• They start in the dirt: for gardens, it’s literal soil; for websites, it’s dirt poor rankings and lack of discoverability. 
• The conditions need to be favourable to growth.
• Plant the seeds and give them some time.
• Nurture them.
• Prune the weeds (ie. spam comments and performance issues). 

An abandoned website can pose some liability for the site owner– the business the website represents. It could have outdated information, security exploits, and not adhere to the current legislation. 

I get approached by many website owners and their websites have tell-tale signs of websites in trouble.

Something Major Has Broken

Several years ago, one version of PHP (version 5.6) was in common use. It was replaced by PHP 7 and its sub-versions. That broke a lot of the Internet. Some web hosts have kept support going for the old sites, but that exposes their systems to security exploits. One by one, they’ve been emailing clients with warnings that support for the old system has lapsed. When the support is pulled, some websites will crash entirely. 

The Forms Don’t Work

Website forms are critical to connecting with clients– both current and potential. If the web-based forms no longer work, it’s a sign that something has busted along the way. Some examples of what could have gone wrong: 

• Web forms need spam proofing, often called “Captcha.” if something has changed and the website can no longer connect, the forms won’t work.
• The mail connection may be broken. If the forms need a working mail system, maybe that has broken down. There’s nothing wrong with periodically testing your own forms to make sure the connections are intact.
• The web form license may be out of date. Products like Gravity Forms need to be annually renewed to stay in working order. Did someone renew the licenses?

It’s Not Mobile Ready

This is 2022. The majority of website traffic comes from phones and other mobile devices. Granted: a big screen lets things look their best, but all websites need to look okay on mobile. If a website looks bad on a phone, it didn’t get the mobile readiness (aka responsive) pass. Making the choices required to make a mobile website look great takes work and if it’s not mobile-ready, that was skipped or it fell into disrepair. 

Just another WordPress Website

Remember when people bought VCRs and the clock kept flashing 12:00? They hadn’t finished the set-up. When a site’s slogan or subtitle reads “Just another WordPress Website” it says to the world: 

• We gave up before we were finished
• We launched with the basics, so we likely skipped optimizations and security safeguards.
• We may not know what we’re doing. Don’t take it personally: maybe you hired someone who didn’t know what they were doing.

Copyright 2018… 2017…. 1066….

A copyright, in part, is a legal defence of your web content. More than that, it’s a datestamp that speaks to when your website was last overhauled or updated. I’ve recently seen websites with “Copyright ©2004” A lot has happened with web technology in the last 20 years. An old website may be missing out on many technological advents. At the very least: mobile readiness. An old website may have dodgy security in place. It could have outdated information. A website should have a refresh every three years. If the copyright is much older than that, the site may not have relevant information.

Your Designer Is Gone

Some designers put a link to their website at the bottom of a client’s site. At Web321, we do that unless expressly asked to not include it. Web design is a field where people enter and leave. The low-level skills needed to roll out a website can be adopted by former graphic designers, former writers, and former marketers. If it’s easy to get into the field, it’s easy to get out. Some web designers just pack up. If their site is down, then they are likely gone too. They may be on the beaches of Thailand defending their camera from monkeys, but you’re left with an aging website. 

Your Designer’s Copyright

Web designers often have the “Cobblers Shoes Dilemma.” While their client sites look good, their own sites have aged. Maybe your designer’s website is still going through the miracle of automatic updates and recurring billing, but if their copyright is several years out of whack, maybe they did abandon their own website and, by extension, their clients. I tried following up with one designer to see if they were in business still. According to their website and their social media accounts, they dropped off the Internet five years ago. Poof. Guess the quality of support one gets from a phantom. 

What If Your Site Has Been Abandoned?

Get Control Back

Try to get in touch with your former designer. If that fails, get in touch with the service provider that hosts the website. If you don’t know who is hosting your site, ask for help from a web developer to connect the dots.

If you have the login credentials to WordPress or the web hosting: that’s great. If you don’t, get in touch with the service provider and plead your case. It’s not uncommon for this to happen. If your credit card is attached to the hosting account, then it’s possible for them to consider your claims to be valid. If they won’t go for it, see if you can get access to the domain name and its registration. From there, an updated alternative web host can be used. The domain name can be pointed to the new web hosting. If you have an administrator-level WordPress account for your website, you can get into the site and make a complete duplicate of the site. Pick it up, move it to a new host and voila: control.

Worst comes to worst, if you’ve lost hosting and WordPress access, maybe consider building a new website from scratch: crib what you can from the old site and start the new site. 

If you have lost access to the domain registration: that’s more challenging. Domain name registrars have layers of defenses to prevent bad actors from getting control of domain names. The first play for a bad actor is often to impersonate the rightful owner. It can be difficult to convince a registrar. If that’s ultimately impossible, then rebrand: register a similar domain name and re-do all of the marketing material as well as your email addresses. It’s a worst-case scenario, but sometimes it’s the only recourse. 

Get Help

Some of these steps are painful and difficult to navigate. Most business owners are not web developers or web design consultants– they’re anything but. If you’re out of your league on reviving your website, get professional help. No surprise: rescues like this are common for me. Feel free to reach out: shawn@web321.co or 1-844-493-2321

The post Top 7 Signs A Website Is Abandoned appeared first on Hospitality Web Design.

Being the most superior CMS in this industry, WordPress stands above its rival brands and constitutes a good amount of market share. The sheer scope and size of the impact of WordPress are huge, which is why we have gathered some shocking stats to help you put into perspective.

The Project Cost Calculator of Open Hub claims that WordPress took approximately 112 person-years to build itself with 423,759 lines of code and an approximate cost of $6 million to fund the size of this project.

The WordPress platform is a simple and free content management system that involves varying levels of technical knowledge to develop impressive and innovative websites and web content. The boundless library of plugins and themes boosts the possibility of this platform.

If you want to make an online appearance today, you can follow the WordPress stats that can help you to gain an online presence. The following are the important WordPress stats in 2020 that you may need to know –

• WordPress powers 35 percent of the internet with a 2 percent surge in contrast with early 2019 and a 4 percent increase compared to 2019.
• If you consider the sites built by only CMS, around 60 percent of the CMS-built sites are WordPress.
• Around 661 WordPress websites pop up every day.
• Back in 2018, non-English WordPress downloads outpaced the English ones.

These numbers are facts that are important since WordPress plays a vital role in the online marketing environment.

The capabilities and contribution of this platform have motivated others to level their playing field and compete. The central determiner of the effectiveness of this platform is not the net worth but their creativity. This is why it is possible for small businesses to compete with global companies who enjoy major marketing budgets.

• 59% of websites using well-known content management systems are using WordPress. There are around 46.2 percent sites globally that do not use a CMS and the rest depend on WordPress.
• There are 64 million websites that employ WordPress in absolute measures. This stat is based on the global count of active sites, according to the Netcraft.
• WordPress is accountable for the added 1.1 million domain registration every half-yearly. This stat is an estimated value from 2015. The actual value is likely to be more since the level of market penetration and domain registration of WordPress have risen.
• Around 34 percent of the 10,000 most famous websites across the world use WordPress. These famous sites are Etsy, Reuters, TED, Whitehouse.gov, Yelp, TechCrunch, The New Yorker, and People. Among international celebrities, Snoop Dogg, Justine Bieber, Katy Perry, Jay Z, and Stephen Fry also use this platform.
• The second most commonly used CMS, Joomla, constitutes 5.7 percent of the market share. This positively skewed market has many competitors but only one of them has been able to take an enormous lead. Drupal, Shopify, and Squarespace follow Joomla with market shares of 3.7%, 2.4%, and 2.5%, respectively.
• WordPress 4.9 version has been downloaded around 159 million times. When you read this article, WordPress downloads would cross 160 million.
• WordPress receives unique monthly visitors the same as Twitter. According to Twitter stats, unique monthly visits are around 152 million in the US but for WordPress, it is around 149 million. Both Amazon (with 199 million visits) and Twitter recently ranked lower than WordPress in terms of unique monthly visitors.
• WordPress users create around 52.1 million comments and 70.5 million new posts every month. This blogging platform encourages a huge population across the world to initiate discussions and add fresh content every month.
• A total of 409 million users view at least 21.1 billion pages every month on the popular WordPress sites. For daily content consumption, a higher count of users views WP blogs.
• WooCommerce constitutes 27.7 percent of the market share among all eCommerce platforms. This is vital information for all online businesses. Online business platforms let merchants build digital stores to allow transactions online. WooCommerce is an eCommerce platform of WordPress that is growing faster than the competitors such as Shopify and Squarespace.
• Around 13.2 percent of all sites use WooCommerce.
• 7.5 million spam comments are blocked by Akismet every hour. Akismet is a famous WordPress plugin that saves its users who deal with spam. Spam is one of the most common nuisances online today.
• In 2017, the 3 best WordPress plugins were WordPress Importer, WooCommerce, and the All in One SEO Pack.

The WordPress usability statistics in 2020 are as follows –

• WordPress.com is different from WordPress.org. These 2 versions can be very confusing. The latter is a free and open-source CMS built for the WP software. Whereas, WordPress.com is the blogging platform that is based on the said software.
• To host an appreciable WordPress site, it costs as low as $60. At this cost, you also get unmetered bandwidth and sufficient storage. In the case of a high-traffic site, you might have to go for expensive versions such as the managed WordPress hosting.
• Being platform-agnostic, WordPress provides native applications for common platforms such as iOS, Windows Phone, WebOS, Android, and even Blackberry. You can use all the functions regardless of what system you are using.
• WordPress is currently offering 47,350 active plugins out of a sum of 56,311 plugins listed by the Plugin Directory for WordPress.
• Around 80 to 90 percent of the SEO mechanics are taken care of by WordPress. This stat was mentioned by Matt Cutts in 2009 who was the head of Google’s webspam group. The platform is still continuing to make it more SEO-friendly with more plugins to assist its users in getting the SEO right.
• At least 36 percent of WordPress sites are served by HTTPS. This figure denotes an increase of more than double from 2016.
• Being the fastest growing web-publishing platform, WordPress helps you to draw more traffic with higher ranks of WordPress keywords than its competitors.
• Despite issues, Jetpack is the most accepted WordPress plugin for all marketers. It is a free tool, facilitating vital tasks such as social media integration, traffic insight, security, and backups.
• WordPress employs not more than 800 workers worldwide, the majority of which are from the US. They collaborate from their residence and they ensure that the requirements of all countries are met.
• WordPress involves more than 100 contributors. Being the world’s one of the biggest open-source platforms, it has 100 contributors in the developer team, containing more than 430,000 lines of codes.
• Taking 2020 as an exception to the rule, WordPress has helped 128 WordCamps in around 48 countries, involving 1091 sponsors and 2310 speakers in 2017.
• This WP platform has also had 4379 meetups, a surge of 43 percent compared to 2016. Above 99 thousand people attended the meetups which were a whopping rise of 65 percent from 2016. The reason for this upsurge was because of the introduction of the Events widget in the WP 4.8 version.
• Some of the amazing WordPress sites are shown at WordPress.org site. The platform showcases the best sites and the list includes names like the City University of New York, the Obama Foundation, and the Houston Zoo.
• A typical WordPress developer earns an average of $50,365 in the US.
• WordPress has denied around 61 percent of DMCA takedown notices. This has added transparency to functionality, security, and versatility. DMCA notices are filed by individuals or companies if they find any posts on the platform trespassing on intellectual property rights.
• WP has also denied around 65 percent of government information requests. WordPress not only cooperates with the government on important and valid cases but also strongly resists circulating information that puts the blogger’s freedom of expression at stake.
• The major WordPress versions are released after approximately 152 days.
• Most number of downloads on WordPress is done on Wednesdays and least on Fridays.

To sum up, WordPress is one of the most widely known content management systems and blogging platforms.

The above WordPress stats prove that the popularity of this platform is not only because of its simplicity and low costs but also other factors such as a wide range of themes and plugins, security, SEO-friendliness, and language packs availability.

The popular platform has journeyed a long way. It has evolved from basic and simple blogging too to a global phenomenon, endorsed by some of the biggest brands and popular celebrities. The features of WordPress are particularly helpful for small and medium businesses since it allows the use of high-functioning and attractive websites without having an expert developer or big budget.

The shocking WordPress stats provided in the article prove the capacity of this platform and why it has spread to such a large extent in terms of usability, web standards, security, etc. The WordPress community is flourishing at an increasing rate every day.

References

https://www.whoishostingthis.com/compare/wordpress/stats/

https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/wordpress-statistics/#gref

https://digital.com/wordpress-hosting/wordpress-stats/

The post WordPress: How Popular Is It? appeared first on Hospitality Web Design.

You can take the phone book as a model, you can pay year after year for those goods. And instead of having a phone book, we will have a web page with all the available contacts. It is important that you can run that web page so that it is informative and that it connects in the best possible way with the audience.

That is, to have a commercial exhibition within a community that has a global reach. So the most flexible solution is to start that website, you can do it through WordPress. Here we have a large number of very useful add-ons. With them, a very important web developer to apply these supplements to the web page and to be able to do everything we need.

But, how can those web pages get worse to have the phone book electronically? Customers often invest in marketing, because closing the book can be very tricky within the phone book. It doesn’t have to be difficult to switch between different marketers.

So a good web developer will register the domain name within the client’s name. This client will be the owner of the domain and that website, so the developer will offer good advice, will be in charge of doing all the technical work and will make sure everything works correctly.

These companies are going to register a domicile with the client’s name but they have control of the domain.

If the client and the same company separate, the one who will keep the domain is the company itself. If the phone book does this to the customer, it will reinforce your presence on the website. The good news is that customers have a good way to pause.

How To Do It: Everything Step By Step

Hire a web developer

It is important that you find a good web developer and that you get along in the best possible way. You can talk to them about all your goals online. Then you will have to listen, everything we can achieve with your online business. You must calculate the budget there is in terms of both time and money.

Try to rescue your domain name

You must ask for your name within the domain. You have to take into account the costs that are involved in the whole process. If the domain name is valuable, you can keep it and even connect it with another client. If the domain is associated with any company name, it cannot be retained by the company. We may install them to transfer the domain, but if it fails, there is a specific body that is in charge of the supervision to be able to request it. They will be in charge of negotiating the transfer with a mechanism for resolving all disputes.

It is not the best option, because the cost we have is considerable, this will allow you to maintain the domain when the brand is very similar.

If this does not work, you can make a similar domain registration as it will coincide with that brand. It is not a good solution, but it is much faster than making a dispute. A website that is well established to market with the best of phone book companies and that is trying to impose itself.

Get the content from your old phone book company website

Any company that has good web development is going to return the best possible content to your business. When we are going to work with the developer himself, like this, we must ask about the plan in two different possibilities, they are these:

1. When both are going to separate.
2. When the business itself should close.

Both of these issues shouldn’t be difficult to fix.

Those designers are going to work with the specific client and they are going to launch the best project.

Until your business website needs some kind of editing, the next interaction should be planned. This inertia can be continuous. Perhaps another reason to separate maybe this. The commercial relationships that we need will begin, life and sometimes close. We have a section to talk about everything that happens when a specific client wants to move on. Each of the designers or agencies have to have a good plan to know how to get a good start. If this business wants to get out of a relationship, it has to have a plan for how the agency is going to be able to provide good material. This content can be stored on the Dropbox platform with the client or with the designer himself. It is the best option for these media to be either delivered or lost. While the IBM company has had a lot of automation time under its belt, when you hire another company, they may lack that time of experience, structure, and good planning. It has worked for a total of 12 companies related to web design since it began to work in this field in the ’90s. Many of them have already died. If you go under, we will group all the assets and it will be provided to you. You have to keep in mind that if the accounts are up to date, there are no problems to provide all that information. These assets must be ready for delivery at any time. A computer can be very powerful, but it can be vulnerable to a soda can if it falls. So the resolution to this disaster is undoubtedly redundancy, that is, you must have all kinds of backups stored in the cloud or on archived hard drives.

Of course, those assets do not come with an instruction guide. You can wait to work with a new design so that they can evaluate you and know what to work with.

When considering the backup or transfer plan, you can ask them to write everything down in the contract. This is because if you don’t do it in writing, they won’t run it when necessary.

Being able to plan situations before each event is fine, but what if this doesn’t happen? You don’t have to worry. We have a secret weapon for content recovery. It’s an internet file. You can enter there multiple times to have all kinds of customer content on hand and bring it to the present moment. So if the developer you were working with does not give up the website or the specific content, they can help with all this.

When The Burn Stops, The Healing Begin

There is a very important divide between what a good print designer does with the website itself and what can be done for that website. The website can be seen in a good way in the phone book, the key to eas deficiencies are going to affect that visibility. Some of those examples will be shown later. If the website falls too short on these elements, the work that is done to popularize and market that visibility is more difficult to achieve.

Google is one of the most important search engines. But it is now when they have begun to penalize all the websites that are not protected. So if you are going to visit any page that is based on the phone book, you must take into account the lock that is there along with the web address. If it has a crossed-out red line through the lock, this will mean that it is not secure. It will be warned that these users do not disclose information through their contact forms. Google will take the measure of leaving it as far behind as possible in favour of others that are safe.

Your website must be very easy for the Google platform to assimilate. We have different ways of disguising the content, this is called Open Graph. It’s not complicated and if you don’t have all of this, Google, Facebook, Yahoo or Bing, … they have less to work with.

You have to keep everything that has to do with the code as up to date as possible. You MUST list the currency of use that you have in your country to be able to work with it. Each of the search engines will take as elements the keywords, this will indicate whether or not this website is late to use that element.

The Easy Way To Do it

Hand off the above tasks and concerns to a professional firm. Let them handle the domain transfer, the design, the management, the upkeep. If you need help getting your website freed up from the phone book company, let us help. We can do this and do it under one of our management plans to take the stress and concern out of the mix. Get started!

The post When The Phone Book Company Has Your Website appeared first on Hospitality Web Design.

• Technical SEO
• Backlinks to your web pages
• Website speed

Performance or Page Speed is a factor Google and other search engines use to deliver the best content to the end user. If a site takes a long time to load, it reflects poorly on the search engine. Page speeds comes from two elements: the download of the webpage content; and the how hard it is for your web browser to interpret the content and turn it into a sensible looking webpage.

These are some of the issues and ways to improve performance. Some are things that a website owner can directly affect. Some of topics best left up to the pros.

The post Website Page Speed – Why It’s Even More Important in 2022 appeared first on Hospitality Web Design.