Between November 1 and December 31 of 2017, e-commerce businesses racked up a total of $108.15 billion in sales, according to Adobe. 2018’s holiday season sales are estimated to reach $124.1 billion, which is an impressive leap and one that’s sure to delight e-commerce companies everywhere. Smart targeting of the 4 different kinds of holiday shoppers can help you take a larger piece of that pie than you might otherwise get. That said, the holiday sales season won’t last forever. When Shopify surveyed high-growth online merchants about seasonal sales spikes and how they saw that affecting sales in other quarters, Q1’s expectations were pretty abysmal. But does it have to be this way? Should you just kick back and let the post-holiday spending slump wash over you? Nope. Here’s our guide which you can start putting to use right now to set yourself up for a better kickoff to the new year, including 11 actionable ways to boost customer sales after the holiday season. Click each title to head straight to the full strategy plan below: Check and Update Your Tech Optimize Checkout Take Down the Decorations & De-Holiday Your Site Put Holiday Data to Use Enable Follow-Up Strategies Prepare for Returns Staff Your Customer Service Offer Post-Holiday Discounts Launch a New Product Promote (or Start) Your Loyalty Program Segment Your Marketing https://pagely.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/lumen5-video-5.mp4 I would argue that you can, in fact, still make a good amount of money from your e-commerce business even after the holidays. It’s simply a matter of preparing your website to appeal to customers’ altered state of mind. So, let’s talk about how to boost customers’ post-holiday spending with your WordPress site. Boost Customers’ Post-Holiday Spending with WordPress There’s no reason to throw in the towel after the holidays, though I understand why you may be inclined to do so. Holiday revelers are exhausted from all the festivities and gift-giving, and their wallets feel lighter than usual as a result. Plus, you did a lot of work to prepare your website, business, and inventory for the holiday season. Isn’t Q1 the perfect time for a break? Rather than embrace the assumed lull in website activity and sales after the holidays, there are certain things you can do to boost post-holiday spending with your WordPress site. 1. Check the Tech Before you do anything else, review the technology powering your website and sales flow. You’ve put a lot of pressure on it during the holiday season, so it’s good to take a moment and make sure those surges in traffic didn’t weaken the system. Plus, if you were busy managing things like customer service and order fulfillment at the time, you might’ve lost track of what was happening to your website over the holidays. Performance Run a speed test on your WordPress site. The free Pingdom speed test will let you know if any performance optimizations are needed. Ideally, your website should load in under 3 seconds. Review Pingdom’s suggestions and apply them to your website as soon as possible. Security The holidays are the perfect time for hackers and bots to sneak into a website when you’re busy looking in a million other directions. Sucuri SiteCheck is a free tool you can use to quickly check for security warnings or vulnerabilities. Before you start encouraging people to return to your website, check your security first. Updates If you’re not automating WordPress, plugin, and theme updates, make sure you have time scheduled every day (or, at the very least, every week) to log in to your website or WordPress management tool and verify that all updates have been made. With the recent release of WordPress 5.0 this is a good time to review for an update. These are essential not just for maintaining security, but also for keeping performance-optimized. Switch Hosting (optional) If you find that you let any of these essential parts of WordPress management fall by the wayside during the holidays, you might want to ring in the new year with some new tech. Specifically, by switching your website to a new managed WordPress hosting company. 2. Optimize Checkout According to a ShipBob infographic about shopping cart abandonment, there is a lot of money lost when checkout is not optimized: If customers left a lot of items in shopping carts over the holidays, it might be a sign that there’s something that could be improved with your checkout process or payment processing tool. Take some time to review the checkout flow and make sure there are no issues preventing users from converting. There’s a lot to gain if you do: 3. Take Down the Decorations You know those people in the neighborhood who wait until March to take down their outdoor decorations? Or those people who leave the Christmas tree up most of the year? The last thing you want is for post-holiday shoppers to look at your website with as much disdain as some people tend to do when they see unseasonal decorations hanging around. This means your website should be de-holidayed by January 1. Here are some ways to do this: Revise wording that’s festive in nature, even if it’s not as explicit as “Happy Holidays!” Undo any style changes you made to the design or color palette. Remove any promotions that ran over the holidays. Even if you intend on running the same or a similar sale in the new year, give it a new look and messaging. Adjust the home page to reflect the current season for your shoppers. Perhaps a shift to “New Year, New You” makes sense, or go with something more agnostically winter-themed. Restructure the navigation so that categories like “Gifts” and other popular products sold around the holidays don’t receive top billing anymore. Update your search metadata if you used it to target holiday shoppers looking for specific products. Even if you didn’t explicitly spiff up your e-commerce site for the holiday season, the start of the year is always a great time to give it a facelift. 4. Put Holiday Data to Use Whether you use Google Analytics or an alternative data-tracking tool to measure traffic and sales activity on your website, now is a great time to put it to use. A great way to boost customers’ post-holiday spending with your WordPress site is to deliver personalized content. The only thing is, personalization might be limited if the only real information you have is the referral source. However, because Q4 is ripe with on-site activity and sales, you now have a treasure trove of data to tap into. Look at the products that were viewed but not acted upon. Peer into their unfulfilled wishlist. Identify attractive upsell or cross-sell offers for things they did actually buy over the holidays. Dig deep into that data and put your analytics tool, CRM, and lead generation machine to work for you in Q1. Your customers might not have returned to your website with the intention of buying more; maybe they just wanted information on returns. But by presenting them with a custom-made recommendation or offer, you can increase the likelihood that they’ll stop and buy something while they’re there. 5. Enable Follow-up Strategies In order for this next one to work, you will need to enable these technologies before you get too far into the holiday shopping season. When implemented, you’ll have a way to automate follow-up with customers who already made a purchase or just window-shopped over the holidays. Cart Abandonment As I mentioned already, shopping cart abandonment can be a major problem for e-retailers. Obviously, you need to get your technology in line first to make sure you’ve provided the optimal experience at checkout. Then, install cart abandonment and recovery software to automate the follow-up with customers via email: “Oh, hey! Looks like you forgot to buy this.” Consider using Conversio. This email marketing tool helps you recover customers at different stages of the conversion flow. Retargeting Retargeting is another way to stay on top of visitors after the holidays are over. If they spent enough time looking at a product or another page on your website, your tracking pixel follows them onto other websites. Reminders will be subtle ad placements, familiar enough to get them to stop in their tracks and wonder: “Is that the item I was looking at last month?” By using what you know from their time on-site, you can effectively drag them back to complete the sale. One of the best tools to do this is Google AdRoll, which will place your reminders and ads all over the web: 6. Prepare for Returns After the 2017 holiday season, shoppers were expected to return $90 billion in gifts. That is a quarter of all returns that retailers have to process all year long. The United States Postal Service said the first two weeks of January 2018 brought a huge increase in returns, thanks to online holiday shopping. They handled 6 million returns in those two weeks alone. Jonathan Byrnes, a senior lecturer at MIT’s Center for Transportation & Logistics said: “Returns are one of the most under-managed and most expensive areas in business. Retailers don’t know what to do, so they’re basically putting their heads in the sand and hoping it’ll go away.” But that’s the worst thing you can do at a time like this. The customer experience doesn’t end with the sale. Realistically, it should never end if you’re focused on retaining their business over the long term. Which means you need to build a process for, first, handling returns and, second, reducing the losses during the post-holiday returns bonanza. Here are some suggestions on how to do this: If you have a brick-and-mortar store counterpart, allow for in-store returns. This will take the load off of your online team as well as reduce the cost of shipping you personally have to handle (if you offer free shipping). Hire and quickly train a team of dedicated freelancers to work solely on processing returns in the month of January. Streamline the returns process online. Encourage customers to create an account at checkout so that they can log in and download shipping labels and start the returns process on their own. Provide a space on your shipping insert to allow for exchanges. This way, customers aren’t forced to return and re-purchase something if a different variation of the item can easily be exchanged. Make sure you use a payment processor that quickly handles refunds. I would also suggest updating your website with personalized recommendations around these returns-related areas, like the support, contact, and account pages. That way, if customers came to the website with the intention of exchanging or returning an item, you’ve conveniently provided them with helpful suggestions for replacing the unwanted item. 7. Staff Your Customer Service Support for customers post-holidays won’t just revolve around handling returns. You need to be ready to answer questions about the things they bought or received from others during the holidays, too. To start, have FAQs set up on your site as the first line of offense. It’ll answer all the common questions asked about your products, services, or policies. Also, set yourself up on all the customer service channels your customers typically go to. Consider: A support portal Customer service phone line Live chat Email Social media Facebook Messenger, Slack, or other messaging channels Finally, don’t be afraid to develop a set of canned responses to equip your team with. Just as you want your website to provide customers with consistent and helpful messaging throughout, you want your team members to be able to do the same. 8. Offer Post-Holiday Discounts As you do all this work to make your WordPress site an appealing destination for post-holiday spending, sweeten the deal with discounts they can’t get other times of year. Many e-commerce companies go the route of hosting an annual sale the first week of January every year. Long-time customers know when it’s coming, so it’s an easy way to bring them back to do more business. It’s also a great way to motivate new customers to stop by. However, I’d suggest you take a look at last year’s analytics and sales reports to see what your traffic and sales looked like on a daily basis throughout January. Were there any days of the week that saw more visitors than usual? Or certain parts of the month? If you know when they’re more likely to open their wallets again, you can run your post-holiday sales during those time periods. When choosing what to discount or promote, be sure to take a look at your inventory. There are creative ways to boost post-holiday spending if you choose the right items to promote. For instance: The Candy Bin Run a sale that’s up to 90% off (or whatever percentage you’re most comfortable with). Then, look at the extra inventory that was difficult to sell over the holidays and give those items the deepest cuts. It’ll be like a drug store candy bin after Halloween or Valentine’s Day. Free Gift with Purchase Another way to get rid of inventory that didn’t sell well during the holidays is to give it away as a “free” gift. It should be something that doesn’t cost too much, but that customers would still find appealing enough to make a purchase in order to get their hands on it. Product Bundling This one is especially great for companies that sell services and software. Look for creative ways to bundle popular items with items your customers might not be aware of. New Year, New You Tap into people’s inherent desire to start a new year afresh. Even if they didn’t immediately rush out on January 1 to snag that product or service to make them healthier/happier/more organized/etc., they’ll likely eventually get into that mindset as they watch everyone around them jump on the bandwagon. You can take advantage of this by running your own “transformation” promotion during Q1. 9. Launch a New Product While the competition is kicking back and accepting their new year’s slump, you can charge forward with the release of a new product. We’re taking our own advice here with NorthStack officially going live in January! Start promoting it during the holidays and drum up people’s interest early so that, when it does launch in Q1, you have people eager to buy it. This would also be a good opportunity to put a waitlist on your website and let customers sign up early. With their permission, you can send them updates on the release as well as occasional reminders about other things you sell that might be of interest. 10. Promote Your Loyalty Program If you’re trying to boost post-holiday spending – or, really, spending any time of the year – a loyalty program is a fantastic way to do it. While you can certainly build trust and loyalty in customers without one, a loyalty program helps you build deeper connections with consumers which, in turn, increases their confidence in spending money with you. According to this press release and report from Bond Brand Loyalty: Consumers spend 37% more with brands when they are a loyalty program member. So here is my suggestion to you: Contact loyalty program members shortly after the holidays with something like: “You’ve earned 25,000 points since July. Nice work! How about you put those points to work and buy yourself something nice now that holiday spending is behind you?” And for those shoppers whose email addresses you have, but who haven’t yet signed up for your loyalty program, contact them with something like this: “Did you miss out on our insider deals during the holidays? Make sure that doesn’t happen next year. Loyalty members saved 35%, on average, over the holidays!” You get the point. You want to reinforce the idea that membership has its privileges – and that those benefits are ripe for using at this time of year, too. 11. Segment Your Marketing If you want to reach new customers and stay in touch with current ones, you have to constantly strategize ways to get in front of them even when they’re not on your site. Above, I mentioned a number of ways in which you can use your site to market to your customer base and boost post-holiday spending. But you can use your other channels for this as well. Just make sure you segment them accordingly. Email Marketing Email marketing, for instance, is best used for: Current customers: Provide personalized suggestions based on activity on the site and previous purchase history, pointing them towards similar or related items they can buy now. Loyalty members: Offer insider deals and special loyalty rewards to encourage them to shop during certain time periods in Q1. Warm leads: Continue with your value-driven messaging, educating prospective customers on all the reasons why they should buy from you and providing incentives for them to do so. You should also have your email marketing platform and site configured to send follow-up emails to anyone who made a purchase over the holidays. The first message, of course, would be a Thank You and Confirmation email. The subsequent one could provide more details on the item purchased, remind them of support options, and so on. And later ones can just be brief messages that alert them to upcoming sales or new seasonal items they might be interested in. The point is, keep in touch. Social Media Marketing Your retargeting efforts on social media are ideal for connecting with people who already visited and made a purchase on your website. However, in the post-holiday period, social media itself is a great way to reach a new set of customers. Just remember that social media has to be about THEM and not YOU. Craft some visual content you can share on social organically. You’ll want to create paid ad counterparts that you can then promote in places like Facebook, Instagram, and Google. And make sure that whatever you advertise there aligns with the reality on the site. First impressions are a big deal, so you want to make sure you 100% deliver on the promise that lured them to your site in the first place. Wrapping Up The holiday sales season is an incredibly profitable one for online retailers. But I don’t believe it has to stop there. By realigning your site and your business to the customers’ shifted mindset, you can effectively boost their post-holiday spending and keep your profits on the up-and-up well into Q1.
As of December 6, 2018 WordPress 5.0 Bebo has been released, making Gutenberg now the defacto editor on WordPress applications. Pagely strives to keep all applications up to date, ensuring that the latest version is available to and being utilized by our customers. Given the magnitude of this update we wanted to address some steps you can take to ensure compatibility as well as announce that we will be holding off until after the holiday season to implement the update for all of our customers, unless specifically requested. We’ll notify our customers when we are ready for a hard release of Bebo early next year, and you can read our full plans for the release between now and then. There’s lots of documentation online about the new release, so we’re boiling it down to everything you actually need to know about Gutenberg and how to make sure your application is compatible. What is Gutenberg? Gutenberg modernizes the editor experience in WordPress, replacing the classic editor utilized for creating Posts and Pages. TinyMCE will be utilized within blocks, which are movable objects within the new editor. The content is still saved in the same place (wp_post) and utilizes the same function, but the editor itself is now an SPA (single page application), meaning it runs on a single page load. To do this, Gutenberg runs COMPLETELY on JavaScript and Ajax requests utilizing the React framework. Why is the Gutenberg release a big deal? The reason this is such a big deal is because of the way content creators and developers have used WordPress in the past. All customizations in the WordPress dashboard, such as unique post types that have to do specifically with an event, or a person’s profile, whatever you can imagine, were displayed to function with the traditional editor – so if the WordPress API didn’t interact properly with these custom post types and respective meta boxes – you were in a bit of trouble. Compounding to this anxiety was the meta boxes – If we have this new interface to interact with, what happens to meta boxes? Meta boxes are basically user interface pieces. Wrappers for individual sections of the interface on the post editing screens. There are several by default, such as the Formats, Tags, and Category boxes. A plugin can add meta boxes to be used for whatever purpose they need them, and meta boxes can both have information and receive input. Over time (like most things) this has begun to seem like not as big of a deal, as there are methods to either make custom post types compatible with Gutenberg, or to default to the classic editor. Meta boxes appear to work, but are inconveniently put at the bottom of pages now. Still, meta boxes should be tested – Please read WordPress.org’s Gutenberg handbook on meta-box extensibility. Main areas of concern: Custom post types and PHP meta boxes seem to be the biggest concern. Unless you’re a developer who has been proactive, proceed as if everything can and will break. How to test your Application’s compatibility with Gutenberg: First, we recommend using a staging or development environment that’s a direct clone of your production environment. We suggest doing some heavy unit testing, for this you can use the block unit test plugin. If you find issues that you don’t believe you can resolve right now, you can try installing the Classic Editor Plugin which will return you back to the old version of the editor. Your developer can check here for additional information on checking Gutenberg compatibility. Helpful Resources: We’ll keep on the lookout for how the community is handling Gutenberg and helpful links, and update that information here. Just in case you want to revert, use the Classic Editor Plugin Here’s the technical overview of Gutenberg Matt Mullenweg’s Gutenberg FAQ, notes and community commentary Check back here for the development updates to Gutenberg Yoast is integrated with Gutenberg WooCommerce has a multi-layered response and has released a crash course video on how to survive Gutenberg After two years in dev, the official AMP plugin is out and Gutenberg ready Zac Gordon’s Gutenberg Development Course to get up to speed Please let us know in the comments if you have any resource suggestions for us to add to this list. Our hope is to provide an easy resource for you and all of our WordPress using friends. …and a big congrats to all of the people who worked really hard (and continue to do so every day) to keep improving WordPress!
Online sales during the 2018 holiday season are expected to top $123.4 billion in the United States alone. There’s never a better time to generate more sales as an ecommerce business than during the holidays. But many online stores don’t develop a plan to target the right buyers, causing them to miss out on potential customers. Not all customers are alike, though. If you market to everyone the same way, you’re not going to get the best results, because different buyer personas respond to different messages. I’m going to show you how to target the four different types of holiday shoppers to increase your ecommerce conversion rate. https://pagely.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/lumen5-video-4.mp4 Holiday Shopper #1: The Evergreen Shopper The most basic holiday shopper is the evergreen shopper. These are individuals who shop all year-round and are what you’d consider the average consumer. They’re not obsessed with finding the latest deals and you won’t find them doing their shopping last minute. Instead, they’re more balanced. Your marketing will need to reflect that, bringing me to my first point. Get Your SEO in Check A total of 74% of evergreen shoppers use search engines for shopping. So if your SEO isn’t in good shape, you’re not going to get any organic traffic. This means losing sales to competitors that are putting this into practice. The main component of SEO is the on-page side. Optimizing your pages and products can be done and left to reap the rewards for months to come. It’s a good idea to audit it on a regular basis, perhaps every quarter, but it’s initially set-and-forget. The result? More organic traffic driving evergreen shoppers to your website. One of the first steps for optimizing your store is using Google’s Pagespeed Insights tool. This will uncover issues that you probably don’t even know you have. Because pagespeed is a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm, it will help you boost your rankings and creates a good base to work from. Type in your URL and click “Analyze.” This will scan the website to find common issues that will not only improve the overall user experience, but also how Google ranks your site. Common issues include: Uncompressed and unoptimized images or files Too much Javascript or CSS No caching to speed up browsers No HTTPS Some of these are simple fixes, such as installing an SSL certificate or a caching plugin. Others will require deeper technical skills, but you should be able to solve most issues and get a nice performance boost – improving your SEO at the same time. But we’re not done yet. Next, you need to perform keyword research. These keywords will be placed in precise areas to get put in front of evergreen shoppers in the search engines. To begin, sign up for a Google Ads account and navigate to the keyword planner tool. You’ll want to search for the following types of keywords: Top-level: A description of your store. This might be “mens tennis clothing store” or “womens gold jewelry store” for example. Product names: The title of products you sell, such as “mens brown suede dress shoes” or “12′ HP laptop.” Product categories: Phrases that describe the overarching categories, like “mens dress shoes: or “glass tables.: Pay attention to the monthly search volume. It’s good to have a mix of low, medium, and high volumes to get a variety. A top-level keyword should be placed in the title tag of your website and on your about page. This helps Google understand what your store is about, ranking for that keyword; when evergreen shoppers are looking for that exact kind of store, you’ll be one of the first they see. You can see the title tag of any website by hovering over its tab in a browser. You’ll also want to rank for individual products and categories, though. Just like on your homepage, include keywords for these elements in the title tags as well. You also want to place keywords in the URL and meta descriptions. Note that when you enter a phrase into Google, it will bold in the description. This is proven to increase click-through rates, and is a quick win every ecommerce store owner can take. Holiday Shopper #2: The Early Bird Some people like to get their holiday shopping out of the way early in the season. That’s why we call them the early bird. They’re all about getting a lot of shopping done at once, and getting it done ASAP. Keep this in mind because it will play heavily in how you can increase your conversion rate while targeting them. Speed Up Your Sales Funnel Imagine the sales funnel of your store like a roller coaster. How fast can users sit down, buckle in, and enjoy the ride? Some will be waiting for hours, and we all know how dreadful waiting in line feels. You want the sales funnel to shoot users through fast, like a cannon, instead. The three main parts of every funnel include: The product page The cart page The checkout page All of these can be tweaked in small ways to increase conversion rates, funneling users through quicker and more easily. One of the primary ways to create a great user experience is to make the user not think. The process should be so simple that they can just do it without questioning anything or getting stumped. Optimizing the Product Page If your product pages aren’t exciting, nobody is going to add the items to their cart. The first thing you should do is ensure that you have great images. High-resolution photos from several angles will give the customer a better idea of exactly how an item will appear in person. Having a zoom function is also useful. Always include dimensions, as photos are sometimes deceiving. Next, clean up your copy. So many ecommerce store owners make the mistake of writing bland product descriptions. They need to be exciting, fun, and speak to the customer’s needs. With that being said, always focus on benefits over features. Remember that features are factual pieces of information: think size, color, or material. Benefits highlight the emotional connections and deeper reasons why a customer wants to purchase a product. For example, you want them to feel that they’re not just buying a t-shirt, they’re buying increased confidence, better style, and higher self-esteem. You can mix that into your copy by saying “A modern style that will improve any outfit and boost your confidence.” That’s much better than just stating boring facts. Lastly, make adding to a cart easy as 1, 2, 3. The cart button should be in plain sight and a color that’s proven to work for your industry. For example, black tends to work for fashion brands while red is the most popular in general. Optimizing the Cart Page After the early bird has added products to their cart, they head over to the cart page. You’ll want to add some tweaks to ensure that they don’t bounce before making it to the final stage – the checkout. The first way to do that is with a clear and detailed product summary. Customers should know exactly what they are buying, how much it will cost, and what quantity they chose. It’s also wise to allow them to change quantities and sizes, like ASOS offers below. This saves them from having to manually remove items or add more from the previous page. Also, note that the subtotal and shipping information is displayed and selectable before checkout is reached. This makes the purchasing process simpler, helping to increase the number of users converting to paying customers. Next, ensure that the call to action is bright and stands out. Continuing with the ASOS example, the green button jumps from the screen and grabs your attention. It should proceed in a logical sequence and, in this case, is placed after the subtotal and delivery options. Optimizing the Checkout Page The average cart abandonment rate is 69%. That’s nearly three out of every four potential customers leaving before they’ve finished purchasing. Most abandonment happens at the final stage – the checkout page – so it’s crucial you make it watertight. To optimize your checkout page, begin by making the form short and sweet. Remove any unnecessary fields that add time to the overall process. Asking for too much information may also deter some early birds that value their privacy. The order summary should also be clear and concise, with shipping and taxes neatly displayed. Just like on the cart page, adding the option to remove line items can be very useful. Display which payment methods you offer so customers know their options ahead of time, too. Holiday Shopper #3: The Deal Seeker We all know one – that person who’s always on the lookout for coupons and the latest deals. I mean, who doesn’t want to save money? It makes sense. Discount codes are used by 93% of customers throughout the year. It’s such a common practice in ecommerce that many users expect it. Here’s how you can better target these deal-seeking consumers during the holidays. Clearly Advertise Discounts and Sales Targeting these users should consist of promoting discounts and coupons, and making your holiday specials very noticeable. Top bars and popups are going to be your best friend. These allow you to place the deal they are looking for right in front of their eyes upon landing on your website. Look how Wayfair pulled this off for one of their 70% off holiday specials: The large banner is impossible to miss, and it features a call to action for users to jump right in to shopping. Ensure Your Store is Mobile-Friendly People aren’t just scrolling through Instagram on their phones all day – they’re also shopping, browsing products, and researching future purchases. It’s way more convenient to shop from a phone on the go than to sit at a computer for hours. This is why you need to ensure that your online store is responsive for mobile devices. Otherwise, you’ll suffer from a high bounce rate. The average bounce rate for mobile devices during shopping is 48%. That means almost half the users that come to your store from a smartphone will probably leave without visiting another page. You can expect this number to be a lot higher if you don’t have a responsive store – and that means losing out on sales. To test whether your website is mobile friendly, use Google’s free Mobile-Friendly Test tool. Plug in your URL and hit the “Run Test” button. This will display a preview of your website on a mobile device along with a rating of its performance. Be sure to fix any issues you experience with loading your store on mobile. Even if your site looks crisp on a desktop or tablet, it might be unusable on a phone. Google and market research company Ipsos found that most deal seekers are shopping from their phones these days. Display Customer Reviews A total of 91% of users read online reviews on a regular basis. They provide insight if the product is high quality, will satisfy their needs, and solve a problem they are facing. Think about the last time you shopped online. Did you check out the reviews to get insight from previous customers? You most likely did, and your deal-seeking customers are no different. They are likely to look at product reviews, meaning you need to have them on display. If there’s one website we can all look to for ecommerce inspiration, it’s Amazon. Few companies pull off reviews as well as they do. Note how they display total reviews, a breakdown of ratings, customer images, and the reviews themselves. Testimonials help build trust and are one of the best ways to increase conversion rates with all shoppers, but especially with deal seekers. Holiday Shopper #4: The Last-Minute Shopper Have you ever done last-minute Christmas shopping? It’s okay – most of us have! If you’ve been there yourself, you know that feeling of urgency. As a marketer, you can use this to your advantage. Create a Sense of Urgency There’s a psychological phenomenon known as fear of missing out, or FOMO for short. It’s very literal. It means taking action because you’re afraid of missing out on a good deal or opportunity. See where we’re going with this? You can increase conversion rates when targeting last minute shoppers by adding more urgency into your copywriting. Look how Joe Fresh makes customers feel like they need to take action so they don’t miss out on a 40% sale. To achieve this same effect, use calls to action like these in your promotions: “Don’t miss out!” “Limited time only” “7 days left” Use Low Stock Warnings Another effective way to to increase conversion rates by promoting urgency is through stock warnings. Display a message when the inventory for certain products is low. Customers will feel that if they don’t purchase an item soon, they might miss out. House of Fraser, a fashion ecommerce company, uses this tactic of displaying the amount of stock left for products and enticing users to purchase them sooner. Last-minute shoppers are already crunching time. By implementing urgency, you’re going to tip the scale and convert them to a customer. Wrapping Up The holidays can be the most profitable time for your ecommerce store. But you have to do your marketing correctly. Too many entrepreneurs miss out on generating more sales because they market to different demographics with the same methods. By targeting the four types of shoppers we’ve explored in this article – evergreens, early birds, deal seekers, and last-minute shoppers – in a more direct manner, you can ensure that sales don’t slip through your grasp this holiday season. So, what are you waiting for? Use what you’ve learned here to develop a marketing plan to lock in your success during the holidays.
Now is as good a time as any to stock up on WordPress deals to set your site up for success in time for the holiday rush. We’ve weeded through the slew of deals to present a handful of the good ones here. Deals on themes, plugins, managed WordPress hosting and much more, just in time to assist your team with the holiday rush. For Building Pages and Themes Themify Trusted by over 74,000 customers, Themify provides beautiful, responsive themes for every size business in any type of industry. They also offer a slew of plugins to boost your website including a form field builder, ecommerce functionalities, conditional menus, and much more. The Themify suite will help any business’ website stand out, no matter the expertise of the web management team. Cyber Monday Deal: Themify is offering 40% off all theme purchases. They are also discounting their library of plugins, BBuilderAddons, and even their memberships. Beaver Builder Praised as one of the best page builder platforms, Beaver Builder is a WordPress page builder for even the most novice users. With over half a million users using the service, Beaver Builder is used to build beautiful, professional pages that are easy to create with simple drag and drop functionality. In addition to page building, the plugin provides powerful, flexible themes, fit for any industry. Cyber Monday Deal: Beaver Builder will be offered at 25% off Want some WordPress theme inspiration? Check out our post on WordPress Themes to Gawk At. For WordPress Hosting NorthStack True serverless WordPress hosting is here with our newly released NorthStack product. We deconstructed the traditional hosting plan to free customers from worrying about plan limits or servers. All hosting resources, in addition to Aurora Serverless by AWS, can be thought of as streams in which your site simply plugs into and you only pay for what you use. Cyber Monday Deal: Join the Beta for NorthStack and get a $50 usage credit. Here’s the direct link to join the Beta For Creating Sliders and Elements Soliloquy One of the best responsive WordPress Slider Plugins, Soliloquy helps you create beautiful sliders simply. With a drag and drop builder, responsive designs, and slider templates, Soliloquy helps bring your strongest website visuals to life. Soliloquy allows offers dynamic sliders, full screen lightboxes, and a commerce product slider. Cyber Monday Deal: The plugin is being offered at 30% off PrestaShop A product by MotoPress, the PrestaShop plugin allows you to transform your product features into a hip slideshow that will turn a casual window shopper into a buying customer. The easy backend management offers a wide range of customization options including categorization options, calls to action, slider duplication for various pages, and much more. The sliders come responsive and mobile ready out of the box and include features such as animated layers, animation effects, and full screen capabilities. Cyber Monday Deal: 50% off of any plugin, theme or membership plan. Envira Gallery Display your photos beautifully with one of the best WordPress gallery plugins. The Envira Gallery is an easy to build gallery with a slew of features including a drag and drop builder, pre-built gallery templates, and supersize lightbox images. It also has the capability and flexibility for multiple addons such as videos, slideshows, pagination, and much more. The Envira Gallery is built for even the most novice WordPress editors to get their images displayed beautifully in their website. Cyber Monday Deal: All Envira Gallery plans will be offered at 30% off For Sales LifterLMS Everything you need to create, sell, and protect engaging online courses. LifterLMS is a powerful LMS plugin for WordPress that helps you increase course engagement, sales and learner results. You can also offer memberships to students and lock your content so only the right people are seeing it at any given time. Cyber Monday Deal: 15% discount for the LifterLMS plugin For Capturing Leads WPForms For the most novice WordPress users hoping to capture leads, WPForms is a great solution. With several form templates, a drag and drop form builder, and mobile responsive settings, WPForms can help a business of any size in any industry turn website visitors into leads and eventual customers. WPForms settings including smart conditional logic, instant notifications to respond to leads quickly, and a dynamic entry management interface to streamline your workflow. Make sure to keep up with email marketing trends to ensure your capitalizing on your leads. Cyber Monday Deal: WPForms will be offered at 60% off WP-CRM System WP-CRM System is an innovative plugin that allows you to add a CRM system to your WordPress website. The robust system allows you to easily manage your contact information, ongoing campaigns, and even invoicing all in one place. The WP-CRM System allows you to keep all of your information on your website – not a third party app – allowing for ease of use and the ability for you to own all of your data for the lifetime of your website. With the ability to integrate with a wide range of apps and extensions, WP-CRM System is a great solution for a small business wetting their toes with customer relationship management. Cyber Monday Deal: WP-CRM will be offered at 50% off For many businesses, this time of year can be a hectic one and we can use all the help we can get. Take a good look at your website and marketing efforts and figure out what it needs to assist you in achieving your year-end goals. Take advantage of the Cyber Monday deals and make the last quarter of 2017 the best one yet. Cyber Monday might only be one day, but the rest of the year is really fair game for maximizing your sales efforts before 2019. Here are our tips to increase your impact on sales this season.
It’s well known that analytics tell a story about what happened to your website. For example, your monthly Google Analytics report says you had X amount of visitors last month and some number of them returned to the site regularly. You also know things like popular referral sources for traffic and a variety of demographic & usage information about those people, like device, location, time spent on site, etc. In short, you use this data to learn more about who visits your site and what they do when they’re there. Then you apply it to future actions to deliver personalized content and drive better outcomes for your website. But what if you could use your data to look into the future? https://pagely.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/lumen5-video-2.mp4 Predictive analytics is a process by which you study the ebb and flow of traffic on a website. This allows you to get a sense of the natural rhythm of traffic, as well as identify events that have triggered unexpected traffic surges. As a result, you can be more productive in preparing your website for surges rather than throwing away exponentially more time reacting to disasters when a site becomes painfully slow or stops altogether. Let’s explore why traffic surges are such a big deal and how to use your data to avoid them. Why Traffic Spikes Happen It’s interesting how traffic surges in restaurants are similar to those that happen online. The Quiet Deceives The lunch rush comes and goes and the staff handles it capably because they know what to expect. The manager of the restaurant looks at the number of staff working and says, “Hey, I’m going to send a bunch of you home since the middle of the day is always dead.” So a skeleton crew remains to staff the kitchen and the floor. Your Website While your web hosting would never cut back the amount of storage or bandwidth you have access to, even in slower periods, there are limits set on hosting accounts for a reason. If a traffic surge hits your site and exceeds bandwidth limits, your hosting company might not call on additional resources to help out. Your site could just slow down or go offline (but you should know that if you host your site with Pagely, we don’t let bad things happen to business critical sites and we’ll always contact you during a traffic surge). The Unexpected Traffic Surge Arrives Sometime around 2 or 3 p.m., a small party shows up to the restaurant. The staff perks up, excited for something to keep them busy during an otherwise boring afternoon. But what they don’t know is that the party has come from a local event that just let out. The event isn’t big enough to show up on the manager’s radar (like a Thanksgiving parade or school graduation), so he or she didn’t think to leave extra staff coverage in place. Your Website Traffic surges (and the resulting downtime, in some cases) occur on websites for a number of reasons: Events like the holiday shopping season drive traffic to unprecedented levels. Content goes viral and people can’t help visiting the source. A well-known influencer or brand mentions a website and its followers want to become your followers. Your offering suddenly becomes the go-to solution to fill a timely need (like privacy policy plugins around the time GDPR was implemented). There’s an imbalance between the number of marketing campaigns pushed out for your brand and the resources behind your site to handle the ensuing traffic. Malicious bots have targeted your site and are trying to break through with repeated attacks. Some of these events can be predicted. Others cannot. Regardless, if you don’t make the effort to predict when these high volumes of traffic are set to hit your site, you can pretty much expect stress and panic to dominate the management of your website. It Hits the Fan As more and more couples, families, and large parties trickle into the restaurant, the staff begins to panic. The host gets too busy seating guests to deal with the line of people waiting at the door. The remaining servers and bartender aren’t prepared to handle all of the new guests – at least not in a timely fashion. And the kitchen just doesn’t have the inventory on hand to deal with the unexpected diners. The customers just have to sit there amid all this chaos, wondering why they haven’t been greeted, why their food was undercooked, and why the service is just plain terrible. Your Website Whatever the reason for it, a traffic surge that you’re unprepared to handle can seriously harm your site. For starters, your site will generally face one of two direct consequences: It will slow to a crawl, testing visitors’ patience far beyond a reasonable limit. It will go offline, causing visitors to look for another website that can fill their need. The failing performance of your site – even for a short period of time – can have long-standing consequences on your business. Cleaning Up While Counting the Losses Keeping with the restaurant analogy, traffic surges were often seen by management as a good thing. “Hey, it’s better that we’re busy than completely dead, right?” The problem with that thinking is that it’s not a simple matter of counting the number of people that came into the restaurant and patting yourself on the back because of the boost in business. A customer’s sour experience can translate into sales that won’t be made. If orders were messed up, customers were likely given a discount on their meal. If the host, bartender, or server was slow to take care of the customer, then the tip left was probably measly (if one was left at all). If the server seemed unenthusiastic and stressed out because of the overwhelming traffic pouring in, the customers probably sensed it. And the servers’ lack of enthusiasm was reflected in the customers’ lack of enthusiasm to order as much food as they had intended on. Even if the restaurant raised its bottom line with the unexpected surge, think about what happens once those customers leave the restaurant and tell their friends, family, and colleagues about what a poor experience they had. That’s why it’s always a good idea to look at the bigger picture. Your Website There’s a lot of work involved in restoring a website after a traffic surge has taken it down. You have to call your developer or host to amp up the bandwidth and/or get your website back online (which also means paying more than you would have otherwise). Also, think about the opportunities missed when inventory goes out of stock or if there is too great a demand for your sales team’s attention and time. Traffic surges will burn through your company’s resources, which can leave those late to the party feeling disappointed that your brand was unable to keep up with the excessive interest. Then, there’s the reputation cleanup to factor in. Visitors who had the unfortunate experience of trying to go to your website during one of these unplanned surges may be completely turned off by the experience, not wanting to attempt another return to the site. And what about those first-time visitors? They heard all this buzz about your website from someone they trusted and then your website wasn’t even online. With no previous relationship or communication channels established, you have no way to reach out and say, “Sorry. We experienced an unexpected server outage, but here’s 45% off your next purchase.” What to Do with Predictive Analytics to Prevent Traffic Spikes Of course, all this may seem hopeless. After all, unexpected traffic surges are unexpected. What can predictive analytics possibly do to help? With predictive analytics, you’ll begin to look at your data differently. Here is the approach I suggest taking: 1. Pull a Couple Years’ Worth of Data If your business has been around for more than two years, you can use Google Analytics to pull the last couple of years’ worth of traffic data for your WordPress site. You can find this data under Audience and Overview. Set the time frame to compare two consecutive years. The resulting chart will show you where the traffic surges occurred. For some businesses, you will have a consistent ebb and flow of traffic from year to year. For others, it might not be as predictable. That said, you still need to have access to this data so you can dig into specific surges and find out what caused them. If your site has been live for less than two years, don’t sweat it. You can use a tool called Similar Web to borrow traffic surge insights from your competition. Gather up a list of four or five competitors and stack their websites against your own in a Yearly Competitive Analysis. In this example, you can see that many of the leading restaurant chains have the same peaks and valleys in their data. If you can pinpoint major surges for the entire industry (or your geographic region), you can predict your own surges more effectively. 2. Identify a Baseline for Traffic Using your data from Google Analytics – all you need is a full year of business for this one – establish a baseline for daily traffic. How many visitors does your website see, on average, every day? To find out how many people visit your site daily, take your total number of users for the year and divide that number by 365. This is an important data point to have, so that you can 1) narrow your focus to significant traffic surges in the data, and 2) monitor traffic growth, in general, since that can affect server performance too. 3. Plan for Predictable Traffic Spikes Now that you have a bird’s eye view of what happened over the last couple of years, and you know what is the norm for your site, we can start using predictive analytics. First, you want to identify predictable traffic spikes. These are ones that tend to occur at the same time. This may mean they happen during the same timeframe each year – like e-commerce sites probably experience around Black Friday with holiday shoppers. Or they could be surges that occur at the same time of day – like a sports blog might experience on Sunday afternoons during football season. Before you do anything else, make a plan for these kinds of traffic surges: Verify that your web server can handle the additional load at those times. Prepare and monitor your inventory accordingly. Assign additional team members to manage the site during those times. If you know the surge is coming, don’t leave it up to chance or settle for so-so server performance just because the cost of more bandwidth or resources seems too expensive. The number of visitors whose business you’ll capture by having a site that stays online and runs well will more than make up for the extra costs. 4. Use Your Marketing to Even Out Traffic Try to control the conversation surrounding your website with marketing. While this won’t come in handy for unpredictable surges, you most certainly can use your marketing channels to gain better control of your traffic. It works like this: You know that shoppers come to your website to buy Mother’s Day gifts. The first problem is the traffic surge that almost always slows down page loading speeds to about 15 seconds. You’re sure you’ve lost business because of it. The second is that some customers buy their gifts too late and then end up returning them because they didn’t want to show up at Mom’s house empty-handed so picked something else up in person. That costs you too, since you’ve been kind enough to offer free returns. Because your predictive analytics tells you this is what happens, why not direct visitors to shop earlier? Write a blog post a month before the event to remind visitors to get their shopping done. Get featured on a guest blog, podcast, or other high-traffic source to get more people thinking about this in a timely fashion. Share steady reminders on social media and keep the subject top-of-mind with customers. Launch a pop-up or email promotion, but set the discount to expire a week before the event. That way, visitors are compelled to get their shopping done in a reasonable time frame. The way you handle this will change based on what sort of event you’re trying to avoid, but just know that there are a variety of ways to redirect visitors with your marketing efforts. If all else fails, or you’re nervous that people just won’t listen, then at least make sure you have remarketing configured for your website. This way, you can capitalize on all that extra traffic on your performance-optimized website. With all those additional eyes on your pages, this means more potential revenue when you lure them back to your site later. 5. Figure Out Why Unpredictable Traffic Surges Occurred Next, take some time to look at the unpredictable traffic surges that occurred over the last couple of years. Can you correlate those dates with an event or other significant change that would’ve drawn in extra visitors? See if you can identify patterns here. If your website is repeatedly hit by bots, then your security plan likely needs a revamp. If the competition runs an annual or semi-annual sale but is failing to satisfy demand, your site could be receiving the overflow and needs to do a better job preparing for it. If the reasons for the surge are unclear at first, look to your data. Look at the sources of the traffic and look at the kinds of people driven there during these times. And if it’s not in the data, check the news. You may be surprised at what sort of connection you are able to make. 6. Prepare for Unpredictable Traffic Surges and Prevent Downtime Preparing for an unexpected traffic surge is about bolstering your site’s performance and security now so that it won’t matter how much your traffic levels fluctuate. Here are some of the ways to do that: Upgrade to Managed WordPress Hosting with a trusted provider. If you can afford it and it makes sense for your business model, switch to VPS hosting. Use a CDN like PressCDN to keep loading times fast. Install a caching plugin to optimize your server performance. Install an image optimization plugin to keep images sized appropriately. Install a security plugin to block those nasty DDoS attacks. Institute automated monitoring for performance, uptime, and security. Use a real-time inventory monitoring tool so you have a way to keep an eye on your stock. Have a team on standby to step in and provide support through ticketing and live chat during unexpected surges. Conduct quarterly stress testing of your website. Schedule a reasonable number of marketing campaigns for your website. Monitor all of your marketing efforts closely: social media, email, PPC, and so on. Set up Google Alerts to track news related to your website, brand, industry, competition, related legislation, and anything else that might cause traffic to soar. The key takeaway here: don’t be like that restaurant manager who assumed traffic levels would remain at a normal pitch on a midday afternoon. Always have a preparedness plan in place and ready to protect your website. Predictive Analytics: Keeping Traffic Surges in Check You want to predict traffic volumes on your website rather than having to react after the fact to traffic surges that have caused harm. If you can do that, you can reduce the time you spend cleaning up your site and repairing your reputation and, instead, focus on conversion-boosting initiatives.
Businesses and enterprises have a lot of data to contend with. From acquisition and retention metrics to prospective customers, internal business processes, partners, affiliates, and competitor data, knowing what data matters most to your business can be difficult. Often, businesses can’t -or simply neglect to -leverage their data effectively into actionable wins that can grow revenue and help them operate more efficiently. That’s where business intelligence (BI) tools can really help. They pull your data from dozens of sources, clean it up, transform it, and display it visually via dashboards and reports, which are far easier to interpret than raw numbers and fields. BI also makes it easier to track the ins and outs of what’s actually happening in your company. While BI tools have been around for decades, there’s been an explosion of excellent online tools entering the market in recent years. These tools are constantly evolving to meet the ever-expanding and fast-changing needs of businesses of all sizes and niches. But choosing a BI tool for the first time can be overwhelming -there are currently more than 100 vendors available. Below, we’ve collected some of the highest-rated and most often recommended business intelligence tools for companies of all shapes and sizes, with options for both well-established enterprises and businesses that are just getting started. Choosing the Right Business Intelligence Tool Working out which tool is going to be right for your business comes down to a few key considerations: 1. Data Sources and Integrations You need to ensure that the BI tool you go with can read all of your data sources and has all the integrations you need, particularly for popular sources like Salesforce, Quickbooks, Google Analytics, and your customer database(s). Because if it doesn’t, you won’t get the specific information you need. 2. Data Cleanup Inevitably, data will be dirty when you first collect it. There’ll be missing fields, or fields that contain inconsistencies. There’ll probably also be spelling errors and values that don’t make sense. Cleaning up data can be a hugely time-consuming process. So keep this in mind when looking -you want a solution that can do the cleanup for you, and do it with some level of automation. 3. Data Analysis Obviously, you’ll want to be able to easily read and analyze your data. But beyond that, you’ll want to have the ability to analyze historical trends and really dig in to your data to understand different aspects of your business, and build models to test new ideas. Some businesses might even want the ability to predict future performance based on statistical models and, potentially, machine learning models. 4. Flexible Dashboards, Charts, and Reports Through the use of data visualizations, dashboards simplify complex data sets to provide users with at-a-glance awareness of current performance. BI tools differ hugely in the flexibility and design of the dashboards they provide, along with the numbers of chart types they offer and the reports they can generate. You’ll want dashboards that you can tailor not just for an executive overview of what’s happening with your business, but for different parts of your organization, from marketing and sales to support and finance. 5. Ease of Use You don’t want a BI that’s overly complicated to use and requires expertise in statistical analysis. So before you commit to a particular tool, try out a bunch. Take note of the user experience -what you like and don’t like. Involve people in your business with different skill sets, who would potentially be using the tool, and ask for their feedback. 6. Collaboration Data is most powerful when your whole company can rally around metrics that matter, but thats hard to achieve when only a handful of people have access to those metrics. So be sure to investigate whether you can share with other users, and how many, and whether there are options for different user roles. Your decisions around collaboration will ultimately impact cost. 7. Cost Many BI software companies don’t list their prices on their websites; they tell you to get in touch for a quote. There’s a legitimate reason for this, given that BI tools are often not a one-size-fits-all solution and need to be customized to be useful. But this lack of clarity is still frustrating. BIME, for example, has a $490-per-month base plan for two users, and adds $90 per month for each additional user. Meanwhile, Grow charges by the number of metrics you want to use and track, rather than by the number of users. 9 Business Intelligence Tools 1. Grow Price: Determined according to business need, pricing quotes are available upon request. While researching for our own BI tools at Pagely, we were quoted $500 per month. Best for: Mid- to large-sized companies and enterprise businesses that want a better way to visualize their data and need help with setup. With more than 150+ integrations, including everything from Asana to Dropbox, Facebook, Google Analytics and, of course, HubSpot, Grow stands out with support for lots of data sources and lots of chart types (300+ pre-built reports, in fact). Grow promises to implement 8x faster than competitors so you can hit the ground running, which I’d say is a fairly accurate assessment. The analytics are fully customizable and offer real-time updates, letting you mash up and compare your data from lots of different sources on one easy to monitor dashboard. Another plus is that you don’t need to be a data expert to use it. Grow takes care of all the data cleanup, pivoting, grouping, filtering, and applying formulas and functions, so you can track what’s most meaningful to your business. Grow is a fantastic and capable BI system, and I know because it’s what we originally decided to use at Pagely. In part, Grow was so attractive to me as a marketer because most of the other BI tools we investigated had overly complex setups. Grow walked us through the setup process, creating many of the initial reports for us. 2. Domo Price: The Standard plan is $83 per user per month. The Professional plan runs $160 per user per month. The Enterprise plan is $190 per user per month. Free trials are available. Best for: Domo is a heavy-duty product for companies serious about data. Domo brings together a huge assortment of data connectors, i.e. integrations. There are 450+, in fact, including Salesforce, AWS, Asana, GitHub and Google Analytics -pretty much anything you can think of. Domo says its customers connect to thousands more custom data sources. Domo also provides a unified data store, a huge selection of visualizations, integrated social media, and comprehensive reporting. Domo’s self-service ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) toolkit, Magic, provides dynamic data transformation capabilities for users of all skill levels. There’s also Buzz, a collaboration tool for assigning and coordinating work around data in your organization. Another nice touch is the Domo app store, which provides apps for even more visualizations. Here’s what the Domo marketing dashboard looks like: 3. BIME Price: The Base plan is $490 per month and includes 45+ connectors. The Big Data plan is $690 per month and includes the features of the Base plan plus access to SQL DB connectors like Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, MongoDB, and more. Two user licenses are included with each plan. Each additional user is $90 per month, and each additional viewer is $9 per month. Best for: Small, medium and large companies. BIME is widely adaptable. With 65+ data connectors, BIME’s BI tool offers the ability to track all kinds of data (flat files, CRM, web apps, and databases), transform your data into meaningful metrics and attributes, and presents analytics beautifully with 25+ data visualization tools. Customizable dashboards let you add images and choose from 100+ icons, allowing you to present data tables as charts that are impactful and interactive. A useful Salesforce and BIME integration for support teams lets you track the entire user journey from prospect to customer to churn. There are also out-of-the-box tools, such as a forecasting feature that can predict future values based on your current data set. 4. ChartMogul Price: ChartMogul is free for small companies and costs $125 per 1,000 customers per month once you generate more than $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Best for: Subscription-based SaaS companies. Unlike the other options on this list, ChartMogul has been built specifically for SaaS companies that run on subscriptions. With this tool, you can keep an eye on your monthly recurring revenue, watch your net cash flow, calculate the average revenue per customers, and generate cohort analytics to look at churn over time. Here’s what ChartMogul looks like: You can connect ChartMogul with Stripe, PayPal, and many other payment services. It can also automatically retrieve all your payment data and process it, as well as manually import CSV files. ChartMogul also lets you associate names and orders with payment IDs. This allows you to enrich your data through integrations with Intercom or MailChimp, for example, and know who is paying for what. It’s also possible to segment customers and target them with customized emails to woo back those who churn. 5. Looker Price: Determined according to business need, pricing quotes are available upon request. We were quoted $3,000 per month. Best for: Small, medium, and large business analyst teams that want powerful access to their data. Looker is an incredibly compelling BI option for one single reason: its data modeling layer, LookML. The language operates like a simplified version of SQL, which is reusable and modular, and in turn, way easier for first-time users to learn. This fundamental innovation provides tools for building sophisticated analytics, which can then be pulled into easy-to-build reports. This powerful combination is what BI tools strive to provide, and Looker does it better than anyone else. Here’s Looker: Compared to other BI tools, Looker lacks customization and visualization features, providing only fairly basic graphing and data manipulation features. However, it makes up for these drawbacks with its powerful data integrations (like Redshift and Aurora), intuitiveness for business users, and excellent support. 6. Tableau Price: Tableau Desktop Personal Edition is $35 per user per month and connects to files like Excel and Google Sheets. The Professional Edition is $70 per user per month and includes integrations with web applications and more. Best for: Small, medium, and large businesses that want intuitive data visualization and analytics. Tableau is a pioneer of drag-and-drop analytics -it was among the first BI systems to offer intuitive dashboards where users could manipulate data via drag-and-drop. With its customizable dashboards, Tableau lets users easily create, publish, and share dashboards without touching code. It can also connect to dozens of data sources, including Amazon Aurora and Redshift, Google Analytics, and Azure. There are three different Tableau products: Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server and Tableau Online. Tableau Desktop is the primary product and data visualization tool. Tableau Server comes with all the features of Tableau Desktop and adds networking capabilities, while Tableau Online is a hosted version of Tableau Server. Here’s what the Tableau Desktop dashboard looks like: 7. Slemma Price: The Basic plan is $29 per month) for three users, the Small Business plan is $99 per month for 10 users, the Standard plan is $199 per month for 30 users, and the Client Reporting plan is $599 per month for 80 users. A free trial is available. Best for: Small to medium-sized businesses that want a solution that is relatively easy to use and implement. Slemma is a powerful reporting and BI tool that lets you easily create dynamic dashboards from multiple data sets. It connects to 75+ services and tools (including Amazon Redshift, Google Analytics, Intercom, Azure SQL, Oracle and more). There’s also a step-by-step chart designer that makes report generation quick and painless with pre-built templates, allowing you to visualize your third-party data in minutes. With Slemma, you can analyze, collaborate, and securely distribute dashboard insights internally or with clients. A dashboard library lets you hit the ground running, with dashboards for popular tools like Hubspot, Salesforce, and Google Analytics. While Slemma lacks the data power of some of the bigger BI players, it makes up for it with ease of use and report creation. Like all these tools, you can also access Slemma on mobile devices. 8. Chartio Price: Determined according to business size, pricing quotes are available upon request. Free trials are available. Best for: Small, medium, and large businesses. Chartio scales with your company. Chartio provides cloud-based data exploration designed to be usable by anyone, so that business users don’t have to rely on analysts for answers. But if you are an analyst, there are powerful features available with SQL and interactive query modes. For business teams, Chartio enables you to create self-service interactive dashboards for marketing, sales, and support teams that pull data from every function of your company. There are out-of-the-box connections to your data sources from Amazon Redshift to CSV files, so you can start exploring data immediately. There’s also a chart builder that lets you easily query data using a drag-and-drop query generator or a SQL query editor. The provided charts are very well designed, flexible, and smart, so they fit the data being fed to them. Here’s what Chartio’s dashboard looks like: 9. Sisense Price: Determined according to business needs, pricing quotes are available upon request. Free trials are available. Best for: Small, medium, and large organizations. Sisense is ideal for data-crunching beginners, but also provides powerful features for companies at scale. Sisense is the only BI system I’ve come across that offers a test-drive for prospective clients – a 90-minute trial using your own real data. The best way to take advantage of this is with an actual business case, which they will solve during the demo. It’s safe to say Sisense is customer-focused. Not only is their customer support top-notch, the platform is built with non-technical users in mind. So the vast majority of what you’ll want to do can be achieved via a simple drag-and-drop interface. That’s not to say power users are neglected – SQL and advanced functionality are also available. Here’s an example of what a help desk ticket dashboard looks like: One of Sisense’s core features is its “in-chip” back-end technology, which maximizes the way existing resources, including RAM and CPU, are used on a user’s computer to allow your system to do more with less. According to Sisense, this allows the platform to work with 100 times more data at 10 times the speed. In practice, this makes it easy for data-newbies to join complex data from multiple sources, build interactive and business intelligence reports, and share it all in one click. What are your favorite business intelligence tools? Share with us in the comments
It’s critical that your website provides a solid foundation for running and scaling your business. Rather than hiring Devops engineers with WordPress experience to manage your site and infrastructure, you may consider using a Managed WordPress Hosting solution. Your company will save money and have a team of hosting experts ensuring your WordPress website remains available, secure, and fast. Read on to discover how Managed WordPress Hosting can help your company. TABLE OF CONTENTS What is Managed WordPress Hosting? The Advantages of Managed WordPress Hosting High Availability and Uptime Expert Technical Support A Modern High-Performing Hosting Stack Updates Data Retention and Recovery Mission-Critical Security Premium DNS Developer-Friendly Tools Scalability Global Reach Conclusion WHAT IS MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING? Managed WordPress Hosting is a specific type of web hosting solution that is tailor-made and optimized specifically for supporting WordPress sites and users. Managed WordPress hosting is like having a team of WordPress and hosting experts working on your website, removing the cost and burden of managing your site’s hosting in-house. Managed WordPress Hosting exists as a separate option from other types of hosting because WordPress websites have unique needs. They have different server resource footprints than other types of websites, have unique security concerns, and properly supporting them requires WordPress expertise. Managed WordPress Hosting solutions are typically defined by: Managed WordPress security Automatic WordPress theme, plugin, and core updates Managed server resources that compliment WordPress’s technical needs Experienced WordPress experts on staff to handle support It’s hosting designed from the ground up to serve WordPress. Let’s take a look at how Managed WordPress Hosting services compare to other hosting options, like shared hosting and VPS hosting, to see which offers the best WordPress hosting solution. WHAT IS SHARED HOSTING? Many small businesses are attracted to the affordable pricing of shared hosting, which can be as little as $3-20 a month. It’s important to understand what shared hosting offers and what it doesn’t. For a hosting company to be profitable at those prices they depend on volume and corners must be cut. A shared host charging $5 a month simply cannot profitably offer quality support and adequate server resources to every customer. Instead, this business model relies on minimizing support interactions and upselling. When someone complains that their site has gone down or is running slow, these hosts generally recommend that the website owner move up to a more expensive hosting plan to fix the problem. Basically, these rock bottom prices are a way to get people onto their hosting solution with the goal of getting them onto more profitable plans as they outgrow their shared hosting service. They do not expect that a business would run an important, high-traffic website on a shared plan. Shared hosting is defined by: Low prices Minimal support Minimal server resources No WordPress expertise, solutions, or specialized support Popular shared hosting companies are GoDaddy, A2Hosting, and HostGator. However, that isn’t to say that shared hosting doesn’t ever make sense. If you have a hobby blog or a side business, shared hosting may be adequate. But, if you’re an established business that depends on your website being available, fast, and secure, shared hosting probably isn’t the best option. Shared hosting simply can’t offer the same quality of hosting service that more expensive options do. Here, the age-old maxim, “you get what you pay for,” applies. What is VPS HOSTING? VPS hosting, or Virtual Private Server hosting, is like shared hosting because your site shares a server with other sites. However, there are fewer sites on the same server compared to the shared hosting option. The server is also partitioned into different virtualized server environments. Unlike shared hosting, WordPress VPS Hosting usually provides baseline guaranteed resources eliminating the “noisy neighbors” problem. VPS hosting is a huge step up from shared hosting but has a major disadvantage for many people — managing a VPS requires technical skills most businesses don’t possess. If your VPS server goes down for whatever reason, you’ll need to know how to troubleshoot and fix it. VPS hosting is defined by: Fewer sites per server Virtualized containers give sites separate resources The need for technical skills to manage the VPS Popular VPS providers are Digital Ocean, Linode, and InMotion. MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING Managed WordPress Hosting is designed specifically to handle WordPress. It provides optimal technology and resources to support WordPress websites. Partnering with a managed WordPress hosting company takes care of all the technical aspects of hosting for you – including security, performance, and other factors. Managed WordPress Hosting is particularly well-suited to large and enterprise-level businesses due to its superior security, reliability, and high performance. Any company that relies on their WordPress site is going to want a host that specializes in that CMS. Managed WordPress Hosting prices vary, with plans ranging from $25 to $2,000 per month depending on the resources and level of support they offer. Businesses invest in this because they understand that the benefits of the service far outweigh its costs. These companies save time and money because they do not have to pay for dedicated engineers to manage their sites. Partnering with an experienced WordPress host also improves site performance, further bolstering the bottom line via key metrics like conversion rate, time on site, and more. THE ADVANTAGES OF MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING There are some fundamental benefits only managed WordPress hosts can deliver. 1. HIGH AVAILABILITY AND UPTIME Site availability and server uptime are crucial for any online business. If your company’s website generates revenue, downtime means lost revenue. Also, it can damage your brand’s reputation and negatively impact your site’s visibility to search engines (also known as Search Engine Optimization). Typically, web hosts guarantee at least 99% uptime. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean you’ll actually get 99% uptime. High traffic to a WordPress website can put a lot of strain on server resources because of WordPress’s dynamic functionality. A host that is optimized for WordPress hosting can use intelligent caching and robust database solutions to ensure your site stays functional and responsive when you need it most. To ensure maximum uptime, here at Pagely we provide two different layers of uptime monitoring. If anything is detected that could potentially lead to downtime, the entire support team is notified. In the vast majority of cases, we identify issues and fix them before downtime can occur, so issues are corrected before customers are even aware of them. This proactive support is what separates great hosts from the rest. We also receive proactive notifications if you get close to your resource limits, and run tests after updates to check that all sites are still up. If a problem from a plugin update is found, we automatically rolls back the update. For enterprise websites that need maximum uptime, it might be best to choose a host that provides high-availability architecture that spreads the workload over two or more servers in different zones. This approach reduces the risk of an outage during maintenance events, unforeseen outages, or traffic spikes. 2. EXPERT SUPPORT A web hosting company that does not specialize in WordPress will have a more difficult time addressing WordPress-specific technical concerns. When you speak to customer support about an issue with your website, you want to talk to someone who has the WordPress expertise and experience to solve your problem immediately. Shared and VPS hosts may offer more affordable services than Managed WordPress Hosting, but when you run into an issue such as an attack on your WordPress site or uptime issues, it could take several days of emailing back and forth just to get your support request escalated to someone with the WordPress familiarity and expertise to address the issue. Meanwhile, you could be losing thousands of dollars in sales. Expert WordPress technical support starts with the people manning the support lines. Look for a host that employs a passionate and exceptionally skilled group of engineers who know how to apply technology to solve big problems. Typically, on the company’s About Us page, you can get a feel for the types of employees you’ll run into when you contact support. Inquire about things like level-one phone operators reading a script, some hosting companies direct you to unskilled operators as a cost-saving measure. It’s always best to speak immediately with bona fide engineers to help you manage your site and solve your problem the first time. 3. A MODERN HIGH-PERFORMANCE HOSTING STACK A reputable and experienced Managed WordPress Hosting company continually tests the latest hardware and software to find the optimum hosting environment specifically for WordPress. They use a modern hosting tech stack and fine-tune it to handle the unique demands of WordPress. Most modern hosts leverage a public cloud provider because cloud platforms, like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, provide hosting infrastructure advantages over traditional options. At Pagely, our hosting stack is built on AWS. This allows our customers to leverage a nearly infinite amount of server resources and the vast ecosystem of cloud hosting services AWS has created. These resources and tools allow us to support and scale WordPress applications as needed and without constraint. With such a vast and flexible pool of server resources available, we can use everything from a pair of nodes to a cluster of 10+ machines to ensure hardware is never a limiting factor on your site’s growth and reliability. This allows your host to carry massive amounts of web traffic without sacrificing performance. In addition, with access to AWS customers can leverage 13 global data centers around the globe. What you’re looking for are the fastest, most flexible hosting environments leveraging intelligent caching/acceleration, security, and configuration flexibility. Along with technologies like PHP7, HTTP/2, and free SSL certificates, at Pagely we use proprietary NGINX/OpenResty HyperProxies. It delivers unmatched speed and Redis to further accelerate the WordPress experience. The following is the suite of other in-house services and a great example of the type of stack you should inquire about when shopping around with different hosts. If for nothing else, consider this a point to reference for comparison sake: PressDNS: Premium DNS powered with Amazon’s route 53 service that takes advantage of geo-balancing and geo-routing PressCACHE: A global WordPress acceleration system that works much like a CDN, but is specifically designed to cache and serve WordPress page output PressARMOR: Pagely’s security architecture, including a web application firewall, malware scanning, chroot user separation, and network edge rulesets PressTHUMB: On-demand image optimization and thumbnail creation PressFORMANCE: Performance monitoring analytics and assessments 4. AUTOMATIC UPDATES A Managed WordPress Hosting plan provides an easy way to update the core WordPress application and needed plugins. Keeping the software that powers your site up-to-date is critical for the security, performance, and compatibility of your site. A well-managed WordPress host may handle WordPress updates for you. But an expertly managed WordPress host will keep your software up-to-date and actively monitor how each updates impacts your site through automated tests that ensure your site is still running smoothly. In the event an issue is detected, the update can be automatically rolled back, restoring your site to functioning condition. 5. WORDPRESS SPECIFIC SECURITY Shared hosting packages typically don’t offer any assistance if your site falls victim to a cyber attack or if you encounter malware problems. Secure WordPress hosting is perhaps the biggest incentive for moving to Managed WordPress Hosting. When you partner with a managed WordPress host, routine software updates and a specialized hosting environment mean your site is better guarded against hackers, bots, and other security concerns. And you can expect regular security checks and malware removal. A good hosting reputation will prove outstanding security for its clients. If a host can boast that they’ve experienced a single serious security incident, you’re in good hands. A robust suite of security services is a comprehensive security architecture that hardens and protects a network, hardware, and WordPress applications with a focus on prevention and the mitigation of risk to clients. For base-level security, your host should use a dynamic web application firewall (WAF) that blocks code injection attacks, known exploits, and rate limits access attempts. This greatly reduces the success of a distributed denial of service attack or a brute force attack. They should also practice real-time system malware scanning of every WordPress installation, constantly looking for things like trojan horses, viruses, worms, keyloggers, spyware, and adware. In the event that security defenses fail, your host should have a daily backup of your site to restore from. These automatic backups become invaluable should your site become compromised. 6. PREMIUM DNS The Domain Name System (DNS) is, essentially, the phone book of the internet. When you enter a domain name like pagely.com into a web browser, the browser uses DNS to translate the domain name into an Internet Protocol (IP) address, which tells the browser where to get the desired webpage. When you’ve invested so much in your site, you don’t ever want your domain names to go offline. This is why investing in a premium DNS provider is a must. But typical shared or VPS hosting packages, and even most Managed WordPress hosts, don’t offer premium DNS. However, there are options where you’ll enjoy the benefits of a DNS system backed by Amazon’s Route53 service. This service answers DNS queries faster by using a global network of DNS servers and uses infrastructure redundancy to ensure availability. 7. DEVELOPER-FRIENDLY TOOLS If your team wants to be hands-on with your server environment, Managed WordPress Hosting provides developer-friendly tools that you’re unlikely to get with most shared hosting plans. You get tools like SSH, staging, GIT and WP-CLI, in addition to basics like SFTP, database access, and error/access logs. In addition, you receive support for customer PHP extensions including New Relic, system crontab access, and more. If it’s important to you, look for integration with the WordPress REST API. A Partner API would be useful for customers who want to integrate their host into their workflows to quickly spin up new sites under their hosting account. The ability to quickly clone your live site and test your changes is hugely beneficial so you can also push updates back to your production site using your own workflows. 8. SCALABILITY WordPress scalability, the ability to quickly handle and adapt to sudden traffic increases, is critical for any online enterprise. If a celebrity endorsement drives more customers to your site, the unexpected increase in pageviews will require more resources. WordPress is highly scalable as long as its hosting platform is configured to keep up with the increase in database requests caused by high traffic. As your business grows and your site gains more traction, you’ll require additional website resources to keep things running smoothly. You’ll also to need to be able to collect customer data efficiently. If you haven’t equipped your site to scale fluidly, it could crash. And any unexpected downtime could lead to lost sales and damage to your brand reputation. Choosing the right Managed WordPress Hosting plan can help safeguard your business against this kind of catastrophe. Strongly consider choosing a market leader in providing scalable solutions for WordPress. We recommend choosing a host who has built its hosting stack and solutions-oriented services specifically to address the complex scaling, security, and performance needs of the world’s biggest brands. 9. FAST PAGE LOADS AROUND THE WORLD Small businesses using shared or VPS hosting typically use caching plugins and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to optimize page speed. This provides faster loading times for international visitors. Managed WordPress Hosting can take care of all that for you. For example, PressCACHE technology is a global WordPress acceleration system. It works much like a CDN, but was designed specifically for WordPress page output. It handles the server-level caching of your site content to speed up the delivery of your pages. All you need to do is turn it on, then sit back and enjoy the speed. PressCACHE is also responsible for globally serving your content from one of Amazon’s data centers in the United States, Asia, and Europe. It routes the requests for your website to the global Point of Presence (PoPs) servers closest to the user. This shortens the distance between visitors and your website, speeding the load time of your site to a global audience. Related: Optimizing Your WordPress Site Managed WordPress Hosting Provider Options The following sites are near 100% WordPress focused, and offer varying levels of ‘managed’ service. Which is the best managed wordpress hosting for your needs? That really depends on the level of support you’re looking for and your budget. As you get more support and better infrastructure, the cost of your hosting will go up. MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING IS CRITICAL FOR HIGH-DEMAND WEBSITES To summarize, anyone responsible for managing a high-traffic WordPress site should seek out an experienced Managed WordPress Hosting Provider if they do not have WordPress experts on staff. WordPress has unique resource demands, security concerns, and support needs that only a host that specializes in WordPress can deliver. Interested in Managed WordPress Hosting? As the world’s first WordPress host and the only provider with a decade of experience, we’re pros. Get in touch to learn more about how Pagely can help your business. We offer in-depth sales consultation and free migration.
At Pagely, we strongly believe in higher education as a vehicle to improve and enrich individual lives, as well as our shared communities. To that end, we created the Pagely Scholarship earlier this year to reward the students that inspire us with their story and life goals. The 2018 Pagely Scholarship Recipients 1st – $1,500 Dominika Maria Wojtowicz is a Sophomore at DePaul University, majoring in Data Science with a minor in Public Relations and Advertising. In her essay, Dominika highlights the intriguing influx of new technology and the concerns that linger behind these powerful concepts. Specifically, data collection. From Siri and Alexa to algorithms being used by Instagram, our search behavior and even our conversations are being tracked by Big Data. While their goal may be to improve daily life and efficiency of search, there can be unintended consequences and, at the very least, the uneasy feeling one’s privacy could be invaded. Notably, with AI like Siri and Alexa which, if not disabled, monitor all conversations had in their presence. This is a concept that fascinates and intrigues her and will no doubt play a role in her studies. 2nd – $1,000 Joshua Alexander Foster is studying Electrical Engineering at Missouri State University. Joshua has a rare, incurable retinal disease known as Stargardt’s Disease that will eventually result in blindness. With little accommodation offered for Joshua, he has had to become his own advocate, investigating ways to thrive in school and circumvent obstacles. Joshua also has a one-year-old son who suffers from a hearing condition. While his infant son benefits from hearing aids, they unfortunately change how he hears sounds. As an engineering major, he hopes to be able to improve the technology behind his son’s hearing aids and provide him with a quality auditory experience one day. Instead of allowing these traumatic events to stop him from following his dreams, he believes they have happened because his destiny is to revolutionize technology – which may not have been possible had he been born before the technological revolution. 3rd – $500 Jasmine Randle is a first-year Film & Television Master’s Degree candidate at DePaul University in Chicago Illinois. It is a technical degree that highlights the advancement of cinematography, production, post-production, and more. In her essay, Jasmine discusses how being gifted her first cellular phone had a large impact on her life and how she was inspired by the ability to remain in contact with loved ones at the touch of a button. She goes on to discuss starting college and how her beloved Macbook Pro became a very significant part of her life. Not only is it where she wrote essays, designed media layouts and edited photos, but it was also a loyal companion by her side as she traveled abroad. In summation, technology has played an integral role in her life and inspired her career path. Thank you to all of the students that participated in this year’s scholarship. We were truly impressed by the quality and ingenuity of the applicants! About Pagely Pagely provides managed WordPress hosting services to big brands, including leading colleges and universities all across the world.
PressThumb has been an off the menu speciality item for the past year or so, and in that time we’ve put it to the test for the whole range of use cases and scale. From a convenient and free add-on to your existing VPS, to full scale dedicated infrastructure processing countless requests per minute, it’s now ready for a wider audience as a Pagely branded feature! What is PressThumb? PressThumb is Pagely’s solution for image optimization and on-the-fly thumbnail generation. It is powered by Thumbor and integrated with Pagely’s hosting stack using a combination of custom NGINX rules and an mu-plugin. Images on all of your pages are dynamically treated with no up front bulk processing required. It’s pretty neat stuff. IMAGE OPTIMIZATION There are many options out there for optimizing your images. Most of them require you to process all of your assets up front, as a pre-optimization. We recommend this option if you are looking to save on disk space as well as bandwidth usage. PressThumb does not require this up front processing because assets are generated on-the-fly with each request. Once it’s on, it just works and you do not need to run any extra commands. THUMBNAIL GENERATION It’s the same story for thumbnails, too. PressThumb generates thumbnails for original size images on the fly (and optimizes them in the process). This is where the huge savings in disk space can come in! You only need the original size of a given image to live in your library and PressThumb will handle the rest. Imagine all the space you’ll save from not needing 20 copies of the same image just to have all your dimensions covered. Neat. So how much? PressThumb is available for any VPS or Enterprise hosting plan for no additional cost. The Standard Version is configured as another service that runs on your existing servers. The premium version gets you dedicated nodes for handling all image processing without impacting the CPU on your application servers, starting at $250/mo. Any other gotchas? Both of these new features require switching to NGINX-only mode. This can be done on a per-application basis and is generally a more flexible and higher performance option than our standard NGINX+Apache mode. As always, reach out to our team with any questions you might have.
