Wordfence has published two vulnerabilities that affect users of the Redux Framework plugin, which has more recently come to be know as the “Gutenberg Template Library & Redux Framework” on WordPress.org. Extendify purchased the plugin from its creator, Dōvy Paukstys, in November 2020, in a deal that was not highly publicized. It is currently active on more than 1 million WordPress sites.
Throughout most of its history, Redux has been known as a popular options framework for themes and plugins. In 2020, Paukstys relaunched the framework with a focus on Gutenberg templates. Users can now browse more than 1,000 templates from inside the block editor.
It is this new template-browsing feature that was found to be vulnerable in Wordfence’s recent security report, due to a lax permissions check on the WP REST API endpoints the plugin uses to process requests in its template library. On August 3, 2021, Wordfence disclosed one high-severity vulnerability described as an “Incorrect Authorization Leading to Arbitrary Plugin Installation and Post Deletion” and a lower-severity “Unauthenticated Sensitive Information Disclosure” vulnerability to the plugin’s owners. The report published this week describes the nature of the threat:
One vulnerability allowed users with lower permissions, such as contributors, to install and activate arbitrary plugins and delete any post or page via the REST API. A second vulnerability allowed unauthenticated attackers to access potentially sensitive information about a site’s configuration.
Extendify responded immediately and shipped a patched version (4.2.13) of the Redux Framework on August 11, 2021. At the time of publishing, more than 71% of sites using the Redux Framework plugin are running on older versions that remain vulnerable. Users are advised to update to the latest version in order to get the security patch, especially now that Wordfence has published an article showing how attackers could potentially exploit these vulnerabilities.
What if WordPress developers lived in a world where we could create PHP-based templates that would output data on the front end and handle editable fields via the block editor? Or, we had a system where we could create blocks without a build step?
While there are many reasons the modern WordPress editor is not the best fit for everyone just yet, one stumbling block has been building custom interface components. The ecosystem has a deep history of creating bespoke solutions for clients using PHP. These have been custom meta boxes and form fields in the classic editor screen for the most part. When WordPress 5.0 launched with its block editor, it turned the world upside down, often leaving agencies and freelancers with no way to move forward without dedicating massive resources to learning React to build blocks or interact with the new editing screen.
The solution? Stick with what you know. It was cheaper and already seemed to do the job well.
As we talk about the support window for the Classic Editor plugin, the WordPress project needs people to provide tools for this segment of the ecosystem if it ever plans on bringing them along for the ride. Solutions such as ACF Pro and Genesis Custom Blocks have bridged some of the technical gaps. However, the user experience can be sub-par when using server-side rendering in the block editor. That method works well for some types of blocks but not all. We need to take this one step more.
Mark Jaquith, a lead WordPress developer, shared a few questions from Helen Hou-Sandí, another lead developer, around this idea and a basic concept about what this might look like:
Weekend exploration, egged on and sparked by @helenhousandi:
“What if building custom blocks for the Block Editor was as easy as supplying attributes and a block of HTML? What if this produced React editing code and PHP rendering code without a build step?” pic.twitter.com/r86Phu88SX
Hou-Sandí followed this with a detailed post on the concept, but she pointed out that this is merely an exploratory phase.
“The React-based WordPress block editor (sometimes referred to as Gutenberg) is a powerful tool for WYSIWYG editing that continues to prove to be somewhere between a speed bump and a roadblock for long-time WordPress developers who historically have been more PHP-centric,” she wrote in the post.
If you are a WordPress developer, there is a not-so-small chance that you are thinking, Yep, I have hit a few of those speed bumps and crashed into that roadblock a few times. This is unlikely news to you. What might start winning hearts and minds is acknowledging and understanding where much of the problem lies for custom development.
“By leveraging the familiar parts of PHP-based templating and creating a bridge that demonstrates the power of React when combined with the markup and styling already being done for the front-end, we can de-duplicate code, help demystify the critical role of JavaScript in modernizing WordPress, and serve as an on-ramp for PHP-centric developers to create compelling and delightful 1:1 live preview editing experiences,” wrote Hou-Sandí.
This all boils down to the process of, essentially, writing some template code that works on both the front-end and editor without all the complexities of currently setting up and building blocks. That is an exciting prospect, evidenced by the numerous likes, retweets, and replies to Jaquith’s tweet.
Hou-Sandí pointed out that the current thought process is primarily about easing the transition for custom client block solutions and not necessarily for WordPress itself. However, that does not mean that this or a similar solution might not be a part of the core platform’s future.
Gutenberg project lead Matías Ventura replied to Ben Gillbanks in the same Twitter thread that it was definitely something they were considering. “From a core perspective we had to ensure the primitives and interactivity is not compromised, but there’s no reason why that should imply a full JS toolchain for simpler blocks. Lowering barrier of entry is important.”
Like several others, Gillbanks thought that such a system would have made an easier transition for PHP-centric developers from the start. However, the project was not ready for that at the time, according to Ventura.
“It’s tricky to do something like this from the start until the compile target APIs are robust enough,” he tweeted. “We are getting to a point where many of the interactive properties are clustered into primitives and components, which makes a templating approach more appealing.”
Automattic developer Riad Benguella shared a similar solution in the past week, launching the Blocky project on GitHub. With his approach, developers utilize the block.json file to create the template or view component and run it through a simple build step to generate the block’s code.
While it is not too early to hope and dream, it may just be a bit premature to begin seriously considering whether such tools will land in core WordPress. However, seeing some of the lead WordPress and Gutenberg developers at least openly talking about solutions is something worth paying attention to.
What, when, why, Woo…we’ll bare and share it all with you! By the time, we are done and through, you will want WooCommerce Hosting too!
Even though there are alternatives to using WooCommerce, when it comes to setting up an eCommerce store with WordPress, nothing comes even close to beating WooCommerce’s market share.
The number of WordPress eCommerce sites using WooCommerce will soon be off the charts. Source: BuiltWith.com
That’s a lot of WordPress sites using WooCommerce. And they all need hosting that won’t let their stores or their customers down.
So…are there any special hosting requirements that WooCommerce stores need? Can you host your WooCommerce store on any WordPress hosting setup? What should you look for in a hosting company if you plan to run an eCommerce store on WordPress using WooCommerce?
If thinking about hosting WooCommerce sites makes you feel woozy, don’t woorry. This post will answer the above questions and many more!
What Is WooCommerce Hosting and Why Do You Need It?
Let’s face it…if you are ever going to take up nail-biting as a lifelong bad habit, it will most likely be from running an eCommerce store and not a blog or a company website.
Even if your web store is professionally built, beautifully designed, and perfectly configured, so many things can go wrong on an eCommerce site. Anything that goes wrong can affect your user’s experience and lead to the loss of a sale or a potential new customer.
Hosting should not be one of the things that can go wrong. Yet, if your hosting causes your store pages to load slowly or not at all, the consequences for your business can be catastrophic.
At the most basic level, then, all eCommerce sites rely heavily on fast and reliable web hosting.
But there is more to hosting a WooCommerce site, as we will see shortly. Web hosting that is optimized specifically for WooCommerce can give you additional features and tools that will not only benefit your business and improve your store, but also improve user experience on your site, and this can make all the difference to your bottom line.
So, if you plan to run a WooCommerce-based store, consider using WooCommerce hosting.
Is there a difference between WooCommerce hosting and WordPress hosting?
I’m glad you asked! Let’s discuss…
WooCommerce Hosting vs WordPress Hosting – Why Any WP Hosting Won’t Woo
As stated at the beginning of this post, most WordPress-based eCommerce sites are powered by WooCommerce. Consequently, if you plan to run an eCommerce store on a WordPress site, it will most likely run on WooCommerce.
WooCommerce, however, is essentially just a WordPress plugin.
Technically speaking, then, you can install and run a WooCommerce store on any and all hosting servers that support WordPress. But…should you?
The best way to answer this question is by understanding the following:
The difference between WooCommerce hosting vs WordPress hosting has little to do with basic server requirements. However, it has everything to do with additional configurations made to the server to optimize and handle the special performance needs and features of WooCommerce.
In other words, WooCommerce hosting = WordPress Hosting + WooCommerce Optimization + Additional features (optional).
Many hosting companies advertising WooCommerce Hosting lack these added optimization features and benefits, so they are really selling just regular, rebranded WordPress hosting.
A2 Hosting’s WooCommerce Hosting looks like their regular WordPress hosting with a rebranded landing page.
Additionally, A2 Hosting’s set up is on shared hosting, which is not the ideal hosting environment for running a busy WooCommerce store.
WooCommerce Hosting Requirements
Now that we understand that any old WordPress hosting won’t do for running WooCommerce sites, let’s look at why WooCommerce needs different hosting requirements
Optimized Caching
Caching improves your WordPress site’s speed and performance by allowing servers to store static HTML versions of your pages, reducing the load on your server and eliminating the need to process PHP and query the database every time users visit your site.
Caching is a great feature to have and any managed WordPress hosting providers offer built-in caching features. Although caching works great for WordPress sites, you can’t apply caching indiscriminately across an entire WooCommerce site, as this will break the functionality of dynamically generated areas of the site, such as your store’s shopping cart, my-account, and checkout pages.
A good WooCommerce host should have built-in optimizations that can detect and exclude these dynamic pages from their caching solution.
Database Optimization
WordPress stores its content in a database. As WooCommerce runs on WordPress, most of your store’s content will also be stored in a database, including all your product data (e.g. prices, descriptions, stock quantities, status, product variations, etc.), customer details, their purchasing information, order history, etc.
This makes WooCommerce stores way more database-intensive than regular WordPress sites.
As mentioned in the previous section, caching doesn’t help with many of your store’s key pages and continually querying the database will put a lot of stress on your hosting and server resources.
A good WooCommerce hosting provider has to take this into account and provide solutions that continually optimize your store’s database. Otherwise, your site will buckle under the weight of heavy database queries, especially if you run a busy site with many products and your site’s users rely heavily on searches to find what they’re looking for.
Server Reliability
Naturally, if you run or manage any kind of website, you want it to always be up and running and available to users.
Server reliability is important for all WordPress sites, but it is vitally important for an eCommerce site.
If the server hosting your company website goes down for a couple of hours, you may get somewhat frustrated, but it will probably not have too much of an impact on your business. However, if the same thing were to happen to your eCommerce store, this could lead to a significant and unrecoupable loss of revenue and trust.
Having an uptime guarantee backed by a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is something you should definitely consider when choosing WooCommerce hosting. Make sure, however, that you understand exactly what the numbers mean.
For example, we would all obviously want our eCommerce stores to always be up and running, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, every hour, every day, and every week of the year. A 100% uptime guarantee, however, is not realistic. No host can really guarantee that their servers will never experience service interruptions.
A 99% uptime guarantee may sound impressive, but while it’s fine for most WordPress sites, it is not enough for an eCommerce store.
A 99.9% uptime guarantee is the minimum you should expect for a WooCommerce store.
The difference between a 99.9% and 99.99% uptime guarantee may seem negligible, but this translates into around 40-45 minutes of downtime per month, which can have a significant impact on your business if you run a busy eCommerce store.
A 99.99% uptime guarantee is ideal, but it also comes at a much higher price. For example, Pagely offer a 99.99% guarantee, but expect to pay between $500-$2,500 per month for hosting your eCommerce store.
Pagely’s 99.99% uptime hosting guarantee is not cheap!
Hosting Support
Like server reliability, reliable hosting support will make a vital difference to the success of your eCommerce store.
While email support is ok for most WordPress sites, you don’t want to wait 20-30 minutes for someone to get back to you when you’re running a WooCommerce store. You want problems to be fixed immediately. While you’re anxiously tapping your feet waiting for someone to reply, your potential customers are tapping out.
Your WooCommerce hosting support team should provide you with 24/7 access to support either via live chat or phone and have extensive knowledge and experience with WooCommerce on everything from code and implementation to usage.
An additional great-to-have support option is assisted site migrations. This is especially important if your site is live and generating sales, as having the expert assistance of people skilled in hosting migrations and WooCommerce handling the transfer of in-sync customer and sales data can help make the process of migrating from different servers or different hosting companies as smooth as possible.
Other Hosting Requirements
Although not specific to WooCommerce hosting, if you plan to run an eCommerce store your hosting setup should have these additional features:
Automated Backups & One-Click Restore
If your store is generating daily sales, new customers, new orders, and regular transactions, it’s important to make sure that your host provides at least daily automated site backups for your valuable data and one-click site restore functions.
Some companies offer the option to purchase hourly or 6-hourly backups for an additional cost.
CDN
Hosting your WooCommerce-powered store on servers with a Content Delivery Network (CDN) not only helps to speed up delivery of your store’s pages, it also provides your site with additional security options like DDoS protection and failover and recovery capabilities for added peace of mind.
If your server crashes, your store’s static files will be replicated across a global network of servers, ensuring that your site at least stays up and running while your server is being restored.
Multiple Data Centers
The benefit of choosing a webhosting company that provides a network of global data centers is that it allows you to place your eCommerce site in the location closest to the majority of your customers.
This might not seem significant, until you consider the fact that placing your site closer to your customers can improve page loading times and research shows that the first five seconds of page load time have the highest impact on conversion rates, where website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% per additional second within these first five seconds.
SSL Certificates
Online users are frequently told to avoid non-https sites that capture user details and process payments online, so having an SSL certificate is a must for WooCommerce stores.
Many hosts offer free SSL certificates, which will validate your domain ownership and from a security and encryption perspective, are sufficient for running a WooCommerce store securely.
Some hosts will also let you install your own third-party SSL certificate. Third-party certificates offer warranties and guarantees for your SSL certificate that can provide additional peace of mind.
Security & PCI-DSS Compliance
Your eCommerce site needs to be as secure as it can be, so make sure your hosting company provides around the clock server hardening security-boosting options such as firewalls, malware scans, and even hack fix guarantees.
Additionally, look for PCI Compliance. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of technical and operational requirements that ensures companies that accept, process, store, or transmit credit card information and payment transactions maintain a secure environment.
PCI-DSS compliance is important if you plan to store credit card information on your website. If, however, you plan to use a payment processor like Stripe or PayPal which handles and stores all credit card information on their servers, then PCI-DSS compliance is not an issue.
Staging Sites
A staging site allows you to duplicate your live site (also referred to as your ‘production’ site) and set up and test your store on the duplicate copy so it won’t affect your live site. Once you have tested things and are happy with the results, you can then overwrite your live site with your changes.
This can be a bit tricky for eCommerce stores, because while you are making changes to your staging site, your live site could be collecting new orders from new customers and you don’t want to overwrite these when moving your site from staging back to production.
Some hosting environments allow you to make partial overwrites and push only staging files or certain databases. With other environments, you will need to use additional WooCommerce data export and import plugins to restore the latest store data to your newly-updated site.
Some Woo, Some Won’t – Managed WordPress Hosting For WooCommerce Sites
As mentioned earlier, some hosting companies may advertise a separate ‘WooCommerce hosting’ plan but when you take a deeper look, it’s essentially the same as their other WordPress hosting products, just rebranded for WooCommerce.
In some cases, the hosting may not be specifically optimized for WooCommerce as described earlier, but they may offer add-ons or support for WooCommerce stores either as optional extras or as part of their plan.
In other cases, their managed hosting service may already be optimized for WordPress sites in general but also configured in a way that will work for WooCommerce without the need for any special adjustments to the hosting setup.
When Should You Switch or Upgrade to WooCommerce Hosting?
Knowing the distinction between rebranded managed WordPress hosting, dedicated WooCommerce hosting, and managed WordPress hosting that can handle specific WooCommerce needs is important because it can affect your site’s future plans for growth.
If you launch your WooCommerce store on hosting that was not designed for specific WooCommerce needs, you may find yourself experiencing a host of inconveniences later on, including server migration (or host migration), and additional costs.
Launching your eCommerce store on servers optimized for WooCommerce, on the other hand, allows your business to keep growing with no disruptions. You can just upgrade, add options, and scale to suit your needs.
Winners and Woosers…An Honest Appraisal of WooCommerce Hosting Options
Now that we have covered what to look for when launching a WooCommerce-powered eCommerce store, let’s take a brief look at some of the different WooCommerce hosting options available.
Note: We don’t promote affiliate links…all the links below go directly to our competitors’ hosting plan pages so you can evaluate their options for yourself.
To begin with, you will find that most hosting companies in the managed WordPress/WooCommerce space include features like free SSL, CDN (or are CDN compatible), daily backups with one-click restore, and 24/7 hosting support.
While hosting companies like GoDaddy and BlueHost don’t offer dedicated WooCommerce hosting, they do provide WooCommerce installs bundled with WooCommerce plugins and themes with their hosting offers.
WPEngine, LiquidWeb, and Nexcess (a Liquid Web company) offer dedicated WooCommerce hosting plans.
WPMU Dev, Pagely, and Kinsta provide managed WordPress hosting finely tuned and optimized to handle all WordPress applications, including WordPress eCommerce (e.g. WooCommerce).
In terms of uptime guarantees, most of the hosting providers listed here offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Pagely offers 99.99% but it comes at a significantly higher price. I found affiliate review sites mentioning that Bluehost offers a 99.98% uptime guarantee, but I couldn’t confirm this on their official website.
WPMU DEV – Our Next-Gen Hosting Will Woo You Too
WPMU DEV’s next-gen managed WordPress hosting is ideal and optimized for running WooCommerce stores of any size, even a WooCommerce Multisite.
Our hosting is highly optimized for dynamic uncached sites with object caching, a custom database table is automatically setup as WooCommerce is built, and our FastCGI cache includes a tuned WooCommerce bypass ruleset.
Additionally, our hosting is fully compartmentalized and includes free SSL, a blazing fast CDN, global datacenters, automated daily backups and one-click restores (we provide full backups, incremental backups, and you can manually create a backup any time with the click of a button), plus staging sites, free expert manual site migration, and expert 24/7 support for all things WordPress, including WooCommerce.
If you are considering hosting one or more WooCommerce stores with WPMU DEV, we recommend starting with our Silver hosting plan.
Is Your Website Ready For The eCommerce Hosting Woovolution?
When it comes to running an eCommerce site on WordPress, WooCommerce is the clear leader.
eCommerce sites depend on so much more than just reliable hosting and the hosting should be evaluated on more than just cost. Speed, performance, automatic backups, and support from knowledgeable experts are also crucial when it comes to ensuring that your WooCommerce store remains continuously running and able to capture every lead and sale opportunity.
This is where WooCommerce hosting comes in. When evaluating hosting for your WooCommerce store, it’s best to avoid shared servers or rebranded WordPress hosting plans, and choose either dedicated WooCommerce hosting or a managed WordPress hosting plan that is fully optimized for WooCommerce.
In the olden days (like, a few weeks ago), the Pinned Items UI was much less capable. You could certainly pin things, and open up a menu to see a list of what you pinned, but there wasn’t any context. There was no visual preview to quickly identify them. There was no metadata like when it was created or updated.
We’ve updated the UI so now you’re Pinned Items always open up in a modal (it’s the same everywhere now) and you can flip between grid view:
And list view:
We’re hoping this will make it much more convenient to get to items you want to really quickly get back to from no matter where you are on CodePen.
HTTP Caching is a Superpower — Hugh Haworth covers how the Cache-Control header is an awfully potent ingredient in web performance. I mis-read the title at first and was waiting to read about HTML caching. Hugh covers it a bit (like how you’d need to be careful doing so on something like a forum, where the content on pages changes rapidly), but I find it something that’s generally under-talked-about. As in, generally, people just don’t cache HTML at all, because it changes the most and it’s risky being the parent of most other cache. I only do it now because Cloudflare handles it.
Why it’s okay for web components to use frameworks — I admit it rubs me the wrong way to think of web components as needing a framework at all, let alone being OK with a hogepodge of random frameworks. But Nolan Lawson digs into the nuance here. A couple of kilobytes that might be lazy loaded/code-split out is not that big of a deal, especially since the frameworks might be optimized for runtime performance.
web-vitals-element — An npm packages from Stefan Judis that boots up a <web-vitals> web component showing your CLS, FID, LCP, and BVD (demo). Sorta weird it won’t build on Skypack.
Top 10 performance pitfalls — I probably wouldn’t have guessed any of the things Jake and Surma cover in this top 10 list. My guess is that the low hanging fruit of performance either becomes a bunch of non-issues through technological improvements, or it is generally handled by site owners and hosts and, thus, a new set of problems become the top offenders.
How to Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources: a Deep Dive — Sia Karamalegos: Render-blocking resources are files that ‘press pause’ on the critical rendering path. They interrupt one or more of the steps. You should be super aware of anything that is render-blocking and only render-block on purpose (like critical CSS) rather than letting it happen by accident.
How we reduced Next.js page size by 3.5x and achieved a 98 Lighthouse score — Colin Armstrong covers how dynamically loading assets, reducing the size of assets, and using responsive images goes along way. Fortunately, the tooling to diagnose performance problems and the tools for solving them are largely build into Next.js. The bit about PurgeCSS and Tailwind seems extra pertinant here. I think if you aren’t using PurgeCSS to remove unused Tailwind selectors (or the JIT compiler to only create the selectors you need), you’re basically doing Tailwind wrong. Shipping 350KB of CSS instead of the 10KB you need is not OK.
Improving responsiveness in text inputs — Nolan Lawson covers how to prevent blocking the input event with “expensive” main thread work, using requestIdleCallback to batch UI updates.
Vector? Raster? Why Not Both! — Zach gets the best possible file size by splitting a graphic into two parts: An SVG (vector) for the things SVG does well, and a super-optimized raster graphic (ideally AVIF) for the things it does well, then plopping them on top of one another.
Have you ever fretted that front-end web development moves so fast that if you stepped away for a while, you’d be lost coming back? Rachel Smith has:
The hectic pace of needing to learn one thing after the next didn’t bother me so much because when I was 26 because I was quite happy to spend much of my free time outside of my day job coding. I was really enjoying myself, so the impression that I had to constantly up-skill to maintain my career wasn’t a concern. I did wonder, though, how I would ever take enough time off to have a baby, or have other responsibilities that would prevent me from being able to spend so much of my time mastering languages and learning new libraries and frameworks.
And then, as is inevitable for most of us, she did take a break. And as you read in the title, it was fine:
What I’ve learnt through experience is that the number of languages I’ve learned or the specific frameworks I’ve gained experience with matters very little. What actually matters is my ability to up-skill quickly and effectively. My success so far has nothing to do with the fact I know React instead of Vue, or have experience with AWS and not Azure. What has contributed to my success is the willingness to learn new tools as the need arises.
I might be extra qualified to verify this claim, as I work directly with Rachel. She’s better than “fine” as a team member and technological contributor, both on the front-end and back. She’s extremely good. And you will be too if you heed Rachel’s advice: be a lifelong learner and be willing to learn new tools as the needs arise.
Dispatch, a delivery solutions provider, has announced updates to the company’s API that are aimed at simplifying data access and management throughout larger organizations that operate with a tiered approach. These companies can now be more flexible in how they offer API access.
Low-code and no-code development platforms have been the trending IT topic for some time now. Experts in this field speculate as to how they could change the future of the industry. Some publications predict the gradual decline of traditional IT, as low-code and no-code products continue to reshape the very approach to solutions development. But, before we get into a discussion on the future of low-code and no-code, let’s define what these terms actually mean.
What Is Low-Code/No-Code?
Low-code and no-code tools help scale and maximize software delivery. The grid below explains, defines, and differentiates low-code vs. no-code tools.
Welcome to Learn JMeter Series! This series helps you to learn Apache JMeter in a much simpler way with the relevant examples and exercises. This tutorial focuses on Recording on JMeter.
What Is Recording?
To get started with application performance testing, the first step in JMeter is recording your business transactions. Recording the business flow helps to expedite the process of creating test plans. Otherwise, you will be spending more time manually crafting the requests.
Packaging a Maven-Based Spring Boot Application as a WAR File
To change the packaging in a Maven-based Spring Boot application that was generated using the Spring Initializr or Vaadin Start tools, make the following changes in the pom.xml file:
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last year, you must have heard about this brand new shiny thing called “No-Code” and “Low-Code”. According to Gartner, 50% of all software projects will be delivered before the end of 2021 using Low-Code and No-Code constructs. Even if Gartner’s numbers are inflated, automation processes for generating code automagically have gained traction lately, and it has gained traction very, very, very fast. So obviously we’re way beyond the “hype factor” in regards to these technologies. Hence, in this article, I will try to break down the advantages, and illustrate with an example use case, so you can see the advantage for yourself. But first I need to define Low-Code and No-Code.
The difference between Low-Code and No-Code
Although obviously related, Low-Code and No-Code are actually two completely different concepts. No-Code is the idea of “citizen development”, where people without software development skills can create software. This is typically achieved through drag and drop interfaces, similar to how DreamWeaver worked a couple of decades ago. On the other hand, Low-Code is typically a software system that generates code automagically for you, by for instance reading metadata from your RDBMS, or Swagger, etc.
As an online store owner, you want to grow your customer base. One way to do that is to start selling globally. In fact, almost 93% of online retailers accept international payments and offer international commerce. For this, you will need to set up your online store to accept multiple currencies in WooCommerce. In this […]
We're a digital marketing company from the UK, who have a wide base of clientele, staring with locksmiths. We have found that blog writing and SMM are the way to go. How about you?
How Recruiterbox Compares to the Best Recruiting Software
Recruiterbox is complete recruitment software with many compelling features. From powerful candidate screening tools to the ability to track applicants, offers, and a customizable recruitment process, there’s something here for most small and medium-sized businesses.
That said, Recruiterbox didn’t make our top picks of the best recruitment software because of sporadic slowdowns and reports that could be better—though we think both will improve over time.
Currently, our top choices for the best recruitment software are Breezy HR, with unlimited job listings, and Workable, which is great for hiring at scale.
Recruiterbox Hiring Volume
Some recruitment software restricts the number of open job positions you can have at any one time, so we’re pleased to say that Recruiterbox offers an unlimited number of them. You may be wondering how it manages to offer this. The answer is simple: Recruiterbox bases its pricing on the number of employees at your company, not on features provided.
Essentially, the number of employees corresponds to the number of openings you’re likely to post on an annual basis, allowing the software to offer you unlimited job postings whenever you need them.
How important this is for you will vary. If you hire only one to two employees per year, it might be better to opt for cheap or even free recruitment software instead of paying for something you don’t need. For instance, Recruiterbox’s pricing starts at a minimum of $3499 annually, so it can be a costly option, certainly if you don’t need unlimited job postings.
But if you do a high volume of hiring every month or every couple of months, you will see the benefit of unlimited active postings plus unlimited hiring managers without having to pay extra.
The decision comes down to the size of your business and needs, so think carefully and go from there.
Recruiterbox is no slouch when it comes to onboarding tools and offers a variety of them.
With convenient job offer templates and e-signatures, you’ll be able to onboard candidates quickly and without unnecessary hassle. There’s a repository available for all offer management-related documentation, too, and the information is kept securely on the Recruiterbox platform for added peace of mind.
The job offer letter tools are a particular highlight, allowing you to create offer letter templates and autofill templates with candidate information as required. The tools save a great deal of time and are especially useful for businesses that frequently hire.
On top of that, approval workflows are available for offer letters that allow you to choose when items are sent out at each stage. For example, if a candidate passes a particular stage of the onboarding process, an email, written beforehand and scheduled in advance, can be sent to them automatically.
Recruiterbox provides a dedicated resources library and offers complete guides on the best things to say to candidates at every stage of the hiring and onboarding process. Its software offers onboarding functionality and the knowledge for those that need it, and we were impressed with how in-depth the information is overall.
Recruiterbox Employer Branding
Posting open positions on job boards is a good start for businesses, but ideally, you’ll want to attract applicants through your site and via other tools as well. Recruitment software often features editable career pages and targeted campaigns that reach candidates beyond the usual generic job postings.
Recruiterbox has you covered and allows you to create and manage your branded career pages on your site from within the software. These tools will enable you to streamline the entire hiring process and add a bit of personality to things. They’re a great place to showcase company culture, for instance, and help you to sell you open positions with style.
We particularly like the mobile-friendly jobs widget. It’s more important than ever to have mobile-friendly content, and candidates now expect a career site that’s easy to navigate from any device. Recruiterbox’s jobs widget solves this problem and makes your job postings searchable via the widget alone, all from the candidate’s mobile device.
Even better is that the mobile jobs widget blends into your company website. You can customize the widget with the Recruiterbox openings API, making it look how you need it to while keeping true to the image and values of your business.
Customizable job application forms allow you to fill positions faster because you can limit the amount of information you take and streamline it down to the essentials. After all, there’s limited time in a day, and with multiple applications to go through, it can distract from other pressing tasks.
For example, if you only want to know a few specific things from applying candidates, you can customize the forms accordingly. You can choose from single-line answers, paragraph answers, drop-down menus, and more. With the competition for top talent being more significant than ever, Recruiterbox’s customizable job forms are a valuable addition.
You can also create application questions that weed out unsuitable candidates. For instance, if the role requires a specific skill, such as C++, you can create a required question asking if the candidate has that skill and how many years of experience using it. If they answer no or only have six months of experience, it makes it a lot easier for you to skip past their application without spending time reviewing the resume.
It’s worth noting that employer branding tools like these are available in most recruitment software on the market, and Recruiterbox isn’t offering much in the way of exclusive features. That said, the tools available are practical, forward-thinking, and work well.
Recruiterbox Recruiting Reports
Recruiterbox provides its users with recruiting reports so you can see what’s working and what isn’t. You can generate these helpful reports by picking a date range, and the software will take it from there. Each generated report is emailed directly to you after its creation, and you’ll be able to share them with your team and hiring managers as necessary, so everyone can work together on improving your hiring game.
Let’s say you’ve posted a new job opening, but after some time, you’re not getting the response you needed or the candidates you wanted. You’re probably posting to career pages, job boards, and other sites. But it would be ideal to know which of these is the best source for attracting top talent. Recruiterbox’s reports set out to provide that information, allowing you to improve your hiring strategies.
You’ll be able to filter down job positions and see how quickly you fill them at each stage of the hiring process. Hiring replacements to fill positions while you wait for great talent is costly, so these reports aim to help you fix that, allowing you to speed things up where they might have been too slow.
Recruiterbox’s source report capability allows you to see which sources your applicants came from and how many of them have been screened, interviewed, and finally, offered a position with the company. The software can even create an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) questionnaire for your candidates to fill out as they apply for job openings to help eliminate discrimination.
While these reporting features are great, we still think the reports themselves could be better. Specifically, compared to some competitors on the market, the reports are visually basic and could be more precise when displaying information. That said, Recruiterbox gets updated frequently, and more advanced reporting options may be coming in the future.
Recruiterbox Interview Scheduling
Recruiterbox offers interview scheduling features that allow your team to coordinate their schedules. After hearing back from interested candidates and screening them, scheduling interviews is the next step, and it’s a step that employers want to make as easy as possible after all the work they’ve done up to that point. This pivotal stage is where recruitment software comes in once more.
Recruiterbox allows you to schedule interviews with relative ease and automatically sends out interview emails to those who need one. Your team members can sync their calendars to the software to avoid typical time conflicts and schedule clashes.
Candidates receive interview requests directly to their email address, and once they’ve accepted them, the event is updated and posted on the entire team’s calendar. The software successfully eliminates the need to go back and forth between multiple team members, and we find it to be a practical and smart solution.
It’s also worth mentioning that Recruiterbox features a centralized collection of comments and evaluations from each team member that interviewed the candidate. Your team can rate candidates and add comments, streamlining the feedback. Instead of long email chains of notes and feedback, each team member posts their notes directly on the candidate’s profile so all those involved in hiring and decision-making can see them.
From streamlining the scheduling process to the automated calendar syncing, Recruiterbox offers a robust set of interview scheduling tools that shape up well against the competition.
Recruiterbox Candidate Sourcing
Whatever your company’s preferred way of sourcing candidates, Recruiterbox offers various tools and valuable additions to help make the process smoother. There’s everything from automatic job postings, external recruiting options, and the option of forwarding emails to the software to remove the need for manual resume uploads.
The social media sharing feature, for example, is one of those simple tools that saves so much time. It allows you to post job openings straight to your social media accounts directly from the software. You can forget logging into each social media platform one by one and pasting in the link. Instead, you’ll be able to send out your job postings in minutes across multiple platforms at once.
But the time-saving tools don’t stop there. One of our favorite features is the ability to forward candidate information to the platform, which then imports it automatically, including resumes uploaded in the process. Employers would typically have to manually open each email, download the resume, and then upload to recruitment software—Recruiterbox makes that a thing of the past. We can hear the relief already.
When it comes to job postings, Recruiterbox will automatically publish your new opening to the following places:
Indeed
SimplyHired
Glassdoor
ApplyIQ
Recruit.net
ZipRecruiter
When applicants apply via these well-known job boards, their contact information will go directly to your online Recruiterbox account.
Businesses are starting to realize the power of external recruitment, which isn’t an area Recruiterbox has neglected.
With the software, you can add external users to the applicant tracking system using a simple link and email address that identifies the recruiter as an official referrer. When the external recruiter adds a candidate through the link, a candidate profile gets created automatically. You can use the platform to track referrals to see which sources provide the top talent and improve your hiring strategy from there.
All in all, there’s no doubt Recruiterbox’s candidate sourcing tools are the real deal, and we believe most businesses will find a lot to like here.
Recruiterbox is a capable recruitment software that we do recommend. While it didn’t make our top picks list, we still think there’s a lot on offer here, and over time, the software will only improve further. If you need web-based recruitment software with robust candidate sourcing tools, excellent customer support, and valuable interviewing scheduling features, be sure to book a free demo today.
You've found yourself hours into coding tutorials, and now you need a change of pace, some fresh action. This is where coding games come in. Here I list free coding games on the web that can entertain you while giving you a new perspective on web development — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and beyond.
Flexbox Froggy & Grid Garden
Codepip is a collection of free and premium coding games for learning web development, from a minecart game called Nth Cart about the :nth-child() CSS selector to Code Crunchers about JavaScript math.
An in-memory database is not a new concept. However, it is associated too closely with terms like "cache" and "non-persistent". In this article, I want to challenge these ideas. In-memory solutions have much wider use cases and offer higher reliability than it would seem at a first glance.
I want to talk about the architectural principles of in-memory databases, and how to take the best of the "in-memory world"— incredible performance — without losing the benefits of disk-based relational systems. First of all, how to ensure data safety.
Zach did that thing where each of his blog posts has a special URL with the design of social image card that is screenshat by a headless browser (like Puppeteer) and used as a true meta Open Graph image, meaning it’s displayed on Twitter, Facebook, iMessage, Slack, Discord, and whatever else supports that card look.
I like it. Even though I’ve got a pretty good solution cooking now (for WordPress), the templates aren’t controlled with HTML/CSS like I wish they were.
As bit of yang to the ying here, Jim has some thoughts on the not-so-great aspects of Open Graph images:
I feel like they’ve been hijacked by auto-generated computer imagery serving as attention-grabbing filler more than supportive expression.
It’s kinda like… we can add Open Graph images, and we essentially get a totally free massive clickable target for hungry fingers, so we do add Open Graph images — even when that image is, well, boring. Just auto-generated computer barf of title text with branding. Jim’s post has examples.
I get where Jim is coming from, and I suppose I’m guilty to some degree. I feel like we’re a cut-above on CSS-Tricks though, if you’ll pardon a taste of defensiveness, because:
We have a variety of templates to choose from to switch it up, like a quote design.
We incorporate custom imagery into the final card, meaning most cards are somewhat visually unique.
We don’t just brand the cards, we usually incorporate the author for a little extra high five for the person, rather than just our brand.
As the time for the RT-Thread IoT OS Global Tech Conference approaches, we’re happy to attach more details to this conference so you’ll know what to expect. The virtual conference will feature 20+ trending topics, range from the latest developments in open-source RT-Thread IoT OS projects to new fields of activities.
As an online store owner, you want to grow your customer base. One way to do that is to start selling globally. In fact, almost 93% of online retailers accept international payments and offer international commerce. For this, you will need to set up your online store to accept multiple currencies in WooCommerce. In this […]
