking with a company who has a great vision and that is professional and dedicated to providing the best service possible.
by Nick Throlson | Dec 7, 2017 | SEO, Web Design, Web Hosting
How to reduce your Website?s Bounce Rate
Websites have always been and are still being used as one of the primary tools for leveraging businesses. It is almost rare as a unicorn to find a business that is making insane profits without having a website. And that is because, for a prospective customer, a website is a door to the company?s products & services. Now some people may argue that choosing mobile app development could have been a better option, but then a website, somewhat, builds a foundation where you can connect with your customers in a much broader sense.
But then there are times when you wonder why in the world your website isn?t generating business as expected, despite spending a fortune on it. You start doubting your product, as well as your business potential. But most of the times, the real culprit is ?Bounce Rate?.
What is Bounce Rate
The simplest definition of Bounce Rate is – it is the percentage of visitors that leave a website after viewing the first page. Even simply put, your product or service didn?t seem interesting enough to them. The effect of Bounce Rate on your business could be disastrous if, over the time, nothing is done about it.
According to a research, 26-40% Bounce Rate is great, 41-55% is average and anything above it is not what you should be aiming for.
So how do you reduce Bounce Rate of your website? If you are looking for an answer, this guide is a must-read for you:
Readability
The connection between Bounce Rate and readability is quite apparent; the better they understand, the more they are interested. If you have a WordPress website, you get a free SEO plugin from Yoast. Install it and follow the corrections it suggests to improve your content?s readability.
According to Yoast, a piece of content has good readability when:
- Not more than 25% sentences have more than 20 words.
- Punctuations and grammar have been well taken care of.
- There is sufficient use of transition words.
- Passive sentences are less than 20%
Use sufficient Infographics
Visual communication has always been much more efficient at getting the message across, compared to text only. People find it the content more engaging when you use pictures, GIFs, and videos to communicate. Besides, Google also gives priority to content that has more infographics. And if you good ranking on Google search; chances are, people already trust you enough to go to your website.
Integrate the content with your brand
Integrating the content with the brand brings uniformity and a sense of credibility to your website. The sections on your landing page should not feel scattered and must not talk about different or contradictory goals. Carry out extensive research on the tone of how others, in the same line of business as yours, pen down their ideas. Have a logo and a summary of your vision, mission, and offer, apparent enough on the landing page itself. The effect of appropriate content is almost the same on a website and app. That is why, the best mobile app development companies as well, understand the importance of appropriate content integration and make sure it has been seamlessly done.
Load-Time
According to statistics, a 1-second delay could cost you 7% conversions. According to another study, 53% mobile sites turn into ghost towns if the load times are more than 3 seconds.
What do these figures say?
It is that people don?t like to wait, period
You can decrease your website?s load time by using page optimization techniques like using compressed pictures and videos. Apart from that, using cached pages also decreases your load time as the server deploys web pages from local cache.
Only use authentic web-hosts to host your website. Some popular web-hosts in India are HostGator, GoDaddy.?
Author Bio:
Hari Krishna is a well-versed content writer working in FuGenX Technologies, an emerging?mobile app development company New York. He likes to write on technology, start-ups and latest technological innovations that people like to know and share with others.
by Nick Throlson | Nov 24, 2017 | Web Hosting
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by Nick Throlson | Sep 20, 2017 | Web Design, Web Hosting
It?s easy to get swept up in adverts for website builders such as Wix or Squarespace that promise the ability to build your own website in minutes. As a small business owner, you?ve got to watch every penny. So why should you pay a couple of thousand bucks to a web designer when you can do it yourself for a low monthly fee?
But there?s a catch. There is always a catch. The kind of website that you build with Wix or Squarespace is a million miles away from the kind of website a professional web designer will deliver. As one of your business? key pieces of collateral, it is important that your website does more than looking good. Don?t believe us? Here are five ways a Wix or Squarespace website will let your business down.
1. Your website won?t get found
Part of the reason many business owners get a website is to reach a larger customer base. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a great way for websites to attract users through search engines like Google. Website builders have notoriously bad SEO, however. Because these builders are drag-and-drop, they spit out a jumble of code that is so poorly structured it is hard for Google to crawl it. If Google struggles to crawl it, you'll rank badly. And there?s nothing you can do to improve it, either. That means that even if you hire an SEO agency, they will have a tough time working their magic on your website if it?s built using Wix.
2. It will look bad on mobile
You look at websites on your smartphone, right? Exactly, and so do millions of other Americans. In fact, more people access Google on their phones than on desktops or laptops. With so many potential customers using the Internet on their smartphone, it?s important that your website looks great on mobile devices. Unfortunately, these website builders primarily care about how your website looks on desktop PCs. There are no guarantees that it will work well or look good on smartphones. A web designer, on the other hand, will usually build up from mobile first to ensure that your site looks great on any device.
3. It will be slow
A fast website is key for great user experience. No one likes using a website that takes ages to load. In fact, most users will leave a website if it takes longer than a few seconds to load. If you want to convert visitors into customers, you need your website to be fast. Unfortunately, the bad code that makes it hard to rank a Squarespace website in Google also means your website will be slow. And just like with SEO, there?s very little you can do to improve it. A professional designer, however, will minimize code and images in order to make your website load as fast as possible. Your customers will thank you for it.
4. It won?t scale with your business
Most web designers will use a Content Management System (CMS) to build your website. This will usually be WordPress. A CMS lets you add new pages to your website and edit the content of your website after you have built it. So when you need to add a new service or write a new article, it?s incredibly easy to do. This isn?t the case with a website builder. Once you?ve built it, there?s very little you can do to change it. You?re stuck with it.
5. You can?t move it
Using a website builder like Squarespace or Wix doesn?t just mean that your website won?t scale, it?s also very difficult to move it if you decide to go in a different direction. Worse still, you don?t actually own the website. Wix or Squarespace owns the website and you must continue to pay them in order to use it. If you want to move away and have a website that you own or control, you?ll have to start from scratch. It?s much easier to hire a professional web designer from the start who can build a great website that is actually yours to own and use as you wish.
See? Using a website builder like Wix or Squarespace isn?t all it is cracked up to be. If you care about your business and want to hire a professional web designer, get started with a free quote from us today. We can build the WordPress website your business deserves.
http://www.throlson.com/free-quote/
