As of Monday, the owners of about 48,000 .eu web domain names had to give back their registered domains. 
Global web hosting provider Namecheap has revealed the most popular TLDs and domain registration trends for 2021 in an exclusive industry report. 
Premium domain names can have a huge impact and advantage online. This, coupled with associated phone numbers is a key differentiator for your business.
Infographic Courtesy of: sbaloan.com
The post The Power of a Premium Domain Name appeared first on SiteProNews.
Students are encouraged to participate in web hosting provider Namecheap’s annual ‘Namecheap for Education’ project, which gives all students with a .edu email address with a free .me domain name and GitHub hosting. 
Name.com, web hosting provider and ICANN accredited domain name registrar from Denver, Colorado, has started reselling DigitalOcean Droplets directly to its clients, expanding its product line to include “best-in-class†cloud computing. As of June 2021, we will be switching the default version on our servers to PHP 7.4. This means that all new sites will be using 7.4, unless manually switched to a different one. PHP 7.4 has been around for more than 2 years now and has already become widely compatible with different CMS’s, themes and plugins, where PHP 7.3 (our current default) is already out of active support and will get out of security support too by the end of this year. Keeping your PHP version up to date has undeniable performance and security advantages and that is why we are now helping you switch to PHP 7.4.
All websites using our Managed PHP service will also be upgraded to 7.4 in the period June 10-21, 2021. PHP 7.3 will still be available on our servers and can be set up manually for any site by our clients from Site Tools > Dev > PHP Manager.
At the same time, the security support for all PHP versions below 7.3 has been officially over for quite some time, and given the exploits that leak out once in a while, we believe the risk of using them is growing higher. Additionally, the performance of websites using old PHP versions is considerably lower compared to sites using newer versions. That is why we are starting a process of discontinuation of PHP 7.2, 7.1, 7.0, 5.6 and lower on our servers. After June 21, 2021 we will be gradually updating the sites using old PHP versions to PHP 7.4. PHP versions below 7.3 will no longer be supported on our servers after December 31, 2021.
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This PHP update will affect many websites on our platform. That is why we have started communicating the update one month ago and we strongly encourage you to evaluate the impact of upgrading to 7.4 on your site as soon as possible by using this tool:
your-domain.com/.well-known/sg-php-try-v74
To see if a site will work properly after the upgrade, please type the above URL using your own site domain in the browser and browse through the site, its subdomains (if any) and its admin area. If anything does not look or behave as expected, we highly recommend that you further investigate your site compatibility with PHP 7.4 and fix any issues before the update. If you have broken plugins or a theme, consider updating or replacing them. If that’s too hard, or the problem is elsewhere, contact your developers for assistance.
Note: By opening your website through the link above you will browse it using PHP 7.4. This change affects ONLY your current browser session. All other visitors will continue to access your site with its current PHP version. To stop the compatibility check browsing mode in your own browser, please close the browser and access your site again via its standard URL.
Magento special case: Sites using Magento 2.3.6 or lower are not compatible with PHP 7.4 That is why, if you have such a website, we strongly recommend you update it to 2.3.7 as soon as possible, so that it is compatible with PHP 7.4 and ready for the PHP upgrade.
We are aware that sites currently using PHP version 7.2 or lower may need longer time to fix possible incompatibilities with PHP 7.4. That is why, the owners of such sites were provided with a link for possible opt-out in the email about the update, sent over the past few days. By opting out through this link, clients confirm that they do not want us to update their site PHP version for them, but are aware that this version will nonetheless stop functioning after December 31, 2021.
For clients using PHP 7.3, we strongly recommend that they do not postpone their PHP update, but in case this is really needed they may simply switch to manual PHP version management, until their site is ready for PHP 7.4.
Looking forward to seeing more secure and much faster sites after the update!
Enterprise Cloud Solutions Architect
My challenging job is closely related to all kinds of Free and Open-Source Software products (some of my favorites are WordPress, Joomla!, Magento, Varnish and Apache mod_security). As a Web security and performance freak I am always hyper focused on solving all kinds of issues and improving our services.
Even though website speed itself has not been an official ranking factor in Google’s SEO algorithm until now, experts have largely proclaimed its importance for good SEO. With the upcoming Core Web Vitals update planned by Google for May 2021, which adds 3 new metrics to the Page Experience signal, website speed officially becomes a ranking factor. So now many webmasters wonder what the immediate impact of that change will be on the SEO searches. Looking for an answer to this question, we turned to top SEO experts and organized a #SiteSpeedForSEO Twitter chat where Aleyda Solis (@aleyda), AJ Ghergich (@SEO), Craig Campbell (@craigcampbell03), and Hristo Pandjarov (@pandjarov) shared their insights with us. Here’s what we learnt from them.
According to Aleyda Solis (@aleyda), an expert in international SEO, speaker and author, “Speed is already a ranking factor along many others, as the page experience one will be and we shouldn’t expect an “extreme” shift in our rankings due to it.“ Arnout Hellemans seems to agree with it and even says “Hardly any imho, it’s a PR play and it’s already in the algorithm. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore this.”
Overall all the experts who took part in the chat agree that we shouldn’t expect a dramatic immediate shift in our SEO rankings as a result of the Core Web Vitals update for a number of reasons. These new metrics are just 3 out of 200 other ranking factors and they will not get special priority so their relative weight will be low. Furthermore, Google will roll this update slowly starting in May till August 2021 to gather data, so any changes would not have an immediate impact.
Hristo Pandjarov, SEO Strategist and WordPress Initiatives Manager at SiteGround expects that this update will have “a bigger impact on small-volume keywords, local searches and niche ones where there aren’t big, authoritative sites that have already optimized their content.” If your site is already fast, you have fewer reasons to worry.
It’s good to know that major shifts are not foreseen as a result of the new Google update, but still if your site is not really well optimized, or if you are not sure where it stands, you are still bearing a risk and Google is sending you a message to get to work. A good start for this is to figure out how your website currently scores on the 3 new metrics – Largest Contentful paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) and what to aim for.
According to Nikola Baldikov, SEO Manager at SiteGround the ideal page loading time is around 1 to 2 secs, while Hristo Pandjarov’s advice is to look at the #TTFB of 200ms for traffic in the same continent and Aleyda Solis adds that her preferred thresholds are LCP of less than 2.5 seconds and FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
If your site is already fast though, it doesn’t make a huge difference if it loads for 1 second or 1.3 seconds in terms of SEO, according to Craig Campbell. Obsessing about it is of no use, but you should definitely care to optimize website speed if you are not close to the recommended values yet.
There are a lot of website speed test tools, which you can use to check your page loading times. Some of the most common ones are Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights, Search Console > Core Web Vitals report, and more. Big thanks to Aleyda Solis who shared with us her all-inclusive list of tools to test website speed.
Take a look at the list she has prepared and figure out which particular areas of improvement to focus on. When looking at the reports, make sure you follow Aleyda’s advice “to identify what’s hurting your own speed the most vs. cost of change” so that you focus resources on getting big wins in a short time.
Here’s a concise list of simple ways to optimize performance, nicely summarized by AJ Ghergich. We have elaborated on his overview so that our clients could easily put the suggestions into action:
The most common problem for website performance and LCP in particular are the large images that need to be loaded simultaneously and slow down the page. That is why you should consider the following optimizations:
Add lazy loading of images – that way not all images will be loaded at the same time upon opening the page. AJ Ghergich strongly recommends to implement it only for resources BELOW the fold. SiteGround clients with WordPress sites could enable that from the SG Optimizer plugin.
Use caching for static assets – at SiteGround we use NGINX direct delivery which is enabled by default on our servers, so if you are a client you get this caching effect out of the box.
Serve an alternative image format – WebP. This is a very useful way to reduce the size of the images on your site. For WordPress users hosted on SiteGround, you could enable this as an automatic service via the SG Optimizer plugin.
2. Minify your CSS and JavaScript
One of the easiest ways for big performance wins in this case is to use compression like Brotli or Gzip. Another possibility is to use plugins for WordPress sites. If you are a SiteGround customer, Brotli is enabled by default on our servers and you don’t need to do anything to use it, and the SG Optimizer plugin for WordPress will help you with the minification of CSS and JS.
3. Limit 3rd party scripts
The more scripts that need to be loaded on the page, the slower it will open. Third party scripts are for example tracking software, advertising scripts, heatmaps, and other. Once they serve their purpose, make sure you removed them so they don’t pile up slowing the website.
4. Get a faster web host
Having a fast server helps a lot for boosting the LCP metric. So if you have done all of the above and your site is still loading slow, see what’s happening with your hosting and how your provider can help optimize the environment for more performance.
At SiteGround we constantly upgrade our platform to make it faster and more efficient and we believe that’s a never ending process. For example, at the end of last year we launched our new Ultrafast PHP and we see performance gains up to 30% across sites hosted on our platform. More recently, this year, we revamped our MySQL setup to boost its processing capacity and thus improve the database performance, which though not directly mentioned in this article impacts the performance of dynamic sites like WordPress.
5. CDN
Since website speed tests are greatly affected by the speed of the Internet connection, where sites with international traffic are most hurt, experts suggest that you use CDN.
In case you wonder which of all those optimization suggestions should be the first on your list, take a listen at the users’ opinion. According to a different Twitter campaign where we asked users to pick their favorite website speed optimization tip, we clearly see that Media (images) & front-end optimizations together rate as the most effective ways to improve performance with full-page caching and CDN coming up second and third.
If you score poorly on this one, it is most likely that your JavaScript is the culprit. Minify and defer JavaScript to fix the issue. For SiteGround clients with WordPress sites, that could be done in a click of the mouse from the SG Optimizer plugin.
The CLS is largely a web design issue. According to AJ Ghergich, the most common reasons for it are:
In this article we focused entirely on optimizing website speed for the 3 new metrics that will become ranking factors in Google’s algorithm. But your optimization efforts should not stop with LCP, FID, and CLS. There are other things you can do that will improve your performance overall and have a positive impact not only on your SEO, but on your user experience and business results. So once you have mastered the tips mentioned in this article, take a look at this list we have gathered with the 9 most effective ways to boost performance: https://www.siteground.com/speed-tips. We’d love it if you comment under this post to tell us about the optimizations you try and how they impact your page loading times.
WordPress Initiatives Manager
Enthusiastic about all Open Source applications you can think of, but mostly about WordPress. Add a pinch of love for web design, new technologies, search engine optimisation and you are pretty much there!
As of this month we started backing up accounts in a datacenter different from the one hosting the live account as follows:
This service is not available for accounts hosted in Singapore for now. These accounts are backed up on different servers within the Singapore facility.
Data storage and safety is a key component of our service and there are multiple risk factors and threats that we keep in mind when coming up with data security solutions. The most common ones are human errors, hardware failure, and hacks. For those occasions, we rely on our daily backups stored on different servers independently from the live account. But then, there are the less likely, yet more damaging risks such as fire, power outage, or a natural disaster that may shut down a whole data center facility. Hosting the backups in a different location means we improve the chances for saving your data and putting it back online even in case of such a serious incident.
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Now imagine your website goes offline due to a massive power outage and the ETA is unknown, which most often means hours of downtime. Or, a hurricane completely destroyed the facility and all servers are lost beyond recovery. That was a very real threat we experienced with Katrina hurricane back in 2005 and is a growing risk in some areas given the climate change and the growing number of natural disasters all over the world. Or, maybe a fire burns the datacenter and a lot, if not all, servers are hurt. That one happened quite recently to a third-party data center in France.
Thanks to our new system, we now have you covered since we have your data safely backed up not more than 24 hours ago in a different data center. In case of an incident we would be able to put your website back online in the new location that is fully operational.
Thus the distributed backups not only save your data, but allow us to restore service in the new DC much faster than any optimistic ETA would forecast for restoring in the original DC.
The distributed backup strategy has been something we have considered for a long time. However, it became practically possible once we started to use the Google Cloud infrastructure. The use of one and the same provider for all our geographical locations, with a super fast interrelatedness between its different data centers and a wide network of facilities around the world, allowed us to distribute data across regions, countries and continents in a way that was not possible before.
We have to recognize the fact that before switching to Google Cloud infrastructure that strategy for distributed backups was not possible in such a sophisticated way. Google Cloud has given us easy access to all their worldwide facilities, including networking capacity and that generated various new possibilities to distribute data across regions, countries and continents.
Our Privacy Policy and DPA continue to apply in light of our new geographically distributed backups. Our clients’ data will be protected in the same way as before, as promised, and under our DPA.
While we are hopeful that no natural forces will affect any data centers, our team prefers to be prepared for the worst and provide our clients with reassurance for their websites.
Enthusiastic about all Open Source applications you can think of, but mostly about WordPress. Add a pinch of love for web design, new technologies, search engine optimisation and you are pretty much there!
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