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Awesome Motive Acquires SearchWP

Awesome Motive, the company behind MonsterInsights, OptinMonster, WPForms, and several other popular products, has acquired SearchWP, a commercial plugin that enhances WordPress’ search functionality. No changes have been announced for the plugin and Awesome Motive CEO Syed Balkhi says it will be “business as usual” for current customers.

“We have built a lot of internal tools to improve our website search that I’m really looking forward to sharing with the WordPress community,” Balkhi said.

“We will be combining Jon’s vision with our own experience, so you can literally have the best search plugin in the industry without the high costs.”

In 2013, when Jon Christopher launched SearchWP, he quickly carved out a slice of the WordPress search market among early competitors. The freemium model was already popular in those days with plugins like Relevanssi, but Christopher chose to launch SearchWP as a commercial-only product.

“There was already freemium competition, and I felt that the pricing model (which is the same today) was stronger given the product itself,” Christopher said. “I saw the pricing model as something that would help SearchWP stand out, and I also wanted to avoid opening the doors to overwhelming amounts of support requests right from the start.

“I had no idea if SearchWP would be successful given the landscape, I built it first to scratch my own itch while knowing that even if no one bought it, I would 100% use it in my own work, and use it a lot.”

His gamble paid off and the plugin has been used on more than 30,000 WordPress sites. Christopher had one support contractor but otherwise had been running the business alone for the past eight years. WordPress’ growing market share has made one-person plugin businesses difficult to maintain once they become very popular, as seen in the recent sale of ACF to Delicious Brains.

“I was looking ahead and considering what would be best for SearchWP’s customers,” Christopher said. “I want SearchWP to live as long as it possibly can. If I’m by myself it’s a bit of a risk to continue that way as the business continues to grow. I know that I prefer to build things from the ground up, and I also know that I’m not the guy to build (or manage) a team, it’s not my strong suit. Given all of those pieces it was clear to me that it was a good time to consider selling.”

Christopher described the 2013 WordPress ecosystem as more “scrappy,” as developers launched product businesses and worked to figure it out along the way.

“There are pros and cons to an environment like that, but it was fantastic from my perspective,” he said. “Over time that feeling went away as companies grew, matured, and playbooks began to take shape. That cycle has continued over time and especially in the last 18 months we’re getting a look at where WordPress is headed – lots of big players in a really big space.”

For those who are jumping into the waters with a new product business, Christopher underscored the need for strong marketing.

“I think that a lack of serious marketing will in fact be a limiter in today’s WordPress economy,” he said. “Products that have been around a long time have a natural momentum that’s really tough to beat, but that momentum doesn’t come without friction. In order to keep up with where WordPress is going, I do feel like you need assets (and capital) aimed directly and solely at marketing for the long haul.”

Balkhi did not elaborate on Awesome Motive’s immediate plans for the search plugin but said the company will be executing on a 12-month plan to make it easier for beginners and non-technical business owners to set up in less than 10 minutes.

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Gutenberg 11.0 Includes Over 70 Bug Fixes, Continues Improving With WordPress 5.8 Just Two Weeks Away

Gutenberg 11.0 landed yesterday with a pile of changes. The development team has been moving fast, and it shows.

For a two-week cycle, version 11.0 includes an insane number of bug fixes. Contributors squashed over 70 in this release alone. This seems to be in preparation for WordPress 5.8, which is expected to land on July 20. The upcoming block-based Widgets screen had the lion’s share of bugs. However, the block library had nearly two dozen, many of those issues with new theme-related blocks.

The downside of such a massive release is that there are too many features and not enough time to cover them all. I will be cherry-picking some of my favorites, but feel free to dive into the release notes for a complete picture.

Theme and Template-Editing Mode Changes

One of the primary Full Site Editing features making its way to WordPress 5.8 will be disabled by default for most users. In a rare move from the core project, the template editor will be opt-in, at least for users with classic themes. It is opt-out for block themes.

As I wrote last month, until users are on actual block themes, the template editor is “a sort-of-OK-but-kind-of-amazing landing page creator.”

Template-editing is really only as good as the weakest link in the system. This will almost always be the theme over the next few months. Because the template editor is a new feature that directly attempts to overwrite the front-end output, it will always be at odds with many themes that were never designed with it in mind. The opt-in approach is unlikely the best route to mass adoption, but it is in the interest of the user experience.

Making it opt-in also allows theme authors to make template editing a smooth experience. Gutenberg 11.0 introduces a new defaultBlockTemplate editor setting. Theme authors can create the default blocks that users begin with when creating a new template.

WordPress template editor showing a theme-defined block template.
Starting with a custom default block template.

Ideally, this default template should include some base layout components, such as a header, footer, and post/page content. However, themers are free to put their own spin on this.

For more information on creating default block templates, theme authors should read Themes Team rep Carolina Nymark’s overview of WordPress 5.8 theme features.

Media & Text Block: Drag-and-Drop Media Replacement

Media & Text block in the WordPress editor. Screenshot of user dragging a replacement media item into the media column.
Dragging a new media file into the Media & Text block.

Users have long been able to drag and drop an initial image or video into the Media & Text block. However, they were unable to replace it using the same method. Gutenberg 11.0 creates a new “drop zone” over the media column, making it easy to change the media to something new.

The feature already exists with the Cover and Image blocks, so this change brings Media & Text up to date. We probably should have had this feature months ago, but the patch sat in limbo waiting for a code review.

Accessibility: Categories Dropdown Has Label

Screenshot of both the Archives and Categories blocks. The former shows a label to everyone. The latter only shows the label to screen readers.
Label difference between the Archives and Categories blocks.

The development team added a new “Categories” label when the Categories block is shown as a dropdown. This is a welcome improvement to help those using screen-readers better navigate the page.

The problem with this change is the lack of consistency. In Gutenberg 10.8, the team removed the .screen-reader-text class for the Archives block label, making it appear on screen for all users. These types of inconsistencies that seem trivial on the surface tend to pile up, creating code bloat for theme designers in the long run as they try to wrangle them.

I would prefer both labels to be marked as screen-reader text. Regardless of the default, the two should match. Then, throw in an option for the end-user to decide whether to show the label similar to how the Search form handles it.

The Return of Post Classes

Devtools browser feature open, showing post classes for WordPress's Post Template block.
Post classes appear for Post Template block.

For those theme designers who need them, Gutenberg 11.0 brings back post classes. If you are wondering where posts classes had gone, you may not be alone. In the world of blocks, they are not needed as much as they once were. Traditionally, WordPress theme authors used these classes to dynamically change the output of a post based on contexts such as type, format, category, and more.

When the Post Template block (formerly named Query Loop) was introduced, there was a noticeable lack of the traditional classes attached to the wrapper for individual posts. This latest update brings them back.

In the future, block themes will likely rely on these classes less and less. With much of the design configuration moving to theme.json files and user-controlled options, it is probably time to say goodbye to one of the core features of theme design over the past decade. However, it is a comfort to know it is there when needed.

Decimals Allowed in Spacing Controls

For those who are particular about getting their margin and padding just right, they can finally rejoice. Spacing controls now allow for decimal values and not just whole numbers.

In past versions of the plugin, a value such as 1.5 would be rounded up to 2. When used with rem and em units, such rounding created a 50% difference between the intended spacing and reality.

I am happy about this one. It is a fix for one of the tickets I opened (hooray for contributing!). However, I cannot take credit for fixing the problem. That honor goes to Themes Team representative Ari Stathopoulos.

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Using a Session Variable in a MySQL Update statement

Hello, so as the title says, I'm looking to include a Session Variable into a MySQL Update statement. I'm not exactly sure what I'm doing wrong, but I certainly know I am. I'm also fairly new to this, so that may explain it lol! Thanks in advance for your help.

Code:
In the original PHP:

$email = $conn->query("SELECT email FROM memberapplications WHERE ID = " . $_GET["appid"]);
$_SESSION["email"] = $email;

In a redirect PHP:
//There is also connections and stuff above and below, but I don't wanna bore you with that.

$sql = "UPDATE users SET appstatus='2' WHERE email='$email'";

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How to Replace Accented Characters (diacritics) with English letters in Google Sheets

The REMOVE_ACCENTED function for Google Sheets will replace all accented characters in the referenced cell, like the letters è, õ, ā, ĝ and so on with their normal Latin equivalents.

Foreign accented characters in Google Sheets

To get started, make a copy of the Google Sheet, go to the Tools menu, choose Script Editor and copy the entire code to your clipboard.

Now open your own Google Sheet and paste the same code inside the Script editor of your sheet. Save and you should be able to use the REMOVE_ACCENTED function in your own sheets.

Input StringOutput string
A História de Malú e João MiguelA Historia de Malu e Joao Miguel
Símbolo de su unidad y permanenciaSimbolo de su unidad y permanencia
Tomás Gutiérrez AleaTomas Gutierrez Alea
Miguel Ángel Félix GallardoMiguel Angel Felix Gallardo

Internally, this function uses the deburr function of the popular lodash library that converts Latin-1 Supplement and Latin Extended-A letters to basic Latin letters and also removes any combining diacritical marks.

Find and Replace Accented Letters in Spreadsheets

const latinRegEx = /[\xc0-\xd6\xd8-\xf6\xf8-\xff\u0100-\u017f]/g;
const comboRegEx = `[\\u0300-\\u036f\\ufe20-\\ufe2f\\u20d0-\\u20ff]`;

/** Used to map Latin Unicode letters to basic Latin letters. */
const latinUnicodeLetters = {
  // Latin-1 Supplement block.
  '\xc0': 'A', '\xc1': 'A', '\xc2': 'A', '\xc3': 'A', '\xc4': 'A', '\xc5': 'A',
  '\xe0': 'a', '\xe1': 'a', '\xe2': 'a', '\xe3': 'a', '\xe4': 'a', '\xe5': 'a',
  '\xc7': 'C', '\xe7': 'c',
  '\xd0': 'D', '\xf0': 'd',
  '\xc8': 'E', '\xc9': 'E', '\xca': 'E', '\xcb': 'E',
  '\xe8': 'e', '\xe9': 'e', '\xea': 'e', '\xeb': 'e',
  '\xcc': 'I', '\xcd': 'I', '\xce': 'I', '\xcf': 'I',
  '\xec': 'i', '\xed': 'i', '\xee': 'i', '\xef': 'i',
  '\xd1': 'N', '\xf1': 'n',
  '\xd2': 'O', '\xd3': 'O', '\xd4': 'O', '\xd5': 'O', '\xd6': 'O', '\xd8': 'O',
  '\xf2': 'o', '\xf3': 'o', '\xf4': 'o', '\xf5': 'o', '\xf6': 'o', '\xf8': 'o',
  '\xd9': 'U', '\xda': 'U', '\xdb': 'U', '\xdc': 'U',
  '\xf9': 'u', '\xfa': 'u', '\xfb': 'u', '\xfc': 'u',
  '\xdd': 'Y', '\xfd': 'y', '\xff': 'y',
  '\xc6': 'Ae', '\xe6': 'ae',
  '\xde': 'Th', '\xfe': 'th',
  '\xdf': 'ss',
  // Latin Extended-A block.
  '\u0100': 'A', '\u0102': 'A', '\u0104': 'A',
  '\u0101': 'a', '\u0103': 'a', '\u0105': 'a',
  '\u0106': 'C', '\u0108': 'C', '\u010a': 'C', '\u010c': 'C',
  '\u0107': 'c', '\u0109': 'c', '\u010b': 'c', '\u010d': 'c',
  '\u010e': 'D', '\u0110': 'D', '\u010f': 'd', '\u0111': 'd',
  '\u0112': 'E', '\u0114': 'E', '\u0116': 'E', '\u0118': 'E', '\u011a': 'E',
  '\u0113': 'e', '\u0115': 'e', '\u0117': 'e', '\u0119': 'e', '\u011b': 'e',
  '\u011c': 'G', '\u011e': 'G', '\u0120': 'G', '\u0122': 'G',
  '\u011d': 'g', '\u011f': 'g', '\u0121': 'g', '\u0123': 'g',
  '\u0124': 'H', '\u0126': 'H', '\u0125': 'h', '\u0127': 'h',
  '\u0128': 'I', '\u012a': 'I', '\u012c': 'I', '\u012e': 'I', '\u0130': 'I',
  '\u0129': 'i', '\u012b': 'i', '\u012d': 'i', '\u012f': 'i', '\u0131': 'i',
  '\u0134': 'J', '\u0135': 'j',
  '\u0136': 'K', '\u0137': 'k', '\u0138': 'k',
  '\u0139': 'L', '\u013b': 'L', '\u013d': 'L', '\u013f': 'L', '\u0141': 'L',
  '\u013a': 'l', '\u013c': 'l', '\u013e': 'l', '\u0140': 'l', '\u0142': 'l',
  '\u0143': 'N', '\u0145': 'N', '\u0147': 'N', '\u014a': 'N',
  '\u0144': 'n', '\u0146': 'n', '\u0148': 'n', '\u014b': 'n',
  '\u014c': 'O', '\u014e': 'O', '\u0150': 'O',
  '\u014d': 'o', '\u014f': 'o', '\u0151': 'o',
  '\u0154': 'R', '\u0156': 'R', '\u0158': 'R',
  '\u0155': 'r', '\u0157': 'r', '\u0159': 'r',
  '\u015a': 'S', '\u015c': 'S', '\u015e': 'S', '\u0160': 'S',
  '\u015b': 's', '\u015d': 's', '\u015f': 's', '\u0161': 's',
  '\u0162': 'T', '\u0164': 'T', '\u0166': 'T',
  '\u0163': 't', '\u0165': 't', '\u0167': 't',
  '\u0168': 'U', '\u016a': 'U', '\u016c': 'U', '\u016e': 'U', '\u0170': 'U', '\u0172': 'U',
  '\u0169': 'u', '\u016b': 'u', '\u016d': 'u', '\u016f': 'u', '\u0171': 'u', '\u0173': 'u',
  '\u0174': 'W', '\u0175': 'w',
  '\u0176': 'Y', '\u0177': 'y', '\u0178': 'Y',
  '\u0179': 'Z', '\u017b': 'Z', '\u017d': 'Z',
  '\u017a': 'z', '\u017c': 'z', '\u017e': 'z',
  '\u0132': 'IJ', '\u0133': 'ij',
  '\u0152': 'Oe', '\u0153': 'oe',
  '\u0149': "'n", '\u017f': 's'
};

const basePropertyOf = (object) => (key) => object[key];
const characterMap = basePropertyOf(latinUnicodeLetters);

/**
 * Replace accented characters in Google Sheets with English letters.
 *
 * @param {string} input The input string with accented characters.
 * @return The input without accented characters.
 * @customfunction
 */
function REPLACE_ACCENTED(input) {
  if (input && typeof input === "string") {
    return input.replace(latinRegEx, characterMap).replace(comboRegEx, "");
  }
  return input;
}
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Beginner JavaScript Notes

Wes has a heck of a set of “notes” for learning JavaScript. It’s organized like a curriculum, meaning if you teach JavaScript, you could do a lot worse. It’s actually more like 85 really fleshed-out blog posts organized into sections and easily navigable. If you want to be walked through it via video, then buy the course. Smart.

If you’re looking for other curriculum for JavaScript, your best bets are:

Like any other learning experience in life, the best way to learn is multiple angles. If HTML & CSS are more your target, we have a bunch of suggestions there.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

The post Beginner JavaScript Notes appeared first on CSS-Tricks. You can support CSS-Tricks by being an MVP Supporter.

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Cobalt Launches New Penetration Testing API

Cobalt, the Pentest as a Service (PtaaS) company, today announced the launch of its public API. The Cobalt API allows customers to easily integrate their pentest data into other tools within their technology stack, enabling streamlined workflows and holistic analysis of their security program.

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How To Update PHP To The Suggested WordPress Version

Using an outdated version of WordPress core, plugins, or themes puts your site at risk. PHP is no different.

While WordPress technically works with some older versions of PHP, you’re sacrificing performance and compatibility, while opening yourself up to security vulnerabilities by using these.

For safety and stability, always aim to use the WordPress recommended versions of PHP.

In this post, we’ll talk about how to check what version of PHP you are running, how to update your PHP to the recommended version for WordPress, and how a capable hosting provider can take care of these elements for you.

Jump Links for this Article:

Respect for PHP

If you look in your WordPress site folders, you’ll see a lot of PHP files.

Since PHP powers a bulk of the core WordPress software, it’s a highly essential language for the WordPress community.

PHP runs on various platforms (Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, etc.), and is compatible with almost all servers used today (Apache, IIS, etc.).

Not only is it a major part of WordPress, but a major part of the whole web, powering 70% of all websites.

WordPress supports many versions of PHP, some even obsolete, but as a general rule you should use only those with security or stable support.

WordPress core officially supports PHP 5.6.20 to PHP 8.0; however, not all themes or plugins are supported.

WordPress currently works best with the following versions:

  • PHP 8.0
  • PHP 7.4
  • PHP 7.3

WordPress Recommendations

PHP has to be updated on a regular basis, just like WordPress core, themes, and plugins.

With PHP, each version receives support for two years after its initial release, then there is a period of another year where only critical security updates are released, as needed.

After this three year period, that version of PHP is no longer supported.

As of July 2021, the current recommended PHP version for WordPress is 7.4 or greater.

Quality hosting providers will generally require you to use the WP recommended version of PHP in order to use their servers, and will help you modify your site to ensure that the latest version of PHP will not break it.

For example, we’ll refer to ourselves (hey, we’re proud of our hosting!). WPMU DEV Hosting provides your site(s) with the latest sanctioned PHP versions.

Upgrading (or downgrading) to various versions is a simple process, done through our Hub 2.0.

Occasionally, some third party plugins may be out of date and cause issues with the latest version of PHP.

In that case you can look for updates, alternatives, or if necessary, downgrade your PHP version to an older one (as long as it’s still actively supported with security patch releases).

Click here if you’re interested in our full documentation on PHP through managed hosting in WPMU DEV.

PHP Versions WP Pie chart
Puny Helping (of) Pie — A miniscule 0.7% of sites use the most recent version of PHP, while a minimal 36.6% use the recommended version of PHP.

Less reputable, cheap hosts will not take the initiative to encourage you to upgrade your PHP because of the additional cost of support time and resources to help you transition.

Since they don’t want to break your site by updating to newer, recommended versions of PHP, they’ll often leave your site to use outdated versions of PHP and hope it goes unnoticed.

PHP 7.2 made its debut in November 2017. Considering the three year rule, we know it reached its End of Life cycle in November 2020 (as well as the even older PHP versions prior).

This means more than one-third (37.2%) of WordPress sites are currently running versions of PHP that are no longer actively supported.

That’s not the worst of it. Historically, there have been extended periods of time where that number has hovered at and even exceeded two-thirds (66%)! This is problematic for several reasons.

Why You Need to Update PHP

Speed

For one, there are tremendous performance benefits that come with using the latest version.

According to speed tests conducted by Kinsta, across 7 versions of PHP, consider the following stats:

Benchmark results PHP versions (Kinsta)
PHP versions show demonstrable speed differences.

You can see from the above table that with each newer version of PHP, the requests per second get incrementally faster.

Since using the recommended version of PHP takes less time to serve the same number of requests, you can give your visitors a much better user experience.

Kinsta also tested on PHP version 8, and I did want to note the scores for it, as the improvements in speed really continue to trend upwards.

With a benchmark result of 233.40 requests per second, PHP 8.0 takes a giant leap over PHP 7.4, proving to be 18.5% faster.

Step back a few more versions to 7.0, and it actually handles 50% more requests per second, comparatively.

I didn’t include PHP version 8.0 in my chart, because its support in the general WordPress purlieu is very difficult to assess. (WordPress 5.6 is presently considered beta compatible with PHP 8.0.)

Knowing this, please proceed with caution and do thorough testing before upgrading any crucial or client sites to PHP 8.0.

Expense

Maintaining code takes effort, and that effort is multiplied when you need to ensure backward compatibility for additional versions.

There is a collective sigh of relief among overworked theme and plugin developers whenever WordPress bumps up the minimum recommended PHP version, effectively knocking another obsolete version (and all of its associated coding efforts) off the table.

Rather than spending time parsing through the code to ensure that any changes to PHP do not affect it, developers can spend their time adding new features or improving security instead.

Vulnerabilities

Just like plugins, themes, and WordPress core get updates to fix security vulnerabilities, so does PHP.

This is also why using a PHP version that still gets updates is so important; it protects you from vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, XSS and DoS attacks.

According to security vulnerability datasource CVE Details, there were only 2 known vulnerabilities found in PHP in 2021 YTD.

Compare this to the 14 vulnerabilities discovered in 2020, the 23 noted in 2018, and the 105 found in 2016, and you can see why updating can help protect you from many known security exploits.

CVE vulnerabilities in PHP versions.
Number of vulnerabilities per PHP in a given year.

It’s a matter of fact that some hackers look to see what version of PHP you’re running to determine what kind of attack would be effective.

An Aversion to Versions?

The first step in compatibility is knowing what version of PHP your site is using.

You can easily see this information right within the WordPress dashboard.

Go to: Tools > Site Health > Status.

If your site should be using a newer version of PHP, it will be shown under recommended improvement.

If it is, then open the passed tests section to verify. You’ll see that it says Your site is running the current version of PHP, followed by the version number in parentheses.

WP Site Health, status passed tests
The WordPress dashboard Site Health screen reveals your PHP version.

Alternately, you can go to Tools > Site Health > Info > Server from your site Dashboard, to see what version of PHP you’re using.

WP dashboard settings to view PHP version info.

How to Update PHP in WordPress

Once you check to see what version of PHP your hosting server is running, you’ll know if you need to upgrade to the latest version of PHP.

If you do, checking your site’s compatibility with the new version of PHP is imperative. You never want to test major changes like updating your PHP on your live site, because if there are major incompatibilities, you could seriously impede or cripple your site.

For this reason, it’s ideal to create an alternate site where you can test your changes first.

Step 1: Create a Copy of Your Site

Start by getting a copy of your current site. You’ll need all of the files and a copy of the database.

You can do this by using SFTP for your files and exporting a copy of your database using MyPHP.

In some instances, you may be able to use your last backup, if your backups include both the files and the database.

You could lessen the load by using a plugin made specifically for this task. Duplicator is a free plugin offered on WP.org that has positive reviews.

If you want the most streamlined, painless process for duplicating your site, and you’re already using WPMU DEV as your hosting provider, it’s your lucky day!! Cloning is already a part of your membership!

With a few simple points and clicks through our Hub 2.0, you’ll have fully configured, deployment ready WP Sites in mere minutes.

Not already hosting with us but want to get on the bandwagon?! No problem, just click here.

For more details, see our documentation on cloning sites through WPMU DEV hosting.

Step 2: Create a Local or Staging Site

Once you have a copy of your site, you’ll need to set up a testing environment. You can either use a local environment or set up a staging environment if your host allows it*.

We have a great post on how to set up XAMPP on your local computer if you need help setting up your local environment.

Once your testing environment is set up, you can add the files and database from the previous step to your testing environment, so you have an exact replica of your live site.

After you have a copy of your site in your testing environment set up, you’re ready to upgrade the PHP version of your testing site.

*Hosting through WPMU DEV includes the ability to create a staging environment, and it is a breeze to do. Click here for details.

PHP QC

Now comes the fun part, and by fun, I mean the tedious task of QC-ing.

You’ll need to go through your test site to make sure that nothing is broken.

Pay careful attention to the critical functionality of your site. Check out processes, newsletter signups, comments, web forms, navigation, and all of the other elements that contribute to expected usability and visitor engagement.

You want to catch any issues before they have a chance to wreak havoc on your live site and cause a bad user experience for your visitors or clients.

Handy Tools

There are some tools that can assist with the QC process, for devs and non-devs alike. Any issues discovered that are outside your scope of knowledge can be intelligently relayed to support.

Error Log Monitor – This plugin will display a list of PHP issues as an error log in your WordPress dashboard.

WP_DEBUG – Not a plugin, rather a PHP constant (aka, a permanent global variable), this can be used to trigger debug mode throughout WordPress.

Turning on WP_DEBUG will allow you to see the PHP failure types so that you can fix them in your code. It also allows you to see any deprecated functions that are running on your site (ie, those that exist in WP but are no longer the standard way to perform a particular task).

To turn on debugging, head to your WordPress install files, open the wp-config.php file (located in the root directory), and add the following line of code near the bottom:

Loading gist 1b61c6ea012f69190264e22782c66824

If that line of code already exists but says false, change it to true.

WP_DEBUG set to true
Make sure this code line in PHP matches the one in your file.

Check out this article from our blog, for a more indepth look at using WP_DEBUG.

Fixing Issues

If a plugin or theme is causing issues, work out the issue first on your test site, and find a suitable alternative that is compatible with the latest version of PHP.

Once you’ve found a solution, head over to your live site and make the changes there.

Smush showing version of PHP
PeeHP the supported version when considering plugins for your site.

When you’re looking for a suitable plugin in the WordPress repository, remember to check what versions of PHP are supported.

Resources

Once you’ve worked through all of the bugs and kinks with compatibility, you can either push staging to live, or make any necessary changes to the live site, and then change the PHP version on your live site.

This process will vary from host to host, but will most likely involve changing a setting in your hosting cPanel. Some shared hosts will not let you access this setting, in which case you’ll need to reach out to them for assistance.

Here’s a list with instructions on how to update the PHP version for a collection of popular hosts, including WP Engine, Pantheon, Kinsta, Pagely, Bluehost, Hostgator, GoDaddy, and more.

Hosting with WPMU DEV includes our Hub interface, which greatly streamlines changing your PHP version.

Accessing PHP settings via WPMU DEV’s Hub.

If you prefer a simple solution with a clean UI for checking or updating PHP versions, give WPMU DEV hosting a try, and take one more task off your plate.

PHP Host Partnering

Would you rather be in a Pretty Horrible Position, or a Professionally Happy Place? Rhetorical question… I really just wanted to play with that acronym. :)

Cheap, shared hosting has convinced a lot of people that hosting websites is a simple and straightforward process. The truth is, there is a lot that goes into maintaining your site files and database.

Keeping all of your software up-to-date is one of the tasks that your host can and should help you with.

If they’re unwilling to help you, or hide versions to keep you in the dark, that’s a red flag that you can do much better, and should seriously consider switching hosts.

At WPMU DEV, our hosting (backed by Digital Ocean) leads the industry in value.

Not only do we help you update your PHP version, we also provide a big ole goody bag of features, such as security, caching configuration, uptime monitoring, dedicated IP, nightly backups, free & automated migration, website analytics, and more.

If you ever need help on compatibility issues with your themes or plugins, or have questions about anything WP, our top-rated support team is ready to jump in and assist, 24/7.

Also, every hosting plan is covered by our full 30-day money back guarantee (we’ll happily refund 100% of your money if you decide you don’t like it).

Whether you host with us or elsewhere, keep in mind how much value your host can and should provide.

Choose a company you can trust to take care of those automation and update tasks, like keeping your PHP version current with WP recommendations.

Don’t let subpar hosting steal your focus. You should be able to devote your time and energies to the finer details; making your sites shine with the talents that set you apart from the competition.

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The Beginner’s Guide to Company Culture

When you hear “company culture,” it’s easy to picture office snacks and free kombucha on Fridays. Unsurprisingly, there’s much more to company culture than meets the eye. The issue? It’s notoriously difficult to create and maintain. This guide will walk you through the basics of company culture and specific strategies and tools you can use to establish a culture that drives growth.

What is Company Culture?

Shared goals, attitudes, actions, and values are what define a company’s culture. It helps to think of it as the soul and personality of a business. It doesn’t matter if you run a business of two or are the head of an organization 5,000 strong—company culture is a big differentiator for any business that plans to be around for a long time.

Depending on how it’s managed, company culture can play a decisive role in the ultimate success or failure of a business—which is why it’s so essential that companies spend time thinking deeply about getting it right.

In many cases, company culture is a driving factor behind employee retention.

The Basics of Company Culture

Before we get into ways to improve company culture, it’s important to understand some of the basic puzzle pieces that come together to create it.

A Clear Mission and Vision

Due to the impressive list of benefits that an organization’s culture can bring, focusing on creating and establishing a healthy company culture is an intelligent long-term business strategy. To do this, though, your company first needs a clear mission and vision.

Your mission informs the shared values and goals of a culture that retains and draws in talent. The mission and vision of a company are crucial to what direction it takes and the growth it sees.

Going through the process of forming your company’s mission and vision statements could be its own book. First, however, in relation to company culture, it’s worth asking a few pointed questions:

  • What steps is our company taking to bring its vision to life?
  • Is our mission illustrated through our company guidelines, rules, and responsibilities?
  • Are these two things clearly communicated to every single employee? If so, how? If not, what specific steps need to be taken for better communication?

Clarity will ultimately lead to better decision-making. With a foundation of a clear mission and vision, you can start setting goals and establishing strategies to cultivate the culture you want to create.

Traditions

Tradition and culture are closely related. If one suffers, inevitably so does the other. Traditions are an important part of your company’s culture because it helps shape your company’s identity through the employee experience.

They can take many forms and are informed by the uniqueness of your business rather than a one-size-fits-all playbook. For example, while an SMB can celebrate individual employee birthdays, larger organizations might opt for scheduling a quarterly outing for each department.

Are you incorporating employee-enriching traditions into your day-to-day operations? One of the best ways to improve traditions within your company is to clearly define what you want to achieve through them.

For instance, ask yourself, are your goals to:

  • Make your employees feel cared for and supported or like they belong to a bigger mission-driven quest?
  • Establish an environment of safe and rule-abiding team members?
  • Encourage innovation and out-of-the-box thinking?
  • Increase the collaborative spirit within your organization?

Deciding what you want to achieve through traditions first then working backward can be an effective way to pinpoint practices worth keeping that go beyond basic company rules and guidelines.

Technology

Though technology might not be what comes to mind when you think of company culture, it’s increasingly playing a part in how employees relate and communicate with each other. Especially with the ongoing changes that enable companies to be more flexible in allowing employees to work and communicate from home.

If you’re a company that values and foster’s innovation, you’d be remiss not to ensure your teams are equipped with the technology that eases communication, collaboration, and processes. This rings true for just about any organization that cares about its employees’ experiences and work environment.

In essence, the technology you use can have a pervasive impact on your business’s unique “expressions” and “personality.” For example, if your company’s systems aren’t integrated or equipped to communicate, employees will have a harder time hitting goals and maintaining a collaborative spirit.

Riding on that topic, below we go through a few tools you can use to improve company culture.

5 Tools to Improve Company Culture

There are a variety of ways to approach how you improve your culture. Here, we look at a few tools that can make that process easier.

Culture Amp

Over 4,000 companies, including Etsy, Slack, and Mcdonalds, use Culture Amp to easily and intelligently collect employee feedback. The platform is designed to improve engagement, development, retention, and performance through timelines, development-focused reviews, and goal tracking tools.

How are your initiatives performing? How do employees really feel about working at your company? Are your turnover rates improving? Who are your highest performers, and why? These are all questions you can answer once you put Culture Amp to work. Feedback collection is an integral part of improving your company culture. It starts with using the right tools first.

Performance Culture

As the name suggests, Performance Culture is built to create a culture of inspired performance and employee engagement. Through performance reviews, check-ins, recognition systems, and employee engagement surveys, performance culture lets you assess each of your employees and where they perform best.

Establishing performance expectations and behaviors can be a challenging task to overtake. But doing this can get you closer to aligning your employees to your mission and vision—which is what Performance Culture was built to do. Not only that, but it also comes with built-in coaching tools that help you shape how your employees perform as you reward high achievers.

Explorance

Successfully managing your employee’s experience is without a doubt a big part of creating and maintaining company culture. Explorance sets out to do this by providing you with tools to hire and manage for success from the beginning. Tools to help you through the recruitment process make sure that you’re onboarding the right people in the first place.

Additional tools like learning evaluations, competency assessments, and feedback management systems all come together to help you lead with a unified approach to culture. In addition, its employee journey mapping capabilities and pre-built reports and dashboards make sure you’re getting a bigger picture of what’s really going on in your organization’s day-to-day. And how you can improve it.

Basecamp

Company culture isn’t only reserved for employees that work in-house. Remote or hybrid teams also need and benefit from an established culture where they feel they can communicate without ceremony or red tape regardless of where they are. Basecamp was built with such teams in mind.

When you onboard with Basecamp, you get access to a slew of tools that move your company forward as it tackles goals and executes projects. However, three specific tools help establish and maintain a culture of open communication: its message board, check-in automation, and chat features. Each of these features allows your employees to freely share feedback, announce milestones, chat casually, and stay on track with automated check-in questions. Learn more here.

Motivosity


Motivosity is built around the idea that your employees are motivated to do their best work once they feel heard through constructive relationships and a sense of belonging. The trick is in cultivating an environment where that’s the reality. Then, Motivosity brings your employees together through tools that connect them.

Managers are better able to manage their employees through priority tracking, the ability to conduct better one-on-one meetings, and the ability to create custom surveys. Motivosity connects four of its products, Connect, Recognize, Lead, and Listen, to help you create a culture where employees feel recognized for their work and heard when there’s a pressing concern. It uses the power of public milestones, awards, and badges to help bring out the best from your teams.

3 Tricks To Improve Company Culture

You know the essential components that create culture and tools to help you execute and improve that culture. Below are a few suggestions for making your company culture the best it can be.

Collaborate With HR

HR isn’t only good for hiring, onboarding, and protecting the interests of your organization. They can also play an important role in setting the tone of your culture as early as the vetting and hiring process.

To collaborate with HR, include them as part of your culture-setting process. For instance, empower them to weed out candidates that aren’t a company culture fit once they learn about the type of culture you’re looking to establish, rather than just selecting employees by an isolated set of skills that fit any given job description. Moreover, HR can encourage communication between employees and managers by making the process easier and more accessible.

Overall, HR should play an active role in setting and maintaining company culture if it’s treated as an integral stakeholder in the planning and execution throughout the company. It starts with setting the example of inclusion from the beginning.

Work-Life Flexibility

Yet another universally flattering strategy that improves company culture is establishing more work-life balance by being a more flexible organization. The pandemic has brought with it a few universal lessons. One of those is that employees not only highly appreciate but need work-life flexibility.

This can take many forms. For example, are you allowing your employees to work from home? Are your dress codes or scheduled office hours less stringent? Are employees freely able to take time off for significant life events?

Going back to the drawing board to revise how exactly you’re flexible with your employees can pay generous dividends in the long run through increased productivity, higher employee satisfaction, and higher retention rates. Both data and feedback help you learn how employees feel cared for, supported, engaged, and included the most.

Gather Feedback and Data

You don’t want to define your company culture in an echo chamber. Gathering candid feedback and relevant data points on the performance of your culture efforts from employees and managers can be a game-changer. Unfortunately, this can be an area of your culture-setting process that’s easy to overlook.

But you shouldn’t. Not if you want to create an environment where employees are generally satisfied and want to do more to move your organization forward.

Whether it’s by surveying, a suggestion box, one-on-one assessments, or other means of collection, gathering feedback can help you through the iterative process as you get rid of what isn’t working and try new and novel ideas. Data can make it easy to pinpoint where you’re falling short and which efforts produce stellar results.

What to Do Next

Establishing a company culture that drives growth is done by being proactive about creating an environment that supports the shared values, attitudes, and actions you want to uphold. Though there isn’t a one-size-fits-all blueprint for creating your own company’s culture, there are steps you can take in the right direction that’ll help shape it unique to you. Hopefully, this guide gave you additional insight into the how and why of company culture.

However, there is always more to learn. For more, I’ve created a guide on how to make your company blog relevant. It goes through why it’s crucial for companies to establish a relevant blog (which could also inform your company culture efforts) and actionable tips to make it happen.

Does your brand have a compelling story? Here’s how to leverage it to drive sales. If you’re struggling with conceptualizing an interesting story, it’s an excellent read that walks you through the process of crafting a compelling story that drives results for your business.

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Complete Guide to Landing Pages

A landing page, simply put, is any page that gets traffic from anywhere other than the same pages on your site — hence the name landing.

It’s most commonly associated with pay-per-click ads like Google Adwords, where you can drive traffic to a specific URL that has been designed to receive those visitors.

The problem with most landing pages is that they’re created around broad categories like “jeans” instead of being more specifically focused like “women’s skinny jeans” or “juniors boot-cut jeans”.

These days, people intuitively understand that when searching the web, the site whose description most closely matches their search is likely to be the winner.

And when you’re paying for clicks — you’re losing money every time a customer goes elsewhere.

Does Keyword Relevancy Matter?

You may think that once you’ve caught the user’s attention (and their click) with a highly targeted ad — that your job is done.

Retailer California Closets wanted to test this theory out for themselves.

Would an ad-specific landing page outperform a more generic one?

Although it’s unclear what the original ad text was, one could theorize that it was “get organized” — which then leads people directly into the site with organization tips and products.

The ad-specific landing page outperformed the generic page by increasing lead form submissions by 115%

With this in mind, a landing page is generally your first and only opportunity to make a first impression with your customer. It’s your chance to start a conversation, ask a question, invite discussion and welcome clicks on into your site. For many sites, particularly those in high-competition areas, it may be your only chance to reel in a visitor and convince them that your offer is worth their time and attention.

That means you simply can’t afford to get it wrong.

Fortunately, setting up and using landing pages in your overall marketing plan is relatively easy. It’s just a matter of creating a web page that combines all the components needed to make a page successful for your specific customer.

Of course, entire books have been written on the subject, and it’s still very much an evolving science. But this guide will work hard to dispel the myths, lift up your conversion rates, and get you on the right track.

Is My Home Page a Landing Page?

It is if your visitors type in your URL directly. But this is likely because they’re familiar with your brand and site already — not that they just happened upon your site mysteriously. Typically, your home page is a more broad, generic introduction to what you have to offer, rather than being narrowly focused to one particular topic.

Many marketers mistakenly direct pay-per-click traffic to their home page, thinking that their visitors will “figure out” where they want to go. Bad news — they won’t. There’s just too much competition, too many opportunities to comparison shop, and limited time to do so. And all these reasons are why we create landing pages — to simplify and streamline the entire process.

Why Should I Use Landing Pages?

Landing pages let you narrow your focus and remove the clutter from your pages that could distract your visitor from taking the action you want them to take. It allows you greater control to direct them and help them find what they’re looking for much faster — and this, in turn can ripple out to affect your search engine rankings too.

Even if people have landed on your page and know exactly what they’re looking for — they want to take the quickest action possible to get results. This was exactly what Time Doctor, a productivity software tool wanted to test in their own landing page. They created a long, detailed page which covered all the major features of their program (see screenshot) and tested it against a much shorter, single “screen-width” page:

The shorter version converted 36% more customers than the longer version. However, it’s worth noting that not all short copy pages will outperform their longer counterparts. Depending on the item being sold — a higher price-point product would likely have required a more in depth showcase of features and benefits.

So What Does This Mean for My Search Engine Ranking?

Since search engines like Google are all about relevancy, they want people to find what they’re looking for. If your site does a good job of that in a straightforward way, then chances are, you’ll steadily outrank your competitors for being the answer to the searcher’s needs — it’s a win-win!

Good landing pages, in turn, can improve your conversion rate — which is the percentage of visitors that ultimately took the action you wanted. These people have been converted from visitors to interested shoppers to potential buyers and hopefully, lifelong customers.

Landing pages are like signposts that direct buyers at each stage to take that next all-important step.

When is the Best Time to Use a Landing Page?

Not all pages are cut out to be landing pages. That’s why, ideally you’ll want to use them:

  • As destinations in your pay-per-click ads – Create a different landing page for each keyword and group so that you can test, track and see how each one performs.
  • To create anticipation about a product launch- Landing pages are a great way to promote a “coming soon” teaser — even if the product isn’t finished yet.
  • To segment your offers – No single offer will appeal to everyone. Some people prefer printable coupons, while others would rather redeem promo codes online. Landing pages can help you steer visitors exactly where you want.
  • To segment your audience – Just like your offers, not every visitor should be directed to a generic “one-size-fits-all” landing page. Attract different groups with pages tailored specifically to them and their needs.

How Do Landing Pages Fit In with Other Online Marketing Strategies?

Landing pages aren’t meant to replace any other forms of marketing, but rather add to them.

Unlike most other marketing strategies, however, landing pages follow a keep-it-simple approach. When it comes to design, content and other aspects of a page — less is more. This means that it’s not uncommon to see landing pages with the entire site navigation stripped away so that few elements remain on the page.

It’s important to understand the role that landing pages play in your overall marketing plan:

  • Landing Pages and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Landing pages are designed to go hand-in-hand with search engine optimization. Any optimization strategies that you employ across your site should also be used on your landing pages as they can only benefit from it.
  • Landing Pages and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising – Landing pages and Pay-Per-Click advertising go together perfectly, and landing pages being used as destinations for PPC ads are one of their most common and most popular uses. But you should also know that landing pages can be used just as successfully with organic search engine rankings — they’re not reserved solely for paid ads.
  • Landing Pages and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) – It’s a very common misconception that conversion optimization (the act of getting your customers to take the action you want them to take on your site) is done solely by landing pages. Conversion optimization involves many more aspects — but landing pages are a strategic part, and just one of the ways you can convince customers to come further into your site and interact with it.
  • Landing Pages and Social Media Marketing -Landing pages also work well with social media, and many businesses have one or more pages for their fans on Facebook, Twitter and other social sites they frequent.As you’ll see, landing pages give you an easy way to create a customized destination for every customer segment, marketing campaign, special offer or pay-per-click add. As such, they’re immensely powerful.But, as with all great marketing strategies, there are some things that they can and cannot do. Let’s take a closer look:

Landing Pages are NOT:

  • Long sales letters – This is not your chance to go into great detail about how great your product is, but rather to provide the user with exactly what they’re looking for — immediately. Remember, relevancy is key here. If they want to know more, they’ll come back.
  • “Name Squeeze” pages – These are part of an old internet marketing tactic that presented users with a choice: enter your name and email to get a freebie, or go elsewhere. Landing pages are more evolved than this.
  • An opportunity to push a hard sell – This is also not the time to pressure your buyers. For many people, this is the first impression and likely the only one. You want them to take the next step into your funnel — you don’t want to shove them into it!
  • A once-and-done strategy – Landing pages need to evolve and change as the market and demands change. You should always be testing and refining your message so that it is more relevant, more helpful and more on target with what your customer wants. This is a long but thoroughly rewarding process as it gets you closer to achieving your overall marketing goals.

The Problem with Most Websites

The issue that most websites have is that they are built from either a design or development perspective.

With a design perspective, there’s an emphasis on the aesthetic. A great deal of attention is paid to typography, color, consistent branding, the tone and “voice” of the content and other creative areas.

With a development perspective, there emphasis is on the platform. How is content published and managed? What kinds of content are accepted? How will the platform evolve as needs change?

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with either of these points of view, they’re missing the marketing element which should be at the foundation of any site designed to sell. Because we’re so caught up in design/development changes and their various stages, we often forget to put the customer first and ask — what are they looking for? And more importantly, how can we deliver that experience and make it flawless at every step of the way? This is where the design and development points come in.

Case Study: How Much Should You Include on a Page?

The question then becomes — what’s the right amount of content and design on a page? Confidis, a French credit loan service, tested two variations of its landing pages — one which removed images, navigation and even customer support links, and the other which included all of these elements:

Here was the original page: (Source: WhichTestWon)

The updated Confidis landing page without navigation, images or support links

The results were astonishing — a full 48% more people signed up as a result of viewing the shorter, “stripped out” landing page. It was shorter, more compact and all of the information the user needed loaded “above the fold” — within the first 1/3rd of screen space.

These are just a few of the ways that a reworking of existing screen space, and prioritizing different elements can have a dramatic effect on increasing conversion rates and bringing in more customers with less effort, time and money spent.

But how do these changes affect search engine optimization? You might be surprised to learn that landing pages aren’t designed to replace SEO at all.

SEO vs. Landing Pages

Search engine optimization is a component of landing pages — but it isn’t designed to compete with them. Now that Google is hiding keyword data — marketers can no longer put as much of an emphasis on keyword research as they once did. Now, the strategy shifts from pure optimization to pure intent.

“What did the customer have in mind when they found our page?”

The first step, therefore is to bridge the gap between what the user’s intent is, versus your landing page. As an example, someone searching for “cheap flights to Paris” may only be in the starting phases of planning their vacation, whereas someone searching for “cheap flights to Paris from Denver in May” may have their calendar all planned out and might optionally be looking for car rentals, hotels and activities to do during that time.

That’s the difference — and power — of intent.

Once the user determines that your page most closely matches their question or issue — they’ll give you a click. But your job isn’t finished yet.

Web users are, by nature, “scanners” rather than readers. They don’t have time to read all that content you worked so hard on writing. They want to know — at—a—glance, whether or not your page is going to meet their expectations. They’re also secretly judging you, asking themselves, “Can I trust this advice? Is it safe? What else should I know about this?”

Matching Headlines with Search Queries

One of the most important steps that you can take to improve both your landing page conversion rate and your search engine optimization is to match headlines with your user’s search query.

In this example from Search Engine Watch, the search phrase was best health insurance plans for single men. The resulting first ranked entry was the Ask Men website, with the title “best health insurance plans”.

This communicates two points — that the site is a recognized authority and it likely has the answer the user is searching for. It’s also easy to visually scan and understand within seconds — all things that searchers want:

The AskMen homepage explores the best insurance plans for single men — its headline is right on target with the searcher’s query

The page above could do with a lot less clutter — but considering that their galleries and advertising are the biggest money-makers for the site, rather than the articles, it still does a good job balancing out the user’s inquiry with what it needs to keep earning profit.

Now that you understand how landing pages are different from other marketing methods — the question you should be asking is “what do my users want from my landing page?” They won’t readily tell you, but enough marketing tests and psychological profiles have been done to tell us which types of pages typically perform best no matter what the user is looking for:

Headlines with Direction

Users want to be told where to go, what to do, and how to do it. That’s why the best performing landing pages have a clear, concise headline that immediately speaks to the reader’s wants, fears or needs. Here’s just such a headline from Carelogger, a diabetes tracking system that instantly addresses the user’s concerns:

Anyone struggling with diabetes wants to keep themselves in better shape and keep their blood sugar on target— and by highlighting what it tracks, as well as the words “Optimal Health”, Carelogger was able to increase their conversion rate by 31% because they matched their headline to what their audience wanted.

Clear, Concise Language

The Encyclopedia Britannica was able to boost their conversion rates by an astonishing 103% just by adapting their copy to include everyday language which included bullet points that highlighted the best reasons to buy now:

Apple’s marketing team are masters at “less is more” when it comes to selling some of their most powerful benefits. How would you describe something as complex as Siri in just a few words?

One sentence. Unlimited possibilities.

Focus on the Customer

People visiting your landing pages want to know that they’re important and valued. Using self-centered language like “I” and “we” gives the impression that you only care about yourself or your business/solutions rather than the customer.

Email management service AwayFind once used the headline “Let us find urgent messages” — but in a test, they replaced it with “Let urgent emails cut through the clutter and find YOU”. Not only does this sound much less “stalker-ish” and give less of an impression that the company decides what’s urgent or not — but it puts the user in a position of control and convenience.

As a result, AwayFind increased signups by 91% — a remarkable achievement by any measurement.

Be Trustworthy

Adding security seals, such as what Mint.com employs on their page, ensures that your personal and financial data is safe with them — and that they have the third-party credentials to back up their promise:

Now let’s move on to some specific examples of different types of landing pages that convert.

6 High Converting Types of Landing Pages

There are actually many different types of landing pages—each is ideal for a different situation in a different business.

If you understand what each type of landing page consists of, why it’s effective in specific situations, and how to make them, you’ll be able to use the right landing page for the right job.

And that’s exactly what I’m going to show you with the following 6 types of landing pages.

1. Product not quite ready? Use a “Coming soon” landing page

One big mistake that you can make is to not promote a product ahead of time.

Just because a product isn’t fully developed doesn’t mean that people wouldn’t want to hear about it and get notified when it’s ready.

If your product presents a unique solution, your target audience is going to do whatever they can to get their hands on it, whether it’s now or in the near future.

Now, if you promote a product before it’s ready, you can’t send people to a sales page that doesn’t exist.

Instead, you should send them to a “coming soon” landing page.

These are becoming increasingly popular as companies recognize how effective they can be.

Essentially, you want to create a simple landing page that makes it clear that the product is coming soon and that allows the visitor to opt in to get updates on the product.

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This way, the marketing team isn’t just twiddling their thumbs while the product guys are at work.

Additionally, this type of landing page gives you really good validation.

If you’re getting terrible conversion rates from targeted traffic, then no one is interested in the product. You can save yourself a lot of time and money by either scrapping the product or taking it in a different direction.

The other benefit is a bit more obvious: you have a list of qualified leads.

When you do launch your product, it won’t be to an empty room. You can get your first wave of orders almost immediately, which will give you the feedback you need to refine the product.

Keys to an effective “coming soon” page: This type of landing page isn’t terribly difficult to create, but you still need to make sure you include all the most important elements.

I’m about to go over all the elements with you. They should all be included when possible, although not in any specific order.

First is the product itself. Visitors need to know what the page is about. In the example above, the product is mentioned “briefly” in the second largest line. It doesn’t need to be huge, but visitors should understand that you’re developing an actual product.

Next, make it clear that the product isn’t ready. This should be one of the largest parts of the page.

On top of that, you need to specify when the product will be ready.

If you’re not sure, you can be a bit vague and say something like “coming Winter 2016.” However, it’s better to get specific when possible. If you can, add a countdown to the page:

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Finally, it’s absolutely crucial that you clearly sum up what your product has to offer.

In one or two sentences, describe what your product is and how it can help your target audience. This should be one of the main focal points on the page.

For example, on the coming soon page you see below, it’s clear that “shopidex” is a community specifically created for small business owners looking for growth.

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Visitors know whether they are in that target market and can easily decide whether they’re interested in that type of product.

You can expand past those few sentences if you like, but you don’t have to unless you have a rather complex product.

Finally, you need an opt-in, and you should also make it clear what your visitors are opting in for, e.g., “enter your email to be notified when the product is ready.”

Tools to help you make a “coming soon” page easily: While “coming soon” pages are simple enough that they could be built from scratch, you really don’t need to.

There are many tools that have these types of templates. You simply click on the “coming soon” template, then click on each piece of text, and edit it however you like.

One option is Kickoff Labs, which has 20 different themes for “coming soon” pages. It isn’t free, however:

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Perhaps the most popular landing page creator is Unbounce, and they have a decent selection of attractive “coming soon” page templates:

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Again, it’s not a free tool, but it’s easily worth the money if you regularly create landing pages.

Another solid option is Lander, which has a good collection of “coming soon” templates.

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The tool you use doesn’t really matter as long as you understand the principles we went over in this section.

2. How to incorporate video into an effective landing page

If you have a unique and potentially complex product, it can be hard to convey everything within a short page.

One great option is to include a video on the landing page and make it the primary element. You can still have text explaining the product and its benefits, but that’s included afterwards.

Here’s an example of this type of landing page on Crazy Egg:

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The video is the sole focus of the page. You could have text beside it as well, and even a button, but the video should stand out so that visitors understand that they should watch it.

Components of an effective explainer video: Videos can be a great tool on landing pages because very few people will scroll down a long page of text. However, a large percentage of them will watch a 1-2 minute video.

It also makes it difficult for them to skip past an important point by accident as you usually have their full attention as they watch.

But putting up just any video obviously isn’t enough.

A bad video will result in a bad conversion rate, just as a great video will result in a great conversion rate.

There are two main aspects of an effective video that you need to try to achieve.

The first is quality.

Videos have come a long way in recent years, and viewers expect professionally made videos.

This means:

  • no blurriness
  • good lighting
  • no background noises or echoes
  • no stuttering or unclear speech

on top of other things.

Unless you happen to have the knowledge and experience to produce a video like that, you’re going to need professional help (more on that in a minute).

The second main aspect is a compelling story.

People associate videos with entertainment. You have 1 or 2 minutes to tell a short, compelling story about why your product is important and why it’s awesome.

It doesn’t need to be complex, but you want to introduce your product, highlight the most important features, and show all the ways the viewer could benefit from them.

If you feel like you struggle with this aspect of videos, read these articles I’ve written in the past:

4 steps to create an explainer video: If you’re still with me, you probably have a good idea in mind for using a video on a landing page.

All that remains is to know exactly what to do to actually make one.

Step 1 is to decide on a budget. Quality videos often cost more than $1,000 per minute of video.

Remember that quality always comes first, so if you have a limited budget, make your video shorter instead of cutting corners on the creation.

Step 2 then, of course, is to hire a freelance explainer video creator. You can find these on any major freelance site (like Upwork or Freelancer) just by searching for keywords such as “explainer video” or “product video”:

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Again, you typically get what you pay for. Don’t cheap out unless you have no other options.

Alternatively, you can use a specialized marketplace for video creators like Animation Explainer Videos.

Step 3 is to work with your freelancer to develop a video outline and script. You could do this yourself to save a bit of money if needed.

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Step 4 is to simply wait for your freelancer to create the video, give them feedback for edits, and then publish the video.

If you’ve never created a video, this might seem overwhelming. Just break it down into small steps, and you’ll see that it’s fairly easy.

3. Selling a complex product? Highlight its features

If you have a complex product, creating a video is one way to convey all its features.

However, there are drawbacks of videos. For one, they are much harder to edit than text and images.

Second, not everyone likes video. Those people would rather read, so it almost always makes sense to have text on the page anyway.

Finally, Google can’t index videos well, so if you want your landing page to rank for any terms in the search engine, you’d better have a decent amount of text.

If you have a product with complex features, you’re not just solving one problem—you are solving many with your product.

There’s no way to concisely explain all those benefits in a few sentences.

If you try to, you might end up confusing visitors who are looking for one specific solution that your product provides, but not the others.

So, what’s the solution?

It’s to create sections on your landing page, one for each main feature.

The order is important. You want to order them from most commonly sought after to least sought after.

Here’s what I’m talking about: Aweber landing page has clear sections (with differently colored backgrounds) for different purposes.

The top section focuses on the 3 main components of Aweber’s software (they jump out in blue bolded text):

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The next section has a testimonial.

The page continues on, and you go through a few more sections that highlight different features and benefits of the product.

For example, further down is a section that highlights how easy it is to integrate the product with other popular applications:

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You don’t necessarily have to have differently colored backgrounds, but there should be clear divides for each section.

Explain each feature in plain language: One important aspect of creating a section for all the features of your product that is often ignored is the language you use.

It’s not enough to simply list the feature; you need to describe it in simple terms—those that your customers would use themselves.

Despite having a huge customer base and complex products, Hubspot still does a fantastic job of this.

Look at this example from one of their landing pages for their Sidekick tool:

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In particular, notice how clear each section is.

From the text color and size to the images and center dots, it’s clear where each section begins and ends.

Then, look at the language they use.

For example:

Sidekick shows you relevant details about your contacts…email opens, links to social profiles, and more.

Many companies would have written something like this instead:

Sidekick shows you insights into your customers’ web presence. Improve your demographic information collection and message targeting easily.

I would bet quite a bit of money that you’ve read something like that on a landing page before.

It leaves you scratching your head, saying “huh?”

While making your product sound complicated might seem like a good way to justify its cost, using vague, high-level language actually has the opposite effect.

Use simple and concise language, similar to your audience’s.

4. Stop selling to cold traffic, and use a lead generating landing page instead

Remember that landing pages can be used in almost every step of your sales funnel.

They are optimized for conversions…of any kind.

But in order for them to work effectively, your landing page visitors need to be in the right place in the buying process.

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Even the best landing page is going to struggle to sell a product if the visitor has never heard of it or your brand.

However, that very same landing page could have an amazing conversion rate when the visitors already know and like your brand. It could be even better if they’re really struggling with the problem your product solves.

Those people who’ve never heard of you, your product, or your website are called “cold traffic.”

The others, with whom you’ve touched base before are considered “warm traffic” and are much more likely to convert.

Is this really a landing page problem?

While at first it might seem like a traffic problem, it is a problem that can be solved with landing pages.

Instead of sending cold traffic directly to one of your landing pages that sells a product, you send them to an earlier in your sales funnel landing page.

Forget about asking them to do something big like pull out their wallets to buy something. Let’s get them on an email list first.

Once you get them to subscribe, you can start sending them emails and building a relationship. And eventually, you send them to that product landing page.

Starting your sales funnel with a landing page: A large percentage of highly successful businesses use this strategy. I urge you to consider it.

For example, Unbounce is arguably the biggest provider of landing page creation tools there is. They’ve done extensive testing to ensure that their landing pages have the lowest bounce rate possible (and highest conversion rate).

That applies to their templates for sale as well as to their own landing pages. Here’s an example of one:

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Notice how they focus you on the page to get you to give them your email address in exchange for their email course.

They make it difficult to even find the pricing page on this landing page because they don’t want their cold traffic to do anything else but to join an email list.

Unlike on a blog, where the value you provide through free content might be enough to get someone to sign up for an email list, cold traffic to a landing page needs an incentive.

As you might know, the incentive is called a lead magnet.

The more enticing the lead magnet is, the higher your opt-in rate will be.

If you have a great offer and send the right type of traffic to a landing page with a lead magnet, it’s possible to achieve conversion rates of over 50%.

The 3 keys to an effective lead magnet: Creating an appealing lead magnet isn’t easy, but it’s not difficult either.

It requires understanding of the three key factors that affect your conversion rate.

The first factor is relevance.

There are two components of relevance. The obvious one is that your offer has to be relevant to your traffic’s interests.

So, if your target audience consists of dog lovers, your lead magnet should be something like a book about dogs, not cats.

But your lead magnet should also be relevant to your audience’s problems.

If many of your visitors are struggling to find good ways to play with their dogs, you might offer an e-book like “5 Ways to Play With Your Dog More Efficiently.”

Compare that to an e-book along the lines of “25 Awesome Dog Names.” While it’s about dogs, which is relevant, it’s not relevant to any of that audience’s problems.

The second factor is related to relevance, and it’s value.

It’s very simple:

The more someone values your lead magnet, the more likely they are to opt in to your email list.

A 10% off coupon is more appealing than a 5% off coupon.

An e-book with 10 ways to play more efficiently with your dog is more valuable than one with only 5 ways.

Additionally, if your lead magnet solves a pressing problem of a visitor, they will put a lot more value on it, which is why relevance is also important.

Finally, the third factor is feasibility.

Remember that we can’t directly ask cold traffic to buy something because it’s asking too much too soon.

For the same reason, you don’t want to overwhelm those visitors with a huge lead magnet.

Imagine you offered this email course: “A 52-Week Course to Dog Training Master”.

While that would have more value than a 10-week course, it also doesn’t seem feasible to most visitors—it’s too much.

So, while you want to provide as much value as you can, there’s a certain point where the extra value becomes too much work for your visitors.

Find the balance between too much and too little value.

If you understand those three factors, you’re ready for my step-by-step guide to creating amazing lead magnets.

5. Focus on the problem you solve before introducing the product

I know you love your product, but sometimes, your customers don’t.

So far, we’ve looked at landing pages that focused on communicating the features and benefits of products.

Sometimes, however, they aren’t the most important thing.

For simple problems, customers already know exactly what they’re trying to find.

If you sell a product to such customers, you need to take a different approach.

On your landing page, you should have very clear, simple text as the focal point:

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That main text should describe the product the visitor is looking for.

Let’s say that a visitor knows they need an affordable shag carpet.

Instead of focusing immediately on the quality of your carpets such as the perfect softness, size, and all other sorts of things, you state the obvious:

Affordable shag carpets for any home.

Below that, you can add another sentence of your product’s best feature(s). Maybe the carpets are made with a special material that your customers might appreciate, etc.

The key here is that they care about finding the exact product they have in their mind first, before even considering the features.

The 2 most important parts of this type of landing page:  If you have a simple product that is suitable for this type of landing page, there are two keys to maximizing your conversion rate.

The first is your main statement, which is typically made as a headline across the middle.

The worst thing you can do is get clever.

State what your product does and offers in one concise sentence so that visitors know that they’re in the right place. Just like we did above.

The second key is having a good call to action.

The call to action is usually placed in some sort of button that you want the visitor to click. It then takes them to a sales page or some other landing page to learn more about your product.

Your button can potentially say a lot of different things:

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You can improve the effectiveness of your calls to action by using language that describes an action.

Instead of the common calls to action, like:

  • Learn more
  • Download
  • Buy this

create more specific calls to action for your product. If your product is a dog training manual, you could try:

  • I want my dog to listen!
  • I’m sick of disobedience
  • Download my dog training solution

To make it even more effective, apply urgency by adding a word like “today” or “now.”

Here is my complete guide to making your button calls to action more effective.

6. Let your visitor choose their own adventure

There’s one type of product that you might be selling that we haven’t talked about yet.

If you have a complex product, the other options we’ve looked at so far might not suit it.

Certain products have many different features, all of which could be their own products. Different customers might be interested in a specific feature and not care about the others.

If you use the other options we’ve looked at so far, you’ll be emphasizing certain features near the top of your landing page.

This is good for your potential customers who want that specific feature, but it will cause potential customers interested in other main features to lose interest and not convert well.

The solution is to give them a choice.

Instead of jumping right into a feature, you let your visitors choose what they’re interested in. Then, depending on the button or link they choose, you take them to a certain section of the page (or even to a different landing page).

Hubspot is a great example of this. They have a complex product that serves both marketers and salespeople. Each group is interested in different things.

On a Hubspot landing page, there’s a link to get more information on their marketing platform as well as their sales software:

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On top of that, they also offer a lead magnet, just in case any cold traffic finds their page.

When to use a “choose your own adventure” landing page: The main factor that will determine whether you should use this type of landing page is whether your traffic is comprised of different types of people.

Some products appeal to many different audiences, and those audiences need to be approached differently because they care about using your product in different ways.

Ideally, you’d send them to a landing page designed just for them, but that’s not always possible. That is when a “choose your own adventure” page is the next best option.

How to make your own adventure landing page: The great thing about this type of page is that it’s fairly easy to make. All you need are links to different landing pages or to content further down on your landing page.

If you need to implement the second option, it’s pretty simple.

There are two parts. The first is your anchor point, where the page will jump to when you click the link.

Put the anchor point on the heading of the section that you want someone to jump down to.

For example: Hubspot for marketers

Then, go back up to where you’d like to place the link, but instead of putting an entire address in the link tag, type the “id” name that you specified after a hashtag when you created the anchor point.

Like this: Learn how Hubspot helps marketers

Put that link in a button or panel near the top of the page, and the segment of visitors interested in those features can go right to them without getting confused.

Conclusion

Landing pages are an important tool that should be in every marketer’s arsenal.

But if you want to take full advantage of landing pages in your work, you need to use the right type for the situation.

Let’s quickly go over what we’ve learned…

  • Landing pages are designed as a springboard for users to step further into your site. They do this by being relevant and focused on a single point — such as the user’s search inquiry. They are most commonly associated with pay-per-click pages such as Google Adwords but are certainly not limited to that platform.
  • Using landing pages is all about maximizing your return on investment for each customer. The more specific, simple and streamlined a page is, the more likely the user will take the desired action.
  • Ideally, landing pages should be used to segment your offers, your users, as destination pages for your pay per click ads, and/or as a way to create anticipation about a product event (and encourage users to sign up as the event comes closer).
  • There are certain things that landing pages are not built to do — mainly act as long-form sales letter or simple name-squeeze pages. Your landing page is essentially the “welcome mat” that draws visitors into the rest of your site. Provided that you have a captivating offer that resonates well with them, you’re digitally encouraging them to walk through the front door.
  • Some of the best converting landing pages embody the philosophy of “less is more”. It’s common to remove superfluous graphics, navigation, testimonials and even customer support options to help the user focus on a single action you want them to take.
  • Search engine optimization isn’t meant to replace landing pages or vice versa. SEO adds to landing pages, and when done right, landing pages can in turn increase relevancy in the eyes of the search engine and potentially increase your rankings.
  • Users have certain expectations you must fulfill if you want them to take the next step, mainly: a headline that matches their inquiry, clear, easily-understandable language, a focus on their needs and the elements of trust and credibility in choosing to do business with you.
  • I’ve also shown you 6 of the highest converting types of landing pages, and you should now understand when to use them and why they work.

These are the main ingredients customers are looking for when they land on your pages. And, they want all of these things in a fast-loading, easy-to-browse, and user-friendly environment.

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Working With Multi-Level JSON in CockroachDB

Motivation

I had a customer inquiring about whether CockroachDB is capable of working with multi-level JSON. Considering their JSON would have up to 3 levels of hierarchy, they wanted to know whether CockroachDB is able to use native capability to access data multiple levels down. This prompted my interest and led to this tutorial. Surprisingly, CockroachDB does not inhibit any limitations to the number of levels in hiearchy and performance can be improved using various optimizations also discussed below.

Start a Single Node Instance With Max SQL Memory Flag and Connect to It

Java
  
cockroach start-single-node --max-sql-memory=.25 --insecure --background
cockroach sql --insecure --host=localhost


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Video Codecs and Encoding

Streaming has always been an important place in our lives, but it has become an essential need for all of us now, especially after Covid-19.

As being one of the core elements of video streaming, Video codecs allow publishers to compress a video file for distribution over the Internet, through a process called video encoding. It allows you to watch your favorite series in the evening on Netflix or Amazon Prime. Video Codecs allow you to watch videos and see your loved ones with video calling programs, even with limited bandwidth.

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The New Cyber Protection Space = Data Protection + Cybersecurity

What Is Cyber Protection?

Cyber Protection is an IT industry solution category that merges the existing spaces of data protection and cybersecurity, with an objective of securing the safety and resiliency of application and business data, whether in flight or in storage, across hybrid cloud and distributed device environments against a globally connected attack surface.

Dev and Ops. Containers and Cloud Computing

Some things just go great together. We’re on the cusp of another great combination, as the tectonic forces of market dynamics and modern threats are fusing together two well-established information technology sectors: data protection and cybersecurity -- into a bigger, broader category of solutions for Cyber Protection.

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The Curious Case of Dead-End-Lock(Deadlock) | MySql

Usually, deadlocks are hard to debug, and often the main reason for the occurrence of deadlock is when a set of processes are in a wait state because each process is waiting for a resource that is held by some other waiting process. Therefore, all deadlocks involve conflicting resource needs by two or more processes.

Recently, in the Production system, we found a case wherein one of the API was getting a lot of failure of transactions due to deadlock. Strange thing was that it was not a total freeze deadlock of threads instead out of two conflicting transactions one was getting successfully completed.

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Why Is Fuzzy Matching Software a Key for Deduplication?

Identifying golden and unique records across or within datasets is crucial to prevent identity theft, meet compliance regulations, and improve customer acquisition. Banks, government organizations, healthcare providers, and marketing companies all require matching algorithms to identify and deduplicate redundant entries to enrich their master database.

Fuzzy matching is a known set of algorithms for measuring the distance between two similar entities. But certain limitations hinder its effectiveness to quickly find matches for larger, disparate datasets. 

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Finding When Premature Optimization Is Evil

This article is based on the Software Mistakes and Tradeoffs book by Tomasz Lelek and Jon Skeet.

There is an old computer science saying that Premature Optimization is the root of all evil. The saying has stuck around because it’s accurate for a lot of use cases. Without any input data about expected traffic and SLA, it’s hard to reason about your code and its required performance. Optimizing random paths in code in such a situation is like shooting in the dark. You will complicate your code for no good reason. 

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How IoT Technology Enhances Fuel Level Monitoring System

Internet while also being a source of information also facilitated a worldwide network that allowed people to connect with each other. The new concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) allows the internet to be used as a communication medium for “Things” as well. This device interoperability between devices is allowing companies to leverage a myriad range of benefits.

The advent of IoT technology in any new organization not only allow the information and data to be used in field research and survey but also its applications are now being seen in more practical places. Accuracy, facts, and references are key to the development of any standard product-based organization. All can be achieved by IoT.