What do you think when a website is painfully slow to load? Do you tap your fingers impatiently, do you sigh in annoyance? When browsing the internet what is worse than a website that takes more than 10 seconds to load?
Not much, and all of our time is precious, so often if you’re waiting too long you’re just going to click off the site and look elsewhere. This is known in the digital marketing world as a metric called ‘bouncing’.
People use this metric as a way to judge how user friendly your website is. A site with a high bounce rate, which is the percentage of people that click off your webpage just after entering it, will not get as much use, and therefore business, compared to a site with a low bounce rate.
So, linking back to load times, they very closely correlate with website bounce rates, a site that loads fast is going to get more use than a site with a slow loading time 10/10 without fail.
Don’t just take my word for it, I have the data to back it up, this article by machmetrics.com shows us how big of an impact load time can have on your business.
Sites with a loading time of more than 3 seconds will experience a bounce rate 90% higher than sites with sub 3 second load times. Guess what, the average page load time in 2019 was 4.7 seconds. Meaning most sites have load times considered undesirable by users.
A large part of a site's load time is the responsibility of the host. When you click on a search result in google it sends a request to load the site to that sites host, the average response time for a server in 2019 was about 1.5 seconds, which is a big chunk of time. This stacks 1.5 seconds on top of your sites own load time, if it takes 4.5 seconds for your site to load and 1.5 for the server response that is a 6 second load time.
What this means is that an important place to start if you want good load times is from the ground up, this means choosing a host with fast response times.
So how do Hosting-Australia’s servers stack up against the average? Well, across all of our servers our average response time is 1.02 seconds, well above average, with the fastest of our servers having a response time of 0.2 seconds. We’re very diligent with caring for our servers and strive to have them in tip top shape 24/7.
We have the technology to compete with the best hosts around the world and the best part is, it all comes from a data centre based in Sydney and not an American/European based server that will inevitably slow your load times drastically.
By this point I’m sure you’re aware why slow loading is bad loading. If you’d like to contact us to inquire about our services and how we can help you increase your website friendliness just give us a ring on (07) 4914 2433. You’ll get one of our friendly home grown Australian support team members on the line to help. Alternatively you can send an email to support@hosting-australia.com with any questions you may have.
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According to the above article published in 2016, 53% of people who browse the internet on their phones abandon sites that take too long to load, longer than 3 seconds to be exact.
It doesn’t seem like a lot, but if you count to 3, then imagine your customers waiting longer than that every single time they refresh the page, it starts to get a little tedious. This highlights the importance of website optimisation. There are many things you can do to speed up your site.
Most sites that are slow are trying to do waay too much at once. They could be loading several images or trying to run dynamic processes like page transitions or fly in headers.
All of this links back to SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation. This is basically the act of trying to make your website as user friendly as possible. Search engines like Google and Bing have algorithms that help them rank websites in search results by a certain set of criteria. These could be the uniqueness of the content, the load times, the security of the site. It’s a fine art, and it takes a keen eye to bring a website up to its fullest capabilities.
Fortunately at Hosting-Australia we have these keen eyes readily available. Ask about our SEO services and we can get you in touch with one of our experts so that you can work closely together to optimise your site.
If you think you’d be interested please give us a call on (07) 4914 2433 or email our support centre at support@hosting-australia.com
Please don’t forget to like and share as it helps power quality Australian hosting.
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What was once used mainly by small time travellers and writers for blogs has grown and evolved to become the biggest content management system on the block. WordPress themselves reveal that 35% of all websites are built on their platform.
They take up more than 50% of the CMS market share worldwide and for good reason, it’s attractive, easy to use and flexible. Thousands of themes and plug ins make it oh so simple to achieve the goals you set out with when first designing a website. And it’s not just us that are catching onto this. Big brands and corporations are using wordpress for their sites too. Whether it’s your favourite sports team or the manufacturer of your car, everyone sees the advantages of wordpress.
Above you’ll find a shortlist of some of the most popular brands using wordpress for their site courtesy of themeisle. As you can see, it’s no secret even to companies like microsoft that wordpress should be your go to option for web design.
This link will take you on a more in depth look at some of the sites using wordpress and the key indicators that give it away, such as the iconic grid layout and the big full length headers wordpress is known for.
Hosting-Australia has years of experience working with wordpress, if you see something you like in any of these sites, come to us with any requests and we’ll be able to help with building you a website on the level of what you see these billion dollar business using.
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Hi everyone, about a week and a half ago WordPress released a maintenance update titled WordPress Version 5.2.3. Within it were several minor security and quality of life fixes. Here’s a link to the patch notes.
https://wordpress.org/support/wordpress-version/version-5-2-3/
If you read through those notes you might be thinking they seem like pretty vague and insignificant changes. You might even consider not updating your WordPress to this new version to save time and effort.
But now, ask yourself, how many times have you updated your WordPress recently, when was the last time you updated your WordPress? 6 months? 1 Year? 2 Years? Say 2 years is the case, there have been 40 WordPress updates released in those 2 years. Imagine every release has security fixes like this one.
There were 7 security fixes in this version. Some releases may have more, some may have less. But if we say that every patch has 7 fixes. Then there are potentially 280 different known ways to breach your site and cause havoc. Now do you see why at Hosting-Australia we are constantly preaching about updating your core CMS and plug ins as often as possible in order to keep them safe and secure.
We provide a managed hosting service where we do all of this for you, every month. We will check your site for updates and peruse whatever security plug ins you have installed to check for threats to make sure your site is safe and sound. We keep up to date, so you don’t have to.
If you’re interested send an email to support@hosting-australia.com or just give us a quick call on (07) 4914 2433 and ask about managed hosting. Our friendly support team are always willing to answer any and all questions.
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Hi everyone, this is a public service announcement to spread awareness of a series of new exploits being used to hack WordPress sites.
The hack in questions uses a few vulnerabilites in WordPress plugins to plant code in the back end of your site resulting in redirects to unknown locations and also creates a back door entry point by generating a rogue admin account.
As far as we know this issue is still ongoing, last week we posted about updating your site and plugins to prevent intrusions exactly like this. If you haven’t already read the following article linked. It provides more information about the hack and what you can do to prevent it.
There are a few specific plug ins you should check your site for that are the root cause, if you have these plugins installed then you should remove them NOW.
Below are the afflicted plug ins
If you’re concerned that maybe your site could have these installed then contact our support team and we’ll be able to help.
You can reach us by phone on (07) 4914 2433 or by email at support@hosting-australia.com.
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Hello everyone, WordPress has recently released their newest rendition of their software and have titled it ‘Kirk’.
I’d like to start by reminding everyone to update their WordPress because as always this one came with several security patches that improve the quality of your site.
Some of the notable additions in this update are a new default theme titled ‘Twenty Twenty’. From what I’m hearing this theme considering it is completely free is fantastic. It has a very minimalist style and is very easy to read and take in content.
Another one is the added compatibility for PHP Version 7.4 which many developers will be appreciative of.
The main focus of the update was to improve the block editor introduced in WordPress 5.0. You now have more freedom to design your layout and style so as to truly put you in control over the sites appearance. The reason the ‘Twenty Twenty’ theme mentioned above is so good is because it was designed with the improved block editor in mind. They work hand in hand like like bacon and eggs.
You can read more about ‘Kirk’ in the recently posted developer blog here https://wordpress.org/news/2019/11/kirk/.
If you have any questions regarding the update, give us a ring on (07) 4914 2433 or send an email on through to support@hosting-australia.com, we’re always happy to answer your questions.
If you had any trouble with the terminology in this article, check out our constantly expanding glossary of terms below.
https://clients.hosting-australia.com/knowledgebase/242/Glossary-Of-Terms.html
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Hey Guys, So recently Google has announced that they’ll be blocking mixed content on websites.
But what is mixed content? Why does it matter? Well, when you install an SSL certificate on your site you redirect all traffic from the http to https version of your site, however there may still be content on your site that can still be identified as http content. What Google is going to do is automatically redirect the http content like images and audio files, if that can’t be done the content will be blocked by google.
This process will begin in the next Chrome release ‘Chrome 79’, which is scheduled for December 2019. However don’t fret, your site content won’t start getting blocked until February-April 2020.
So how can you tell if you have mixed content on your site? Well in the top left you should see a lock to the left of your domain name in the address bar, clicking on it should show connection secure. Alternatively you may see an ‘i’, if you click on this it may show ‘Your connection to this site is not fully secure’. This means you have mixed content warnings.
The good news, we can actually help you with this, mixed content is something we handle all the time, if you don’t update the content you may notice chunks of your website disappearing before you know it. To avoid this you can contact your personal developer or do some quick googling or even just call us on (07) 4914 2433 and ask our support team about mixed content issues on your site.
If you want to read what google said about this you can do so in the below link.
https://security.googleblog.com/2019/10/no-more-mixed-messages-about-https_3.html
As always you can contact us regarding anything you read here via email (support@hosting-australia.com) or phone ((07) 4914 2433).
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Hi everyone, this week I’d like to quickly go over mail storage, what it means and how to keep on top of it.
So a lot of people have trouble keeping on top of their mailboxes. This can either be because they don’t have the correct configuration in their mail setup or because they don’t check their storage regularly enough.
With the incorrect configurations, a POP3 email setup can run into storage issues quite regularly, if you don’t have your emails set up to delete anything on the server once it has been downloaded to your local device then it can quickly fill up and cause issues with your emails ability to send and receive. One way of working around this is to log in to webmail and clear it out manually.
To do this go to a browser and enter into the address bar - webmail.yourdomain.com - For example if your domain was bertha.com, you would enter webmail.bertha.com. Once done that should take you to a login screen, from there you will enter your email address and the associated password. Once logged in, select a default application, I’d personally recommend roundcube. Then select any emails you want to delete and do so. You can delete in bulk by clicking on the storage icon located in the top left corner of your webmail. It should say something like 7MB/10MB. You can use the ensuing screen to delete emails in bulk.
Alternatively you can set your emails up to delete automatically once they are downloaded from the server. For outlook, you may do this by opening your account settings, selecting ‘More Settings’, then navigate to ‘Advanced’. Under the ‘Delivery’ heading, there should be 3 settings. I’d recommend setting them the same as mine on the left.
IMAP users can also have issues with storage, although it can be a bit easier to manage accidentally. An IMAP set up is when your local emails on your PC or phone are synced with the server. So any deleted on your PC/phone will be deleted from the server and vice versa. This however means that while you can keep your online storage clear from outlook manually. You will eventually run out of space if you hang onto a lot of old emails. To prevent filling up your mailbox this way I recommend setting up and auto archive for your mail client. The following link leads to our user guide for setting this up yourself.
https://clients.hosting-australia.com/knowledgebase/149/-Email-Archiving---Automatic-Outlook-.html
If you have any trouble with setting this one up, we can actually help you with it, just give us a ring on (07) 4914 2433 and ask us about email archiving.
There you go, a brief rundown of mail storage and how to easily circumnavigate a full mailbox before it happens. If you have any other questions about this out friendly support team are always available and willing to help.
If you had any trouble with any of the terms in this article go check out our glossary here.
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A lot of people have a lot riding on their emails, you’re probably not different. You can run an entire business solely through emails, if you’re doing this and your emails become inaccessible or unavailable over an extended period of time you could be in a spot of trouble. Here are some steps you can take to ensure your emails are consistent and reliable.
The first may seem like the most obvious, but it is one of the most important and that is your password. It needs to be complex enough so that someone won’t easily guess it and you really need to make sure it isn’t on this list. A mixture of numbers, letters (capital and lowercase) and symbols is recommended to provide the most secure password. If you know you have trouble remembering passwords, then you need to be sure it’s written down securely somewhere. You also need to be absolutely certain that all of your devices with active email accounts have the most current password so as to avoid any issues with our server firewalls.
Another thing you need to be aware of is your mailbox’s storage capacity. As soon as your mailbox is full it will start bouncing incoming emails and blocking any outgoing emails as well. Meaning you won’t receive or be able to send. Anything you do receive while your mailbox is full cannot be recovered either and will need to be resent. You can manage your mailbox storage from the following address -yourdomain/webmail-. From there you can login using your email address and password, in the top right you should see something like x/100mb. Click on that to manage your storage.
The last thing is in regard to deliverability, so you shouldn’t have any trouble sending emails to anyone and will also help you keep out spam at the same time. Mail authentication, AKA DKIM, DMARC and SPF records inserted into your domains DNS. SPF looks at any of your incoming mail and verifies it is coming from a legitimate source. If it cannot verify the source, it will reject the mail before it ever enters your mailbox. DKIM is for outgoing, when you send an email a DKIM signature is attached to it, this tells any receiving mail server that your email is legitimate and is safe to allow through to be delivered. DMARC basically just ensures that SPF and DKIM records are being properly authenticated and that any fraudulent emails are blocked. Once all three are installed your emails will almost always successfully deliver and incoming spam will be filtered out effectively. You can check if your domain has SPF, DKIM and DMARC here
If you stick to these three rules you will 100% notice the difference than if you were acting otherwise. If you have any questions about your emails please don’t be afraid to call ((07) 4914 2433) or email us (support@hosting-australia.com).
If you had any trouble understanding any of the terms in this article please check out our glossary.
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Hi everyone, this week I’d like to clarify what the bandwidth allowance on hosting packages is. Most of Hosting Australia’s hosting package has infinite bandwidth allowances, with a few exceptions. This means that you pretty much don’t have to worry about exceeding this limit at all. Before we get into that we’ll quickly go over counts as bandwidth usage. We do enforce a high end limit, to prevent malicious use of Bandwidth, but this should not effect legitimate use of bandwidth on your site.
The first and most well-known way of using up your bandwidth is http traffic. Simply put this is people visiting and using your website, the more visitors you have the more bandwidth you will use up. One of the more common reasons we see our clients use up their bandwidth occurs when a special event or sale is held on their website and they receive more visitors to their site than usual. Obviously, it could be disastrous for a site to go down right in the middle of a big sale, so what we recommend to anyone before holding an event like this would be to contact us and discuss further.
One way of using up bandwidth that is less widely known Is through outgoing mail, Pop3 and IMAP traffic can quickly exceed your bandwidth limits if you’re not careful sending out lots of emails. Compromised email accounts can also be your worst enemy here as even one account sending out spam can max your bandwidth before you can blink. The easiest way to avoid this is to update your password regularly and to follow the general rules to creating secure passwords.
The last one is FTP, AKA File Transfer Protocol. FTP is a service for transferring data and files across the internet, you may upload and download whatever you want using certain applications and software. However once again if you’re not careful of the size or the amount of content you’re uploading you could be maxing your bandwidth again. If you know you’re going to doing a large FTP transfer that could put you in the red for your bandwidth give us a heads up and we can increase your limit temporarily.
Bandwidth is easy to manage if you know what not to do, it’s rare to max it out but if you do happen to reach the ceiling limit at a bad time then you could find yourself without website and emails in times of need.
If you had any trouble with any of the terms in this article you can visit Hosting-Australia’sglossary of terms.
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