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Tools and Frameworks To Build Progressive Web Apps

Posted on 01/03/202015/06/2021 by Tushar

Connecting the power of the web with mobile has always been one of the most challenging tasks for the development community. While the purpose saw a number of tools and frameworks trying out to develop the perfect blend of performance and wide reachability, the result had always been sub-par. But in 2015, everything changed. Designer Frances Berriman and a Google Chrome Engineer, Alex Russell denoted the term Progressive Web Apps.

Although it took some years for the concept to come into the mainstream, but the moment Google started popularizing PWAs, the industry noticed.

And it was not just the developers who were now looking for tutorials to migrate websites in PWAs.

Both SMEs and industry’s hot-shots like Facebook and Twitter now started singing the tune of the many benefits that the concept came packaged with. All leading to a very high popularity rate of the concept when it comes to combining the best of convenience and mass reach.

The popularity graph that the mobile app type is on has given birth to a number of PWA frameworks and tools that are being prepared to strengthen the debate of Native vs PWA in favor of the latter.

The rise in PWA frameworks and tools list, however, has made it all the more difficult for businesses to choose the best frameworks for PWA development.

But let us make it easy for you today.

Here’s the list of tools and frameworks for PWA that businesses can choose from. These PWA development frameworks have been chosen by our team of PWA builders on the basis of the ease of development and scope of mass adoption.

Without further delay, here’s the list. The one we rely on in our role as the Leading PWA Development Company.

Top PWA Tools and Frameworks

Ionic

Established in 2013 as an open-source SDK, Ionic is based on Apache Cordova and Angular framework. And since then, it has been a part of over 5 million hybrid app development. What makes Ionic ideal for PWA development is that it comes with a massive library of components for both Android and iOS, which are used by developers to develop web pages which run inside the device browser with the help of WebView.

There are quite a few benefits that come tagged with using Ionic, making it one of the best PWA framework of 2019 such as –

Reduces the cost of app development for its open-source and free
One of the tools to develop PWA that come with the shortest learning curve
Easy maintenance with the help of a built-in browser instrument
Large plug-in library for accessing APIs

Polymer

It is an open-source progressive web app framework developed in-house by Google.

It consists of a wide range of templates, Progressive Web App tools, and web components which simplifies the whole PWA development process. It makes use of HTML/JSS/JS making it a complete PWA framework on its own.

The pros that Polymer comes with include –

A full web app stack support which includes routing, data tier, and responsive layouts
Great documentation
It is one of those PWA development tools that come with easily understandable APIs
The range of wide base of components across browsers

AngularJS

The third most used PWA frameworks and tools are the set of AngularJS offerings

Introduced first by Google in 2009, AngularJS is one of the most popular methods of PWA development. It makes use of the JavaScript ecosystem to build responsive applications which are both reliable and robust.

The benefits that AngularJS come attached with include –

Large community support
Well-defined method for implementation
MVC framework
Presence of IntelliSense and Typescript
Newer versions being launched with minimal learnability curve

Vue.js

Vue is presently one of the fastest evolving libraries because of its ease in coding and high-speed rendering. It allows for scaling of the project with an added advantage of extra packages.

The pros of Vue.js which makes it one of the most reliable frameworks to build PWA includes –

Supported by Laravel and Alibaba
The simplicity of code lowers the learnability curve
Simple structures and features inspired by Angular1 and React
Fast rendering with Virtual DOM
Flexible to set up with the help of TypeScript and JSX

React

Supported by Facebook, React is often one of the top choices of Progressive Web App builders because of its wide JavaScript library and a large community.

Although Pure JavaScript lies in the base of React, it makes use of JSX to employ render functions for connecting HTML structures. This gives developers ease which in return makes React one of the top PWA frameworks and tools.

The pros list of React looks something like this –

Large community support
An extensive ecosystem
A greater degree of scalability and flexibility
Speedy rendering with Virtual-DOM.

Lighthouse

Developed by Google to improve the quality of web apps, the tool measures your website in multiple criteria and enlists the factors that you have to keep into consideration to ensure your site is ready to become a PWA.

It analyzes your digital offerings and gives you the areas to implement in your PWA development process.

So here were the six frameworks and Progressive Web App tools that have been relied upon by the industry and by our team of in-house PWA builders for converting your idea into an app that merges the best of mobile and web.

FAQs About PWA Development and Frameworks to build PWA

Q. How does a Progressive Web App work?

A PWA is a web application that is installed on a system.

It works on an offline network state, making use of the data cached during the users’ last interaction with the application.

Q. How do you know if a website is PWA?

To check if a website is working as PWA, you will have to make use of Chrome’s Lighthouse extension. It will tell you if the site is PWA in addition to giving you ways to convert it into one.

Q. How do you create a PWA?

There is very extensive documentation prepared by Google devs explaining the process of creating a PWA to the t. Here’s the link – https://codelabs.developers.google.com/codelabs/your-first-pwapp/#0. You can visit the page if you are planning to fly solo and if not, you can get in touch with our team of PWA developers who will hand-hold you through the entire process.

Q. What are the PWA frameworks and tools?

There are a number of PWA frameworks and tools presently operating in the market. But the ones that we rely on most are –

Ionic
Polymer
AngularJS
Vue.js
React
Lighthouse

Convert a Website to Progressive Web App (PWA):Guide

Posted on 06/01/202012/06/2021 by Tushar

In a very short span of time, Progressive Web Apps have made a very prominent mark in the mobile app industry.

The concept, which Google wants you know to know about, is a respite for the industry that continuously has been making the same complaints time and again –

With respect to Websites: Slow loading speed and Low Resonance Rate

With respect to Mobile Apps: Apps taking a lot of memory space, It is dependent on the network connection, and The long steps users will have to take from finding an app to starting to use it.

Since Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are downloaded straight from a website and runs as a website as well, users get benefitted in three ways –

They get to save on the time that goes into first finding an app on the store, installing it and then feeding in information to get it started
Since Progressive Web Apps work as a website, they take up minimal device storage space, and
Because they work primarily as a website, the concept of cache holds true, which enables the app to run even where there is no network connection.

Benefits of PWAs: Reasons to Convert Your Existing Website to PWA

Besides giving these obvious benefits to the users, Progressive Web Apps – the ideal combination of websites and mobile apps – have emerged as the cost-effective formula of business success as well.

The benefits that PWAs bring to businesses by being easily discoverable, by taking up less memory space, by coming with low cost of development, and lastly by running offline on a great speed can be gauged by seeing the change in growth numbers of these famous brands –

Success stories like these and a lot of them in the industry are enough to make every modern day mobile business look for the best progressive web app development company and look for ways on how to convert their website to PWA.

If you too are planning to convert the site to PWA and avail all the low investment cost benefit that the concept has to offer, you are the right place.

Here are the exact steps to How to convert your WordPress/PHP website to Progressive Web App (PWA), as shared by Google to our Team of Progressive Web App Developers (one of the perks of being one of the official Google Developer Agencies) –

But first thing first. Know the elements you would need to create PWA from a website.

What You Need Before Looking into How to Turn a Website into PWA

To convert a website into PWA, here are the three things required –

An attached Android device running Chrome 52 or above,
A basic understanding of Git and Chrome DevTools,
The sample code, and
A Text Editor

Once you have these ready, get your HTTPS website out for migration.

Step 1: Load the URL

Clone GitHub repository from command line:

$ git clone https://github.com/googlecodelabs/migrate-to-progressive-web-apps.git

Doing this will help develop a Migrate to PWA directory with the completed code for every step. For this specific codelab, upload the work file and then make the changes there.

Once your code has been checked out, use the ‘Simple HTTP Server Application’ for serving work file on the port 8887.

After this, you will be able to load the URL.

Step 2: View the Site on your Mobile

In case you have Android device plugged in with your desktop, type in this in your URL – chrome://inspect. This will let you set a port forward with the help of port that you wrote before to the same port on the device.

Press Enter for this to save.

Now you will be able to access the basic version of your website at – http://localhost:8887/ on the connected Android phone.

Step 3: Add the Modern Head Tags

The first thing that you will have to do is make the website mobile friendly and secondly you will have to add Web App Manifest. The manifest will describe the meta information of the site in a way that it would appear on user’s’ home screen.

If you don’t have a templating system in place, add these lines –

<head>

</head>

Viewport – The first line consists of a meta tag which specifies the viewport. This element will help you with responsiveness. After writing the line of code once you reload the site, you will find the site fitting your device precisely.
Manifest – In the second line of your code you have referenced the file – a movement that is needed to control how the site gets added to the home screens.

Once done, open a text editor. It’s time to write JSON. In the short_name section, specify what will show on the home screen and try to keep it within 15 characters.

Next, save your file as the manifest.json nomenclature and reload the page on Android device and go to the top right menu and opt for ‘Add to Home Screen’. Now you will be able to see your icon on the home screen!

Step 4: Add a Service Worker

Service Worker is the background script which the browser can run while the user is not on the page. It is the element that gives the offline support and gets active when the notification is pushed.

Create a Service Worker

Copy this code in a new file and then save it as sw.js.

/** An empty service worker! */

self.addEventListener (‘fetch’, function(event)

{

/** An empty fetch handler! */

});

And that’s it.

Register the Service Worker

You will have to register the code in your website’s code, for that, open up your site.js file and paste this –

navigator.serviceWorker && navigator.serviceWorker.register(‘./sw.js’).then(function(registration) { console.log(‘Excellent, registered with scope: ‘, registration.scope);});

Now, the code will get executed on every single page load. Check if its working properly by reloading the page and then checking – chrome://serviceworker-internals/

Now your website will be able to prompt users to install it on their home screens and secondly, you will be able to make your site able to support push notifications and even work offline.

Step 5: Make the Site Work Offline

First step would be to open sw.js script and get hold of caches object. Once you have that, update the code and app the entire website to cache.

Try out how it’s working now. Uninstall the present app and load it on Chrome. Next, refresh the page and select ‘Add to Home Screen’ in the right corner menu.

For abiding by the rule that when Service Worker changes, the page should reload and reinstall it, all you will have to do is add a component which has the ‘version’ of the service worker. When that changes, the install movement happens again, caching the resources that would have changed.

Congratulations, you now know how to convert a Web to PWA and if you followed the steps side-by-side, you have now even migrated your website into a Progressive Web App!

*Disclaimer*: While these steps will give you, the developer, an exact idea of how you will have to fill in the blanks and move from Point A in the process to Point C, if you are reading this as an enthusiastic entrepreneur who wishes to take charge of the migration, I would say, don’t do it without having support of an experienced progressive web app development services provider.

While these steps are explanatory, there are a number of elements that come up as part of the process when you sit with the actual development process. So, instead of trying your hands with the steps and finding a different result because you weren’t sure of the between the line elements, give the job to a PWA development company who has specialization in the domain.

Website Loading Times: 4 Ways They Affect Your Business

Posted on 28/03/201922/06/2021 by Tushar

Hereâ€™s a question for you: whatâ€™s the first thing any visitor notices on your website ? Your header? Your logo? Your headline? The answer is none of these; itâ€™s your loading time. Before a visitor sees any of your content, theyâ€™ll watch your website load. The expectation is that this will happen almost instantaneously. If it doesnâ€™t, theyâ€™ll start to leave and this will impact on your conversion rates. But there are other reasons why a slow loading site causes problems: it increases your bounce rate, it makes your site harder to crawl, it gives a poorer experience for your visitor and, perhaps most crucially, it lowers your ranking on search engines. In this post, weâ€™ll look at the importance of site speed for your website.

1. Google uses site speed as a ranking factor

Googleâ€™s mission to provide users with the best possible search results means it is actively demoting slow loading websites. It doesnâ€™t consider it good business to send visitors to websites that take too long to load as it reflects badly on itself. So, even if your content is great, your ranking in search results can still suffer. And this means less traffic and fewer sales.

Whatâ€™s more, this applies to searches done on mobiles as well as on computers, so if your desktop site runs fine but your mobile site is sluggish, youâ€™re still going to rank lower.

2. Site speed affects search engine crawling

If you want all your content to be searchable on the internet, search engines have to discover whatâ€™s there. This is done through what is known as site crawling, where a search bot will go to your homepage and follow all the links until it has made an inventory of every page it can find. These pages and their content are then indexed so they can be searched for.

When undertaking a crawl, a search engine needs to send requests to your server to receive information about your content. However, as each request uses up a part of your serverâ€™s resources, search engines are reluctant to send too many in case they slow your website down for genuine visitors. If your loading times are slow or you have a poor server response time, then, to prevent overburdening your website, search engines will crawl fewer pages. As a result, not all your pages may get indexed or updates to existing pages may not get noticed.

This should not be a big problem for small websites, however, if you have a large website that is constantly adding new content or if you have a significant amount of older content, it could be an issue. One way to improve crawling efficiency is to improve your site structure. Delete outdated content, eradicate any broken links, put in redirects where necessary and tidy up your menus and categories.Â This will cut down on the amount of unnecessary crawling a search engine has to do, so it can focus on the content that counts.

3. Faster sites have higher conversion rates

While studies into the effects of site speed have come up with different figures, they all agree on one thing: the faster a website, the higher its conversion rates. HubSpot looked at 12 different case studies and showed that a 1 second delay in loading times reduces conversion and revenue by 7% and page views by 11%. Similar results were shown for bounce rates: the faster the loading times, the lower the rate. A page that loaded in 9.9 seconds had a 58% bounce rate, compared to 12.8% for a page that loaded in 2.4 seconds.

This goes to show that even the smallest delay can impact your bottom line. Quite simply, the longer people have to wait, the fewer of them are going to stick around all the way to the checkout. To grab those sales and remain competitive, you have to have a website that loads faster than your competitors.

4. A faster website equals happier users

If you want visitors to stick around until they purchase something, you have to provide them with a great experience. This is especially so if you want to retain those customers over the long term. Studies have shown that site speed is an integral part of creating a good user experience â€“ this is why Google places so much importance on it when ranking sites. The statistics for conversion rates and bounce rates back this up.

If you want to improve your brand reputation and increase customer loyalty, making your website faster should be one of the things that you consistently try to achieve.

How to improve your site speed

The first stage for anyone wanting to make their site faster is to discover its current desktop and mobile loading times and to find out where improvements need to be made. You can find this out easily by using the free Google PageSpeed Insights Tool. Just type in your URL and it will give your site marks out of 100 for its desktop and mobile loading times. The higher the mark, the better. Of more value, it will also identify the issues which are causing your loading times to be slow and provide you with a list of modifications that can make it load even quicker. These will include things such as caching, compression and image optimisation.

Another issue which can affect your loading times is the performance of your web server. This can be due to your host using slower hardware or not configuring the server for optimum speed. For those on a shared hosting plan, it can also be due to other users hogging all the server resources and your host not dealing with the matter.

Conclusion

As you can see, slow loading speeds can affect your site in all kinds of ways: lowing search engine ranking, preventing pages from being indexed, reducing conversion rates and revenue, and negatively impacting the user experience. Hopefully, the information provided here will help you check your own site speed and put measures in place to make it load faster.

Before registering a domain name, think about these six things.

Posted on 22/03/201922/06/2021 by Tushar

Choosing the best domain name for your business is a critical but often challenging decision. Get it right and it can attract lots of visitors to your website and improve your online presence. However, before you make a final choice there are a number of things you need to consider and, in this post, we’ll look at what they are and explain why they are important.

1. Getting the basics right

Before coming up with ideas for a domain name, you first need to consider how visitors will use them. If someone is looking for your website, they’ll need to remember what it is called and then type it into the search bar. A good name, therefore, is one which is easy to remember and easy to spell. Keeping it short and simple and doing away with over quirky spellings make for a good starting point.

2. Keyword names versus brand names

There’s lots of debate about whether your domain name should contain keywords, e.g. cambridgecleaners.com or brand names, e.g. hargreaves.com. In reality, there is no right or wrong, however, the choice you make should decide upon the market you are in and the long-term goals of your business.

A brand name is unique and once your business is established can have a status that attracts customers because of your reputation. If you are in a market where brand is important, then that option might be best for you.

Keyword-based domains help people associate you with the products or services you sell and/or the location where your business operates. Cambridgecleaners.com would be helpful to anyone in Cambridge looking for a cleaner because the name says it all. A potential issue, however, is if your company diversifies or specialises in the future and the keywords in the domain name don’t accurately indicate what you do.

3. Finding your ideal domain name is already taken

This is a common problem and not simply because there are other organisations with the same name. Some companies register thousands of unused domain names just so they can sell them at a profit when someone else wants them.

If you find that the domain name is already taken, the first step is to visit the site and see if the website is live and being used. If it is and the site looks successful, there’s little chance of you being able to purchase it and you may need to seek an alternative domain name. If there is no live site, there is a much better chance that it can be purchased. You should check the Whois database to find out the site’s owner so you can make an offer. There are, however, no guarantees the owner will sell and they can charge what they like.

4. Finding your ideal domain name is being used on social media

While your ideal domain name might be free, it is also a good idea to see if someone else is using that name on social media. If you want to create a brand called GameU and register the GameU.com website thinking you’re good to go, it can be disconcerting to find out immediately afterwards that there’s a massively successful GameU YouTube channel with 10 million subscribers. Chances are, everyone who visits your website would be looking for the YouTuber, not for you. It’s the same with influencers on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

5. Choosing the right domain extension

Domain names come in two parts, the part before the dot and the part that follows it. While the first part is important for your branding and for helping people find you, the second part plays a number of important roles and shouldn’t be overlooked.

The second part of the name is known as the Top Level Domain (TLD) and this is used to categorise your website so that users and search engines have a better understanding of what its purpose is. We all know, for example, that .gov is for government websites, .co.uk is for UK companies and .org for non-profit organisations.

Not so long ago, choosing the right TLD was a fairly simple affair as there were few to choose from. Today, however, there is a far greater number and more are being added all the time. The good news is that many of these are keyword-based and this means that there is less need to use keywords in the first part of the domain name. Some examples of new TLDs include .London, .restaurant and .finance.

One of the advantages of these new TDLs is that it gives people more chance to get the domain name they want. If hargreaves.com has been taken by a builder in Macclesfield, the chances are that hargreaves.london or hargreaves.cafe is still available.

6. Registering multiple extensions

It is common practice for companies to register multiple TDLs associated with their brand name in order to protect their reputation.

If you ran a successful eCommerce store called abcfashions.com and only registered that one domain, it wouldn’t take long for others to register an abcfashions.co.uk or abcfashions.co website and pretend to be your company. They may sell counterfeit versions of your products to unsuspecting customers or just plain steal from them. All of this can have a devastating effect on your reputation. This is why registering multiple TLDs became so common.

This may be something you want to consider. However, with so many TLDs available today it would cost you thousands of pounds a year to register them all. Instead, it might be worth registering the ones you think most useful. If you have a .co.uk TLD, for example, it might be wise to consider registering the .co, .com and the .uk versions at the same time.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are quite a few things you need to consider before choosing a domain name for your business. You need a memorable and easy to spell name, to consider the use of keywords or brand names, to check whether it is already registered or being used on social media, to pick the most appropriate TLD and to consider whether to register multiple TLDs. If you are looking for a domain name for your website, you can search for and register them on our Domain page.

6 Signs That Your Website Is In Need Of An Upgrade

Posted on 19/03/201922/06/2021 by Tushar

Nothing stands still in business and that includes a website. Trends change, new technologies are developed, search engines modify their ranking criteria and customers have ever-increasing expectations. A website that was the best thing since sliced bread when you launched it several years ago may now be due for an upgrade. Here, we’ll look at some of the signs to look out for.

1. Your site doesn’t rank well

One of the first clues that you need a website upgrade is if your site is performing less well than it did in search engine results. Search engines are forever moving the goalposts when it comes to how they rank websites and older sites often come out badly as a result. This can be because many of your earlier pages were created using now outdated SEO techniques which no longer carry much weight or, even worse, are penalised for contravening the latest webmaster guidelines.

While it is important to keep abreast of SEO trends and to update your optimisation accordingly, sometimes a complete overhaul may be what’s needed to bring your site up-to-date and to ensure all your content is fresh and relevant.

2. Your website is chaotic

One of the issues that all websites face is how to manage growth. As the years go by, you’ll make lots of changes to your site, adding pages, posts, products and other features, while removing others.

Sometimes it can be difficult to keep tabs on these changes and they can lead to a number of problems. You may end up publishing duplicate content, have links to content which is no longer there or, perhaps worst of all, having two versions of the same page but with different details, such as pricing, which can cause issues with customers. You may also have features which no longer work properly or which don’t comply with the latest legislation, such as GDPR.

If your site is getting into such a chaotic state, then it can often be better to start from scratch and create one which is better organised and where everything works as it should.

3. Outdated styling

Design trends are continually changing and although you can’t update your website every time a new fashion appears, there comes a time when it begins to look out of date. This isn’t a good thing on the internet where visual impact is so important, so, if your website is still wearing flares and sporting a kaftan, it’s probably time for a makeover.

Typical things to look out for are dated images that no longer depict the modern-day and tired looking layouts, fonts and backgrounds. Updating to something more modern will give visitors the impression that your company is forward-thinking and on point.

4. Not mobile-friendly

Google wants website owners to have a ‘mobile-first’ approach to web design, where the focus is on building the mobile site first and then adding other features for devices like tablets and computers. The reason for this is that although we do most of our browsing, around 60%, on mobile phones, many websites do not function well enough on smartphone screens.

This requires website owners to go beyond using responsive themes as even these don’t always put the needs of the mobile user first. They may render the website in a way that is readable, but often some of the functions don’t work effectively and some of the navigational features are not user-friendly for the thumb-operated screens.

With increasing numbers of people browsing and buying on smartphones, any website that doesn’t provide for these users is going to lose out and find their search engine rankings getting worse.

5. Poor user experience

Where, once, customers simply wanted the cheapest prices, today, many of them will purchase from the website that offers them the best user-experience – even if the price is a little higher. This is great news for those working with small margins but means you will need to upgrade your game when it comes to your website.

Providing a great customer experience covers all aspects of a website. It needs to be easily navigable, have detailed information (i.e. text, images, video and other content) that directly answers the questions customers have. It needs to offer users the opportunity to get quick responses, such as those offered by live chat. It will provide personalised shopping experiences and offers, swift delivery, customer reviews and additional services like wish lists or gift wrapping. It may also offer expert advice in the form of blog posts, engaging content (such as competitions) and even reward schemes for loyal customers. Importantly, a simple and quick checkout process is also needed.

6. Slow loading

Customers expect websites to load instantly, so if yours takes its time to render on their device, you may lose a lot of business. Even a one-second delay has been shown to drop conversions by 7% and up to 40% of visitors abandon a website when the landing page takes more than a couple of seconds to load. Few people are ever going to make it to the checkout if this happens on every page.

If that doesn’t encourage you to upgrade to a faster website, you also need to remember that search engines use loading times as a ranking factor. Speeding up means you’ll rank higher and get more organic traffic, whereas being slow will have the opposite effect. You should also consider moving to a faster hosting package as this, too, can dramatically speed up your site.

Conclusion

Websites are like cars. When we first get them, they are shiny, new and have all the latest features. However, after a few years, they have been superseded by shinier and newer models that have even smarter features. If the signs mentioned in this post apply to your website, then it may be time to upgrade to one which is better suited for today’s internet.

7 Steps to Creating a Secure Website

Posted on 15/03/201922/06/2021 by Tushar

The sheer number of data breaches and cyberattacks that take place means that when developing a website, companies need to adopt a security mindset. Failure to do so can have disastrous consequences, including substantial fines, loss of business and reputational damage. Ensuring your website is secure means grappling with a wide range of security issues and in this post, we’ll look at ways you can overcome many of the vulnerabilities that pose a threat.

1. A comprehensive security approach

Right at the outset of the development process, there should be a disciplined approach to building a site that is end-to-end secure. This is particularly important when the site is being developed by different teams, each working on separate areas. Even if each team is working with security in mind, doing so without an understanding of what other teams are doing can result in data becoming vulnerable. To prevent this, there needs to be someone with oversight of security so that, once all the separate elements are put together, the final website remains comprehensively secure.

2. Validate all data

Not validating the data inputted by your users puts your website at risk from various, havoc-wreaking, forms of attack. These include SQL injection, cross-site scripting, command injection and other similar threats. Data validation, therefore, should be built-in to ensure all information inputted is not going to cause harm.

3. Scan your website from the outset

Scanning is fundamental to ensure your website is secure. It enables you to find previously undiscovered vulnerabilities and security holes so that you can fix them. You should scan regularly during the development process and, once launched, you should continue scanning on a daily basis and after each time you make an update to your website or system. Some web hosts will provide a website scanning service for you.

4. Update apps immediately and use clean code

Hackers send out millions of bots a day looking for websites using outdated, vulnerable applications they know they can break into. Updating your software to the latest version or applying a security patch removes these vulnerabilities and makes your site safer. Importantly, the sooner you update, the quicker you become secure. Auto-updates are the safest and most hassle-free way to do this.

To reduce the number of vulnerabilities overall, it is always good practice to delete unnecessary data, databases and software from your server.

Website developers should also make sure they do not use applications with known vulnerabilities. Older platform versions, themes, plugins, etc., should be replaced with the latest clean versions prior to being installed.

5. Use strong passwords

Everyone knows that the sophisticated software used by today’s cybercriminals makes it easy to crack weak passwords. Enabling users to keep default passwords or use weak passwords puts your company at risk of attack. For this reason, there’s no excuse not to enforce strong passwords on your site. Indeed, implementing two-factor authentication where, for example, a code is sent to the user’s phone, can make security significantly tighter. And as virtually everyone has a mobile phone these days, such methods of authentication shouldn’t be too much of a burden on your users.

6. Rigorous permissions management

The issue with weak passwords is exacerbated when administrator permissions and privileges are not well managed. If these are given to non-essential users and third-parties, the website becomes increasingly vulnerable to attack. Organisations need to have a clear policy in place about how permissions are managed and this should include precautions which ensure that the higher the level of privilege a user has, the stronger their authentication process needs to be.

7. Encrypt your data

If you store personal data about your users, the best way to keep it secure is to encrypt it. This way, even if your database is breached and the information stolen, the hackers won’t be able to access it. If you sell directly from your website, you should also encrypt the user’s financial data while it is in transit from their browser to your site. This prevents it from being stolen on-route. You can do this by installing an SSL certificate.

Conclusion

Security is essential for all websites in order to protect your company and your users from today’s sophisticated cybercriminals. To make your website secure, you need to put things in place during its development, rather than bolting them on at the end of the process. Hopefully, the points raised in this post will help you develop a secure site of your own.

Why Is Personalisation So Important in Online Business?

Posted on 09/03/201922/06/2021 by Tushar

Personalisation is not the latest trend in online business. In fact, it has been around for a while. It is, however, becoming the norm, with more and more companies adopting personalisation as a strategy. Those who haven’t yet begun to use personalisation not only fail to reap its benefits; they risk losing customers and sales to their competitors. Here’s why you should consider personalisation for your business.

Why personalisation is important

Today we are bombarded by marketing messages. We find them on websites, social media, emails, television, radio, on the sides of vehicles, on street hoardings and tons of other places. There are so many fighting for our attention that, despite the millions that are spent on them, the majority go ignored. Personalisation has been proven to make customers take more notice and take more action, vastly increasing the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

To give some substance to that claim, a recent article from SmarterHQ showed that over 90% of consumers would be more likely to buy from a company that provides them with relevant offers and recommendations. What’s more, they also discovered that, in 2019, more than 70% of customers only engaged with marketing messages that met their individual interests.

Since companies like eBay and Amazon started introducing personalisation, consumer expectations have increased. Indeed, if a website doesn’t offer relevant suggestions, almost half of its visitors will head to Amazon before making a decision. Overall, 70% of consumers feel marketing is too impersonal and 36% want even more personalisation than at present. Importantly, where personalisation makes buying less expensive or easier, 90% of consumers are willing to share their data to obtain those benefits – and it is that data which makes personalisation achievable.

The value of data

Websites are able to obtain vast quantities of valuable data from their visitors. This gives marketing departments the ability to know when people shop, what and who they shop for, how much they spend and even why and how they shop. This, however, is just the tip of the data iceberg. Today, businesses go way beyond tracking website behaviour and create end to end journey maps that collect the data on every single interaction an individual has with the organisation, including customer service interactions, emails and responses, product ratings and reviews, social media interactions and so forth. This helps the company to know their customers better than ever before and thus provide them with a far better customer experience.

The insights gained from analysing such data can help a company procure the products their customers want and market them in the most effective, personalised ways. It can even help them send out marketing communications via the customers’ preferred channel and do so at the time that will have the greatest chance of a call to action being followed. And, of course, when the consumer arrives at the website, they’ll be greeted personally and find all the products they are most likely to be interested in and be given offers which are both relevant and appealing.

How to add personalisation capabilities to your website

The growing demand for personalisation means there are an increasing number of plugins, tools and third-party services you can use to help implement it. The key tool is a Customer Relationship Management application that will enable you to do the essential collecting, tracking and analysis of your customer data as well as providing you with the ability to personalise recommendations on the site and send personalised marketing communications. Chatbots are another popular AI tool that act as personal shopping assistants to recommend products based on customer data.

Personalisation tools vary considerably in price. The WordPress Repository has several highly rated plugins with free and premium versions. More advanced tools dealing with bigger quantities of data can cost hundreds of pounds per month. A third-party provider will cost even more but will take the burden of managing the system off your hands and remove the need for in-house technical expertise.

Don’t forget your hosting

Do remember that if you choose to offer personalisation, you will need the capacity to store all the data you are collecting and the processing power to run the apps that will analyse it. This means you may have to consider a more powerful hosting solution for your website, such as VPS, dedicated server or cloud.

At the same time, collecting large quantities of personal data means you will be obliged to ensure its safety and so you may need to enhance the security features that you use to protect your website and online storage.

Conclusion

Personalisation is becoming a necessity for competitive businesses, especially in the eCommerce sector. Offering personalised interactions improves the customer experience and makes marketing strategies far more effective. To do this, however, you need the right tools to collect and analyse the data and to generate the personalised content. You also need the hosting capabilities to deliver personalisation and maintain data security.

5 Worst-Case Scenarios of Not BackUp Your Website

Posted on 10/01/201917/06/2021 by Tushar

If you’ve never had a serious problem with your website, backups are probably something you don’t lose much sleep over. But just because you haven’t seen your website go down or lost data in the past doesn’t mean you are immune in the future. There are plenty of ways you can suffer such a disaster, with server failures, hacking and the accidental pressing of the delete button being just some of the potential causes. Without a backup, restoring your website would be a long, difficult and expensive process. Not convinced you need them? Here are five potential nightmares that might change your mind.

1. To err is human

Even with the best will in the world and all the right procedures in place, people still make mistakes. All it takes is for someone to accidentally click on the wrong button and important website files can be wiped. As a result, your website might cease to function. It’s bad for your reputation and you’re losing business while it’s offline.

While restoring your website is possible, it may take a long time to get it back online, especially if you are using bespoke software or a theme that has been customised for your needs. Installing a fresh version of WordPress and your theme, for example, might not take that long. However, if you’ve edited the code to change the look or functionality of the site, all these tweaks will need to be carried out from fresh, once more.

The longer restoration takes, the more your company will suffer and for some, the damage can put them out of business. With a backup in place, everything can be restored, as it was, very quickly indeed.

2. Disappearing content and data

Perhaps more important than the website is the actual content that goes on it and the data you store. If you lost your content there’d be no product pages, landing pages, blog posts or any of the other important information you need to share with your customers. If you lost your data, you may lose all your existing orders, customer details and inventory information.

Losing content or data is more problematic than losing your website files. With content, you may have to start creating it again from scratch which can be a massive task if you sell large numbers of products or have a substantial blog. If you lose customer data, you may never be able to get it back and may be in breach of regulations too.

3. Killed off by infection

According to Hiscox, there are 65,000 cyberattacks on UK businesses every day. One of the main forms of attack is to attempt to infect a company’s website with malware. Malware can do many forms of damage to a website, from putting your site at ransom to installing hidden programs that infect your customers’ computers when they visit your site. As a result, they can take your website offline or corrupt your files. If your site is corrupted, you host may have to take it offline to prevent the spread of malware to others while search engines will stop listing it until the issue is fixed.

Finding the corrupted files (sometimes the infection replicates itself) and getting rid of the infected code can be a long process and the easiest thing is to delete the entire website and install a backup. Of course, you cannot do this without a recent backup in place.

4. When great plans backfire

A common time for issues to happen with websites is when people make changes to them. There are quite a few things that can go wrong, for example, software compatibility issues, tweaks to coding breaking your software or new themes making your content appear all wrong. Indeed, any major modification to the functionality or design of your website can result in unforeseen issues, which is why many companies carry them out in an experimental environment before letting them go live. Unfortunately, lots of other companies choose to make the changes to their live website and when plans go wrong, the site can easily be put offline. With a backup in place, you can restore your old, fully working website straightaway.

5. The vendor trap

The success of your website relies to a great extent on the quality of your web hosting provider. A good provider offers faster loading times, increased reliability, enhanced security, managed services, 24/7 expert technical support and the right packages and prices for the growing needs of your business. There may be a time, therefore, that you consider migrating your website to a new host.

Moving to a different provider means moving your entire website to a new server. Without a backup, this means starting from scratch and for lots of businesses, this is just too much hassle to consider. As a result, many stay with their existing provider even if the services they receive are not up to the standard they require. If you do have a backup, migrating is simple. Indeed, so simple that some web hosts will do it for you.

Backing up your site

You can back up your site in numerous ways, such as doing it manually to a computer or using a plugin that saves your site to places like Google Drive or Dropbox. However, depending on your website’s needs, you may need to back up more frequently or keep several copies of older backups (e.g., if your latest backup took place after your website became corrupted, you’ll need to restore an earlier version). Your backups will also need to be stored remotely, i.e. not on the same server where your website is stored. If you don’t and the server fails, you’ll lose your website and your backup at the same time.

The ideal solution is to use a backup service provided by your web host. Here, you automate backups and control the frequency and number of backups kept. You’ll also be safe in the knowledge that the backups will be stored securely and will be backed up themselves by the host.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are numerous nightmares that can occur if you do not backup your website. All of them can result in your website being taken offline and even the loss of your critical content and data. For many businesses that operate online, such issues can have a significant impact. A backup is an inexpensive solution that enables your site to be restored regardless of the problem which caused it. For that reason, creating regular backups is indispensable.

The Benefits of Google’s Grow My Store Tool for eCommerce Websites

Posted on 03/01/201917/06/2021 by Tushar

As the world’s leading search engine, Google is in a good position to understand what makes online stores successful. Indeed, its influence gives it the power to set the criteria by which eCommerce websites are judged. Its latest tool, Grow My Store, is designed to provide online shop owners with valuable information and site analysis that can help them improve. Here, we’ll take a closer look at what the tool has to offer.

What does Grow My Store do?

Google’s primary objective is to offer its users the best search results. While it constantly works to improve its search algorithm, it also tries to improve the quality of the websites that feature in its search results. Those that follow its guidance generally end up ranking higher. This is why it has so much power and influence. One of the key attributes that Google wants online stores to improve is customer experience. The Grow My Store tool was designed with this in mind and is particularly aimed at small and medium-sized retail sites.

In a nutshell, the Grow My Store tool will scan your online store and provide you with a customer experience report which will point out what you are doing well and areas where you should look to make improvements. The benefits, apart from helping your site to be more Google-friendly, are that improved customer experience can increase your revenue by as much as 15% and also help you cut costs.

What kind of websites can use Grow My Store?

The tool is designed to analyse the websites of all retailers, whether you only sell via a bricks and mortar store, only sell online or sell both online and in store. The feedback you get is tailored to the particular business model that you have. However, while the tool is helpful for retailers who don’t sell directly from their websites, it’s not designed to help businesses that aren’t in the retail sector.

Getting started with Grow My Store

Like most of Google’s website analysis tools, using Grow My Store is easy. Simply visit the Grow My Store page and paste in your website’s URL and click the ‘Get Started’ Button. You will then be asked to choose your business model (i.e. online only, physical store only or both) so that results can be tailored to your needs.

After this, you are asked to choose the sector which best suits your site. The options are limited to apparel, beauty and personal care, computers and consumer electronics, food and groceries, home and garden and other. If you choose ‘other’, you are able to type in something more specific. Once this information is inputted, the tool will begin analysing your website. To get the full report, you’ll need to sign up or sign in.

What kind of feedback will I receive?

Google will analyse your site on 22 areas of customer experience best practice. These include basic things like having a returns policy, clear pricing and adequate product information, as well as website features such as easy site navigation, live chat support and a customer-friendly checkout process.

The tool will analyse site speed, including loading times, how long it takes for customers to be able to interact with the site and the time it takes for the site to respond to interactions – all of which can affect bounce rates and shopping cart abandonment. It will examine mobile friendliness, which is increasingly important as more people shop with smartphones and use them to search for local stores. From a security perspective, it will look to see whether you have an SSL certificate installed that encrypts data sent between the user’s browser and your server, keeping payment details secure.

Other areas the tool will report back on include whether you have product ratings enabled; if you display basic store information (e.g. opening times and location and direction details for physical stores); how well your site offers personalisation; how easy you make it for customers to order, return and collect products; and the quality of your fulfilment and customer service.

When completed, the tool will give your store an overall rating and compare it to the average of similar stores. It will also offer advice and guidance on areas in which it thinks you can improve.

Conclusion

It’s always helpful to get feedback on the quality of your online store. The information provided by Google’s Grow My Store Tool can offer insights that you might not have previously considered or highlight issues that you were unaware of. What’s more, it can show you how well your site performs in relation to your competitors. Hopefully, it can help you improve your customer experience and reap the benefits of doing so.

4 Ways Your Web Host Affects Your Google Ranking

Posted on 01/01/201917/06/2021 by Tushar

During its latest algorithm update in May 2020, Google has tweaked a number of its ranking criteria which are directly related to the quality of your web hosting. Here, we’ll look at what aspects of your hosting can influence your website’s ability to rank and explain how they are important.

1. Site loading speed

Site speed is important to search engines because it improves the customer experience. Slow-loading websites have much higher abandonment rates because users just aren’t willing to wait for them to load. For this reason, the slower a site performs, the less likely Google will feature it in its results – it looks bad on them. What’s more, to do well, the site needs to perform quickly on both mobile devices and PCs.

Website loading times are an important web hosting feature for Google. While there are several things you can do to speed up your website that don’t rely on hosting, such as image optimisation, compression, minification, caching and the use of content delivery networks, ultimately, the performance of your server is critical.

Google takes note of a number of timescales when judging performance, such as the time it takes to start loading content on a browser, how quickly the page becomes interactive and how long it takes for your server to respond to an action performed by the user, for example, clicking on a link. If your server performs too slowly on any of these criteria, it will affect your page’s ability to rank.

Choosing a web host that uses high-performance servers, such as those with SSD drives and Intel Xeon processors can speed up performance dramatically. So, too, can upgrading to a more powerful solution, such as VPS, cloud or dedicated server.

2. Server uptime

While Google doesn’t like sending users to slow loading website’s, it is perhaps even less happy about sending them to sites which are frequently offline. If it keeps supplying links to sites which aren’t there, people will use an alternative search engine. Google, therefore, monitors the amount of time that websites are online and uses this as part of its ranking algorithm.

There are numerous reasons your site can go offline. Some of these are related to things you do on your site, such as putting it into maintenance mode or causing it to crash through installing incompatible software or making coding errors. Other reasons can be due to your web hosting, such as when your server needs its operating system patching and updating.

With some hosting solutions, however, the amount of time your website goes offline can be unacceptable to Google. For example, if the hardware is outdated, unreliable and keeps breaking down or if too few resources are available for shared hosting accounts that the server simply can’t cope with the amount of traffic. In these instances, it can affect the site’s ranking ability.

To protect yourself, ensure your web host offers guaranteed uptime backed by service level agreement (SLA). The minimum you should be looking for is 99.95% uptime. If you require 100% uptime, then you need to choose a cloud hosting solution.

3. Server location

Data needs to travel from A to B and the further it has to go, the longer it takes. This increases latency, making your server respond slower to requests from a user’s browser and, thus, reduces site speed.

While it is possible to speed up global loading times using a Content Delivery Network (CDN), this only works for static website data, i.e. website content that remains the same. For websites that provide lots of dynamic data, i.e. pages that change for individual users or which display things like product search results, the nearer the server to the browser, the better the performance.

Ideally, therefore, you need a server geographically located closer to where most of your traffic comes from. If you are a UK based company, it makes sense to have your website hosted on servers in a UK based datacentre.

Some web hosts, however, store their data all over the planet, much of it in huge US data centres. Even if the company is UK based, its servers may be anywhere. At eukhost, all our datacentres are located within the UK.

4. SSL certificates

The padlock icon displayed on browsers is a clear indication of how seriously Google takes security. The last thing it wants is to send its users to sites where their financial data may be at risk of interception because of an insecure connection between the browser and the website.

Today, the security of that connection is key to performing well in search engine results. The only way to obtain a green padlock icon is to install an SSL certificate that will encrypt data travelling between the browser and the server. These are normally obtained via your web host.

There are different types of SSL certificate and the one you need depends on the level of security required for your organisation. A good web host will provide all the different types available and give technical help to install it if required.

Perhaps less well known is that a basic Domain Validated SSL can now be obtained free of charge from the Let’s Encrypt certificate authority. eukhost, which is a sponsor of Let’s Encrypt, enables its customers to install these free Domain validated SSL certificates directly from within your cPanel control panel. Many web hosts, however, prevent this, forcing customers to buy alternate SSLs and pay an annual fee for their use.

Conclusion

In its drive to provide better services to its users, Google is pushing websites to up their game. From a web hosting perspective, this means having a site that loads quickly on all devices, has minimal latency, is reliably online for 99.5% of the time or more and which provides secure, encrypted connections. Websites with these things in place will find themselves better positioned by Google’s algorithm.

Top PWA Tools and Frameworks

Ionic

Polymer

AngularJS

Vue.js

React

Lighthouse

FAQs About PWA Development and Frameworks to build PWA

Q. How does a Progressive Web App work?

Q. How do you know if a website is PWA?

Q. How do you create a PWA?

Q. What are the PWA frameworks and tools?

Benefits of PWAs: Reasons to Convert Your Existing Website to PWA

What You Need Before Looking into How to Turn a Website into PWA

Step 1: Load the URL

Step 2: View the Site on your Mobile

Step 3: Add the Modern Head Tags

Step 4: Add a Service Worker

Create a Service Worker

Register the Service Worker

Step 5: Make the Site Work Offline

1. Google uses site speed as a ranking factor

2. Site speed affects search engine crawling

3. Faster sites have higher conversion rates

4. A faster website equals happier users

How to improve your site speed

Conclusion

1. Getting the basics right

2. Keyword names versus brand names

3. Finding your ideal domain name is already taken

4. Finding your ideal domain name is being used on social media

5. Choosing the right domain extension

6. Registering multiple extensions

Conclusion

1. Your site doesn’t rank well

2. Your website is chaotic

3. Outdated styling

4. Not mobile-friendly

5. Poor user experience

6. Slow loading

Conclusion

1. A comprehensive security approach

2. Validate all data

3. Scan your website from the outset

4. Update apps immediately and use clean code

5. Use strong passwords

6. Rigorous permissions management

7. Encrypt your data

Conclusion

Why personalisation is important

The value of data

How to add personalisation capabilities to your website

Don’t forget your hosting

Conclusion

1. To err is human

2. Disappearing content and data

3. Killed off by infection

4. When great plans backfire

5. The vendor trap

Backing up your site

Conclusion

What does Grow My Store do?

What kind of websites can use Grow My Store?

Getting started with Grow My Store

What kind of feedback will I receive?

Conclusion

1. Site loading speed

2. Server uptime

3. Server location

4. SSL certificates

Conclusion

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