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If you want to make your WordPress page rank higher in search engines, you need to provide as much information about it as possible. One way to do that is by including metadata such as meta titles, meta tags, or meta descriptions. In this article, you’ll learn why meta descriptions, in particular, are important for […]
The post How to Write Good WordPress Meta Descriptions appeared first on WPExplorer.
Cloud computing has revolutionized the software industry in the last 10 years. Today, most organizations prefer to host applications and services on the cloud due to ease of deployment, high security, scalability, and cheap maintenance costs over on-premise infrastructure.
In 2006, Amazon launched its cloud services platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the leading cloud providers to date. Currently, AWS offers over 200 cloud services, including cloud hosting, storage, machine learning, and container management.
This tutorial takes you through a Python SocketIO implementation. Understanding the difference between SocketIO and WebSocket is essential. However, that is not the scope of this article. Please go through this tutorial to explore more about it. To realize the reason behind the increasing popularity of SocketIO, I would like to request you work along with this tutorial.
We will use the client code and SocketIO server responding with TraderMade’s Forex data. I am clarifying these aspects in the beginning as it is easy to work on one side of the example before diving deeper into the topic. At the same time, you will experience a practically used, real-life example.
In recent times, many web applications have been ported to mobile platforms, and mobile applications are also created to support businesses. However, Android and iOS are the major platforms because many people use smartphones compared to desktops for accessing web applications.
As per Statcounter, Mobile is the clear leader with 61.16% market share, while Desktop has 38.84% market share.
Coding new visual elements into an image file begins with a basic understanding of how image files are normally displayed. When an image file is loaded for display on any of our devices, software from that device must first decode the file and store the result of that decoding in a temporary block of memory called a buffer. Buffers become responsible for communicating the color information stored by each individual pixel within an image (in each instance, the file is opened), and from there, that color information can be rendered by our device’s lighting (usually LCD or LED) display.
When we want to layer new text or shapes which display on top of an image, we need to access the file in memory and create our own temporary image buffer to work within. This new buffer will give us control over an entirely new layer of pixels in our image, allowing us to temporarily influence — and eventually save changes to — our image’s final display. How our image subsequently implements our new buffer depends on the original file format. If we begin with a PNG file, for example, we’ll leverage built-in transparency features to layer new content on top of the original file. If we begin with a JPG file, which doesn’t offer transparency features, we’ll end up with a single, blended image layer that effectively mixed the new and original content together. In either case, the result of the operation will retain the encoding of the original file, allowing us to easily write our resulting (slightly larger sized) file encoding to a new file entirely.
Is self-management an essential building block on an organization’s path to business agility or a nice-to-have cultural twist to, for example, keep teams happy and attract new talent?
While many people, particularly at the management level, are skeptical about the concept, I am convinced that organizations need to descale and regroup around aligned, autonomous, self-managing teams in a complex environment. Ultimately, only the people closest to the customers’ problems can solve those within the given constraints while contributing to an organization’s sustainability.
The Integration Architecture guiding principles are guidelines to increase the consistency and quality of technology decision-making for the integration solutions. They describe the big picture of the enterprise within the context of its technology intent and impact on the organization. In the context of Integration Architecture, the guiding principles drive the definition of the target state of the integration landscape. Each principle will contain a description, rationale, and implications.
Any integration-related initiative should conform to the standards and recommendations of a centralized Integration Centre of Excellence (CoE); any design decision or strategy related to integrations needs to be driven, reviewed, and approved by the Integration CoE.
Many applications are now being hosted on public cloud platforms, and it becomes imperative to leverage the cloud to store their data and application parameters. And of the most popular cloud providers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the most widely used. While AWS offers many solutions for storing application parameters, understanding which option best fits your application and use case can be difficult. In this article, we’ll dive into the best ways to store your application parameters in AWS.
Let us take the example of AWS Lambda — a popular compute service that allows developers to run code without provisioning or managing servers. When writing code for Lambda functions, it's common to use configuration properties to define how the function should operate. Configuration properties can include things like environment variables, database connection strings, and other settings that are specific to your application.
Gradle is a powerful build automation tool that is widely used in the Java and Android development communities. It allows developers to automate the process of building, testing, and deploying applications, making it an essential tool in modern software development workflows.
Homebrew is a package manager that allows you to easily install and manage software packages on macOS.
In my earlier post, we learned about the Java synchronized method. In this post, let’s learn about the synchronized block.
Video: To see the visual walk-through of this post, click below:
Continuing our Snowflake blog series, after learning about setting up a Snowflake account using System-defined roles, we will explore the best practices for loading data from a file into Snowflake.
Let’s begin!
Automation testing tools rely on object identification based on object models or object properties such as name, type, and position. We have many automation tools for web and desktop applications. While testing mobile devices, hardware, and electronic equipment poses unique challenges, which can be sorted out with remote system access. Where the local and remote system is not geographically co-located, interactive script recording and debugging can become cumbersome and time-consuming. Existing remote desktop solutions bring problems of their own: interoperability of the controlled and controlling platform, compatibility of the test framework and remote control application, setup and configuration issues, and others. Accessing specific embedded or mobile devices may not be possible.
Squish is a cross-platform testing tool that supports many desktop, mobile, and embedded platforms. In addition, Squish allows automation of the testing of graphical user interfaces (GUI) for applications written in various programming languages, including Java, .NET, and Qt.
API Gateway is an architectural pattern to create a façade that exposes the internal system’s data to external clients in a decoupled layer, reducing the dependency between frontend and backend components. Nowadays, that pattern is widely spread in the computing field being used in business applications and integration solutions for small, medium, and large enterprises. The value of breaking the dependency between clients and backend implementations is very substantial. Many paramount functions of modern distributed systems can be implemented in the API gateway. The list of functions is quite large and will be elucidated in the next sections of this article.
Currently, we see API gateways usage in critical mission applications and use cases such as microservices architecture, legacy monoliths, monolith migration to microservices projects, and integration layers. Additionally, the API gateways are involved in different deployment models, since the bare-metal servers running on-premises, virtual machines like Amazon EC2, and containerized solutions such as Kubernetes on Amazon EKS, even in the modern serverless computing platform, covering all possible deployment spectrum available today. The issues solved using the API Gateway pattern are explored in section 2.
Ryan Mulligan has an interesting exploration of a somewhat niche CSS Grid behavior in CSS Grid Gap Behavior with Hidden Elements. When creating a grid, I find it’s common to create pretty specific column behavior, and let rows auto-generate, but of course you can be specific about row sizes as well. If you do that, say, grid-template-rows: auto 1fr auto; or the like, and you have a gap that puts spaces between grid items, you’re going to have vertical space between those rows whether there are items in them or not. I think this is great-to-know information because WHERE THE HELL IS THAT SPACE COMING FROM?! is everyone’s least favorite kind of CSS debugging.
Mitosis looks like a cool project to me.
Write components once, run everywhere. Compiles to Vue, React, Solid, Angular, Svelte, and more.
If I was creating componentry that needed to run in multiple frameworks (I imagine design systems are the #1 use case here), I’d give it a shot in a heartbeat.
I think if you asked a bunch of people (I stopped writing this for a sec to ask a bunch of people) if they would use a real non-Safari browser on iOS if they would, they would say yes. As a reminder, you can download browsers like Chrome and Firefox on iOS, but they are just Safari under the hood. Mastodon is probably a pretty weird audience to poll here, but we’re somewhere around half of people saying they would.
I imagine instantly losing half the users of a software product you make is at least a part of the reason that Apple doesn’t want to allow it. Then again, I dunno. Safari is free and iPhones are not. You’d think they’d make choices more centered around making their phones desirable. I’ve often wondered if Apple chose to change this policy, or were forced to, if Google would have a version of Chrome immediately ready to go. Some news reports that… maybe? I sort of doubt it, especially in the case of Mozilla who I don’t think can afford to do entirely speculative intense development work.
I find it fascinating how the world has all this strong, solid, database technology. You wanna store data in a smart way, use tried-and-true tech like MySQL. That’s what WordPress uses and it’s half the web, right? Right! Well, unless you want to search that data. MySQL doesn’t have very good full text search. Slow and not good at ranking. By extension, WordPress’ built-in search is pretty bad, which helps paid offerings like Jetpack fill the void.
For big companies with their own data storage plans, since it’s known that you can’t use your main MySQL database for good search, often reach for something else. Another database in which to replicate and sync data into that is actually good at searching. That’s basically the premise that makes tools like Elasticsearch a thing. But hot dang if that doesn’t explode the technical debt you’re responsible for.
Chalk all that up as a reason that Postgres is nice. MySQL, but better (debatable, I know, but let’s say better), and Full Text Search is Awesome, says Montana Low.
Do you think you could have guessed top 10 most-visited websites worldwide? Wikipedia has a list. As of last month:
I would have done OK. I would have biffed Baidu and Yandex, as while I’m aware of them, they aren’t on my brain much as a U.S.-based person. Yahoo blows my mind, and I didn’t even know Whatsapp worked on the web. But I certainly would have put Wikipedia higher! Higher than Twitter, anyway.
I was just thinking about this while reading Alex Hollender’s Design notes on the 2023 Wikipedia redesign. Always worth taking note when we get to read a little behind-the-scenes on a redesign of a site in the top 10. I liked the insight into the goals:
Olga, the product manager, and I started by articulating a few goals (which are interconnected and overlapping, as most sets of goals are):
- Make the website familiar & welcoming to anyone who visits (thinking especially about younger people, in other parts of the world, who have not yet discovered Wikipedia)
- Improve the experience of reading, navigating long articles, and knowledge discovery
- Better accommodate divergent needs (reading vs. editing)
- Develop a more flexible interface, with an eye towards future features
Olga also picked key metrics to monitor: pageviews, edit rates, account creation, and session length.
Me, I give it a thumbs up just for fixing that line-length issue. It used to be whack on desktop.
New look is classy I think. Not so different it sets off any weird alams but addresses many issues.
Just in case they are reading, if you could fix how tables render on mobile so I don’t have to side swipe reading TV episode entires, that’d be great thanks.
There are tons of examples of responsive tables on CodePen.
The post Chris’ Corner: Write Once, Read Anywhere appeared first on CodePen Blog.
Our recommendation for the best ecommerce analytics tool is Optimizely because it combines analytics and marketing into an all-in-one solution. Sign up for a free demo to see how Optimizely can work for you.
Knowing who buys from your web store and what they do on your site can help you target their needs better, thus generating more sales and creating more lifelong customers. Ecommerce analytics tools collect data you can use to track customer behavior and learn more about their needs and preferences.
We spent days researching dozens of the most popular analytics tools for ecommerce sites to find the best of the best and break them down into the in-depth reviews you’ll find below.
The best commerce analytics tools help you track customer behavior and website traffic to optimize your site for greater sales. Optimizely is our top recommendation overall because it seamlessly blends marketing tools with site-improvement features. Sign up for a free Optimizely demo.
Check out detailed reviews of each company below, along with the best matches for specific use cases that may be relevant to your situation.
Tools for ecommerce analytics can vary widely in their features and what they do best, so there are certainly no one-size-fits-all solutions. Here, we dissect a few specific needs for ecommerce website owners when they’re looking for an analytics tool and pinpoint the top two options for each use case.
Best Option: Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics tackles your entire sales funnel, helping you save time when moving customers along through each stage of the buying process. However, it’s pricey for small businesses with more sporadic sales, so you’ll want a healthy baseline of revenue to justify the outlay.
Another great choice: Optimizely
Optimizely has some of the highest prices on our list, so it’s best for businesses making enough sales for the cost to make sense. Its product information management features cater to large ecommerce businesses with multiple product lines and a need for targeted customer experiences.
When your online store processes hundreds or thousands of sales per day, you should consider:
Best Option: Google Analytics
Google Analytics is completely free, despite being a powerful analytics tool. If you’re just starting out and want to get all the necessary data to build your store—like traffic, keyword analysis, and bounce rate—you’ll find it without paying a dime for Google Analytics.
Another great choice: Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is free for 30 days, giving you plenty of time to test out its capabilities before buying. With plans starting as low as $29 per month, Crazy Egg remains an affordable solution for A/B testing, recording analytics, and tracked pageviews after the trial period ends.
If you don’t have a flexible budget yet, choose a tool based on:
Best Option: Optimizely
Optimizely doesn’t just track and show you data about your visitors. It also helps you use that data to customize your marketing strategy to your advantage. A/B testing, campaign planning, and built-in ecommerce tools all come in this single platform.
Another great choice: Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is an alternative to Optimizely that works well for smaller-scale online stores that don’t want to spend hundreds (or thousands) of dollars per month. It analyzes the customer journey and marks potential problems in your sales funnel to help you home in on issues that could be affecting your sales.
If you don’t want a separate tool for marketing, consider an analytics tool with:
Best Option: Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics’ primary goal is to help ecommerce businesses learn more about their actual customers. Go beyond most viewed and purchased to see deeper insights like popular searches and which sites searches most often lead to a purchase. Site owners can create customer types to track lifetime value and shopping behaviors, then target customer journeys to match their buying needs.
Another great choice: Optimizely
Ecommerce business owners can use Optimizely to run A/B tests for marketing campaigns, capture customer insights, and change elements of their website for different audiences. Real-time analytics deliver on-the-fly insights about customer behavior and allow you to generate detailed reports that can be segmented for different types of customers.
When you need highly targeted reporting, think about:
Best Option: Matomo
With more online privacy laws coming into play these days, it’s crucial to have as much control over your tracking data as possible. Matomo aligns with regulations like GDPR and CCPA by allowing you to track personally identifiable information (PII) without tracking those users across different sites, which goes against most privacy regulations.
Another great choice: Optimizely
Optimizely has various settings for users to control the cookies and other storage technologies used on their customers, helping sites comply with GDPR and other regulations. The company also has an in-house security and compliance team to keep itself and its users up-to-date and aligned with current privacy laws.
To best protect your customers when tracking their shopping behavior, consider:
After researching numerous ecommerce analytics tools, we found the companies below are excellent fits for a solid range of needs. Some are better for smaller operations, while others can meet the needs of the largest organizations.
Continue reading to learn what each analytics tool does best and find which one could be the best fit for your needs.
Optimizely is not made for smaller companies with modest budgets, to be honest. If you don’t want to spend a lot on an analytics tool, this won’t be for you. But, the reason Optimizely is so pricey is that it offers a virtually endless array of features for ecommerce businesses that want a detailed picture of their sales funnel.
Use Optimizely to set up A/B tests with a visual editor that requires no confusing coding or track full advertising campaigns from a single dashboard with full customization and segmentation. Then, use the data you collect to guide your strategy going forward.
With content and digital management tools built in, Optimizely helps guide your website to be what your visitors want it to be. Ecommerce businesses can especially make use of tools that help you create personalized customer experiences on your site whenever they visit.
Optimizely is so much more than analytics, which will obviously be more than what some ecommerce businesses need. But, combining deep analytics, optimization, a content management system, content marketing, customizable ecommerce elements, and so much more into one tool can save you money in the long run on other tools—which, combined, still might not even be able to replicate Optimizely’s power.
Let’s say you own a pet supplement company. One customer segment of yours might be cat parents who are interested in cat-focused content and products. Optimizely taps into data for that segment to show you its most-consumed items on your page and suggests ways to develop personalized content, navigation, product pages, and more just for that audience.
Optimizely also excels at A/B testing and site experimentation, its primary focus. Play around with the placement of site elements or test your entire customer journey to determine what steps in the process could improve to increase conversions. Experiments are conducted in real-time, so you can address and reduce shoppers’ pain points quickly.
Pricing for Optimizely is kept under wraps until you speak with the sales team, as each customer’s plan is customized. However, it won’t come cheap. Even the leanest plans tend to run around $2,000 to $3,000 per month, according to customer reports.
Think of Kissmetrics as a somewhat scaled-back version of Optimizely with an emphasis on improving the customer journey. It offers basic traffic metrics to learn about your site as a whole, but it also drills down into insights like conversions, sign-ups, revenue by traffic source, and new and canceled subscriptions (and much more), giving you a better understanding of your customers.
As such, Kissmetrics helps you decide what to change based on what your customers are doing. Are they dropping off at checkout without buying? Do they spend more when you offer a discount? You can answer these questions with Kissmetrics, then turn right around and optimize your web store with those answers in hand.
You can also tap into A/B testing for site features and customer funnels on select plans. Any reporting goes deep in Kissmetrics, allowing you to view how key site metrics, test performance, customer statistics, and more improve or decline over time. When you see dips in your KPIs, it might be time to change your strategy.
Kissmetrics is an exceptional analytics tool for learning about your customers and what they do on your site. Website owners can search for specific customers to track their journeys from day to day or month to month and beyond. Sales funnel reporting also breaks down where customers drop off the funnel.
Reports segment customers into populations, like first-time buyers and the highest spenders. Compare populations to see how your ecommerce properties and funnel might affect one or the other, or dig deep into one population.
One potential pitfall is that Kissmetrics can be confusing to set up, even for seasoned marketers. The user interface is also more challenging to use than other tools, so it may take some time to navigate it efficiently.
Kissmetrics for Ecommerce starts at $299 per month, billed annually. Large businesses might want to consider the Gold plan for $499 per month to get up to 10 users and 75,000 visitors tracked each month.
Google Analytics is used by millions of website owners around the world to help them gain insight about their visitors. The tool dives deep into traffic, letting you know where site visitors come from, how quickly they move from page to page or off of your site, and where they go when they’re staying on your site.
Learn more about the engagement you get from visitors by tracking what parts of your site are getting views and clicks. For example, keep tabs on which pages are most popular on your site to determine what content you should produce more of in the future to keep visitors coming back for more.
The drawback that some users point out about Google Analytics is that it’s confusing to learn. It sports a lot of customization for tracking the data you want, making it a bit tough for non-marketers to get the hang of. That learning curve is made a bit more difficult by an interface dense with information and submenus.
Although Google Analytics mostly caters to site traffic data, it does report on some useful user behavior metrics, too. You can learn how long visitors are staying on a page, what users are searching to find your site in the first place, and how many pages people are visiting per unique session.
Google Analytics comes with loads of customization capabilities, too. For example, you can create unique campaign URLs to track traffic and behavior for individual campaigns. Or, track custom events like a specific navigation sequence or when visitors click a CTA button.
Users of Google’s tools, like Ads, Cloud, and Search Console, appreciate how well Analytics syncs to these other platforms to enhance marketing strategies. While Analytics gives traffic insights, Search Console digs into the keywords and search performance that led to that traffic arriving at your online store, for one example. They all play well together, right out of the box.
Many businesses can get what they need from the free version of Google Analytics. However, an enterprise plan—Analytics 360—is available for larger operations with multiple websites or applications to track. Pricing is customized, but reportedly starts at around $150,000 annually.
Want to know how to get Google Analytics working on your ecommerce site? Check out our guide instructing you on how to do that.
Matomo is unique in that it’s an open-source analytics platform, allowing full transparency of its coding. Additionally, users get full ownership of the data they collect from their site’s visitors, whether they choose to host it on their own servers or on Matomo’s cloud servers.
Although the highest level of control and privacy with Matomo comes with self-hosting your data, this can be challenging to set up for businesses without dedicated technical teams. Matomo isn’t very beginner-friendly unless you use its cloud servers.
Still, if customer privacy is the top priority—whether you’re concerned about adhering to laws like GDPR or you’re building better trust with visitors through a transparent data collection policy—Matomo is an attractive option. Data gathered by Matomo isn’t used for other marketing purposes, so visitors don’t get tracked from one site to another. You can collect personal data like IP addresses and order IDs using Matomo, as long as you get consent from visitors to do so.
Matomo features cookieless tracking and does not send data to third parties, therefore letting you keep your customer data safe in one place. Simply letting visitors know that you use Matomo for private tracking—or, at the very least, notifying them that their data isn’t shared elsewhere—could be enough to swing some customers in your direction.
Even though it prioritizes privacy and compliance, Matomo still gives you important information you need to know about your visitors. Unlike many other ecommerce analytics tools, Matomo only tracks real data instead of using data sampling techniques. The tool tracks metrics like events, site searches, and external link clicks so you can understand your customers’ behavior.
To ensure compliance and transparency between you and your visitors, you can also use Matomo to gather tracking consents and opt-outs. Advanced security settings let you turn off tools or features to protect your customers further, like disabling live visitor profiles and masking IP addresses.
Hosting Matomo on your own servers is free, while using Matomo’s cloud hosting will cost you at least $23 per month, increasing beyond that based on your monthly traffic. Subscribers get a 17% discount with annual billing.
Crazy Egg isn’t just for Shopify businesses, but it does connect seamlessly with the platform to give you serious insights into your ecommerce website. After connecting Crazy Egg to Shopify, you can see visitors navigate through your store from product pages through to checkout, with video recordings that help you see where any issues might lie.
This platform’s other bread-and-butter is its A/B testing tool that allows you to experiment with site elements to learn what to optimize on your web store. You’re also getting visual reports that display where people are clicking on your site alongside essential reporting functions like traffic analysis and referral source data.
Setting up Crazy Egg on a Shopify site is quick and simple through an integration connection. You can see all your Crazy Egg data from your Shopify dashboard, so you won’t need to switch between tools to use it.
Another bonus for Shopify and other ecommerce platform users is Crazy Egg’s shopping surveys, which provide quick feedback from customers as they use your site. These surveys don’t interfere with your Shopify store’s user experience and take just a couple of seconds to answer, encouraging customers to give you useful feedback in the moment.
Multiple authorized users can work on your Crazy Egg account without additional cost. Add users, like an SEO expert or a marketing lead, and manage their permissions through the Crazy Egg dashboard on your site.
If you choose to switch your store to a different ecommerce platform in the future, Crazy Egg can stay with you. It integrates with other sites using plugins or code, and it works with non-ecommerce sites just as well as it does with online stores.
Crazy Egg starts at $29 per month, billed annually, for unlimited websites, 30,000 tracked pageviews, and up to three months of video recording storage. Websites with more traffic can opt for plans of $49, $99, or $249 per month, billed annually.
Learning how to create a successful ecommerce website can take time. As you build up your online store, use the following resources to help you optimize and grow your ecommerce business smoothly.
Ecommerce analytics tools provide necessary insights to learn about your traffic and customers, what visitors do most on your website, and what areas of your site could improve.
Our top recommendation is Optimizely, which effectively combines analytics and marketing tools to help you take care of potential optimization problems quickly. You can instead try Kissmetrics if you just want to dive deep into your customer journey or Google Analytics for a free solution that won’t cost you hundreds or thousands per month like the previous two.
As more applications are deployed in Kubernetes clusters, ensuring that traffic flows securely and efficiently between them becomes increasingly important. Kubernetes Network Policies are a powerful tool for controlling traffic flow at the IP address or port level, but implementing them effectively requires following best practices. In this article, we will explore ten best practices for using Kubernetes Network Policies to enhance the security and reliability of your applications.
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: NetworkPolicy
metadata:
name: backend-policy
namespace: backend
spec:
podSelector:
matchLabels:
app: backend
ingress:
- from:
- podSelector:
matchLabels:
app: frontendEnd-to-end (e2e further in the text) testing is immensely important since there are issues that can only be discovered while testing the system as a whole, testing it from one end to another.
That also adds a greater level of complexity to e2e tests, making them longer, slower to execute, and with more points of potential failure compared to lower-level tests with a smaller scope, especially when compared to tiny and blazing-fast unit tests. Since e2e tests bring a lot of value, we don’t want to neglect them. We also want to make our lives easier when doing e2e testing, which we can do with the right tools. Apart from automating our e2e tests, we can speed up our e2e tests if when they are not automated. Let us dig deeper into what exactly we can do to make e2e testing easier and faster to execute.
As someone who's in the market for HubSpot alternatives, you've probably had a taste of the platform and seen for yourself just how complex its architecture is. It features multiple advanced tool suites, all of which can be difficult to wrap your head around. In this article we'll introduce you to simpler (and cheaper!) sales and marketing solutions that might fit your needs better.