Google Analytics is a great tool. We use it at A2 Hosting and it's something that I look at everyday. However like any tool, it isn't perfect and there are stats that you shouldn't necessarily take for granted. One of those stats, and it is an important one, is your conversion rate.   I for one have never paid much attention to the conversion rate that Google Analytics reports. I instead prefer to calculate this number myself with actual sales from our billing system. I would recommend that you do the same.   If you're going to use Google Analytics, or any website stats program for that matter to calculate your conversion rate, I would take a close look at your traffic sources. Some months you're going to purchase online advertisements and they're just not going to work. That's just the nature of marketing; trial and error.   Those visitors probably aren't sticking around for very long on your site and the bounce rate is probably quite high from those traffic sources. That's obviously going to negatively impact your conversion rate. Don't be afraid to strip those traffic stats out to give yourself a more accurate idea of what your conversion rate was for that month. Also feel free to remove stats from any pages on your site that aren't necessarily going to convert users. An example is a blog post that is getting a ton of hits, but just isn't converting your visitors. You can easily accomplish this by using Analytics to filter and segment these pages and traffic sources.   Stripping out these numbers from your traffic stats to calculate your conversion rate will allow you to more easily compare your conversion rate month over month and year over year. After all, your conversion rate is a key statistic to help you measure and really compare the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

From time to time, our support team receives the following question:   I installed a security plugin and some of my other plugins disappeared. What happened?   If you have plugins unexpectedly disappear when you are updating, deleting or adding plugins, your site has likely been compromised.  This does not mean the new plugin you just added was the cause of the compromise; this simply means by modifying your plugins, Wordpress has performed a basic check on all plugins that are installed and has removed any plugins that had code injected above the meta data for the plugin.   So what’s really going on when the plugins disappear?     When the plugins disappear, WordPress is just ignoring the files for missing metadata.  This is usually caused by code injection near the top of the file.  This is not a security feature of WordPress;  Instead, it is a byproduct of WordPress requiring a specific comment at the beginning of each plugin describing things like the plugin’s name, author, copyright, and version.  WordPress no longer recognizes the plugin so it effectively disappears from the wp-admin; however, the files are still in the plugin directory.     What is code injection?   Many exploits to plugins and themes in WordPress will take advantage of the fact that WordPress executes the code present in the main file of each active plugin on every page load. When infected files are executed, they will also seek out other files to compromise and very quickly every PHP file on a site will have several new lines of code in them for any number of evil reasons.  The lines of code that are copied into each php file are known as injected code.   Why do hackers inject code?   Code injection is a common way hackers use WordPress to send SPAM, advertise their hacker group or to even perform a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.  The code is executed at least once on every page view of your site, causing the hack to perform its task over and over again.  If the purpose of the hack is to send spam from

About 4 years ago we saw the birth of a new tactic to target potential customers called remarketing (also referred to as retargeting). You may not be familiar with this term, but I would be very surprised if you haven't seen remarketing in practice. Remarketing is when you visit a website and then you start seeing banner ads and even ads in Facebook promoting the website you visited.   It's a very targeted marketing tactic because you are spending your marketing budget on customers who have at least shown interest in your website and product. That is instead of advertising to the giant pool of potential customers who may or may not be interested in you. Unless your conversion rate is 100% (I would love to speak with you to learn some pointers if that's the case), you should consider using remarketing. After all, a 2% conversion rate means 98% of customers didn't purchase from you.   Most of us have been using the Internet long enough that banner ads don't always grab our attention. Instead you may want to consider remarketing for search via PPC bidding. In your average PPC campaign, your bids, ads and keywords are identical for each searcher. However if you know that someone has already shown interest in your product, you can bid more for broader keywords and write more targeted ads.   For example, let's say you're a shoe retailer that specifically sells blue basketball shoes. A normal keyword you would bid on would probably be 'blue basketball shoes'.That's a very specific keyword that may not get a ton of searches, but it describes your product perfectly. By using remarketing for search, you know you're only advertising to previous site visitors who have shown interest in your product. Since this is the case, you don't have to be so defined with your keyword selection. You can choose a keyword like 'shoe'. Bidding on 'shoe' probably wouldn't be the best strategy without retargeting because it's likely a highly competitive keyword, therefore it would be extremely expensive to get clicks for.   Go ahead a

For anyone who doesn't know, Shellshock is the name of a particularly nasty vulnerability in Bash, the standard shell for most Linux distributions (and other Unix-like systems.) As of press time, new vulnerabilities due to this bug are still being discovered. Some distributions have only released patches that fix part of the problem, and a vast number of Internet connected computers are unpatched and vulnerable. There's bound to be some negative outcomes from a security problem like this, but let's see if we can scrape out some positive results. The first lesson to take from this problem is that no software, no matter how ubiquitous, is guaranteed free from vulnerabilities. The Shellshock bug in Bash has been there for a long time. It looks like over a decade. This isn't a result of an overwrought, unmaintainable mess receiving a poorly reviewed patch like the Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL. This is code that has been there for a long time, and everyone from Google to Facebook to Apple has been using Bash and not found it. Don't take for granted that because some program is standard and popular that it is safe. Because it isn't. That means, don't assume you can just stick with the version you have forever and not worry about updates down the road. It also means, don't trust software unnecessarily. Don't believe that any piece of software is a locked door, and you can be sloppy behind it assuming nobody will ever get past it. In the case of Shellshock, most people probably didn't even realize they were trusting Bash with their CGI setups, but they were. If you're using CGI to execute your web application, you're trusting Bash (or some other shell) to be free of vulnerabilities that would allow remote execution. It's not just CGI, though; any PHP script that uses shell_exec could be vulnerable. Or an application written in another language which uses a form of shell_exec. Remember when your paranoid, security-minded friend told you not to use shell_exec in your applications? This kind of thing is why. That's the thir

It shouldn't come as a surprise WordPress users really care about page load speed and website security. After all, page load speed impacts everything from your bounce rates, conversion rates, page views and Google rankings. On the security side, over 10 million websites are hacked each year and the total cost to fix those hacks are rapidly escalating.   We understand your concerns! That's why our team of WordPress optimization experts developed A2 Optimized. A2 Optimized is a WordPress plugin, exclusive to A2 Hosting customers, providing auto-configuration for your site so you get the best WordPress performance. Thanks to months of testing multiple combinations of compression and caching solutions, we've ended the guesswork of how to get the fastest WordPress page loads.   We don't want your site to become another hacked statistic.  That's why the plugin also helps to lock down your WordPress sites. With A2 Optimized, you automatically get:   Unique WordPress Login URL Automatic WordPress Updates ReCaptcha on WordPress Login Page   Automatically accelerate and harden your existing WordPress site with A2 Optimized in a few easy steps! Or are you a new customer who wants to give our A2 Optimized WordPress a try? Just visit our WordPress Hosting page and your A2 Optimized WordPress install will come pre-installed!

Imagine you're launching a new product you've been working on for months. It's perfect. Your creative ad copy is going to really hit home with your target market. You even have an affordable contract for product distribution. All you need to do is slap a price down and all your hard work will mean you'll get to see money rolling in. Out of the 4 P's of the Marketing Mix (price, product, promotion and place), doesn't it seem like pricing would be the easiest one to nail down?   Then you start thinking about price and it's really not so easy. Is it a unique product with few competitors where you can afford to price it a little higher? Are your potential customers going to be turned off by the high price? Are you in a crowded market place where you need to price low? What if you price too low and you can't cover your costs.   It's never a bad time to review your pricing strategy. Not every pricing strategy is the right one for every business and each business can utilize multiple strategies. Here is a quick look at 6 different pricing strategies for you to consider the next time you launch a new product or decide to re-consider your current pricing.   Competitor Based Pricing   Just as its name infers, this strategy focuses on your competitors. What are your competitors charging? Are you able to set a price without worrying about your own costs? What are your luxury and budget competitors charging?   Value Based Pricing   Pricing focused on determining on how much a customer is worth to you. This can be tricky to determine at first and may require you to put some customer lifetime models together.   Cost Based Pricing   Determine how much your product costs to make and marking it up by a percentage or flat amount.   Promotional Pricing   There are a number of techniques when using promotional pricing including offering special event pricing, comparison discounting (Was $100, Now Just $75) and offering pricing well above your competitors with heavy discounts on other items.   Psychological Prici

When searching through all of the potential plugins to install on your wordpress site, you may notice that many of the popular plugins have to do with security.  This may seem very tempting to let a plugin handle all of your security needs for your site but, security plugins forget one important fact about the web:  if your site is too slow for people to navigate it, people won’t visit your site.     Most Security plugins add lots and lots of rules into your .htaccess file which the web server has to parse for every page load (even for static .html files). The longer .htaccess gets, the slower the site will get.  I’ve seen as many as 900 rules in a single .htaccess file from wordpress security plugins: needless to say, this site was one of the slowest that I have ever seen.  There are better ways to secure a wordpress site.  When security plugins are not writing hundreds of .htaccess rules, many of them use large amounts of CPU power to search through lists of bots and IP addresses of potential hackers.  They also write to log files constantly, which clogs up the performance of your server.  If it has Security in the name, chances are that it will slow down your site.   How do you secure our site without security plugins?   The simplest and most affective way to secure your site is to use a strong admin username and password.  Most of the time, the username for the site admin is drumroll please…. “admin”.  Using the same admin username as everybody else makes it easy for botnets to hack your site, since all they need to do is figure out your password (which is probably “pass” or “password” J.K... right? ) and they’re in.     Moving your login page is the simplest way to prevent bots from attempting to log into your site.  You can use “Rename wp-login.php” to change the URL of your login page, then bots will have no idea where to go to even attempt logging in.  You can also name the login page anything you want by a setting in wp-admin (Settings > Permalinks > Login url) .  So if you really want, your logi

When it comes to your marketing efforts, it's impressive how often the 80/20 rule....rules. That is 80% of production comes from just 20% of the total source. This could mean 80% of your affiliate sales come from 20% of your affiliates or 80% of content views on your site are from only 20% of your pages.   In my experience, the rule is often closer to a 95/5 rule. This is especially true from the AdWords campaigns I have run. You can have 1000's of optimized ad groups, but the reality is only a select few of your keywords are actually the ones converting. If this is the case for your AdWords campaign, and I bet it is, doesn't it make sense to spend the majority of your budget on those keywords? More importantly, doesn't it make sense to do everything you can to make sure that your ads are being triggered when your top converting keywords are searched?   AdWords makes it simple to keep your most successful keywords above your competitors. Just go to your keyword tab and sort by Status. The keywords below the first page estimate will be sorted at the top. I highly recommend that you go through your keywords, especially your top converting keywords, and making sure that you are bidding them up to the first page estimate. In fact, if the cost per click and cost per conversion makes sense on a CPA basis, I would bid the amount AdWords recommends in their above the search results estimate.   If you're running a campaign with numerous keywords, I also recommend placing your top converting ad groups into a separate campaign. That way it's even easier to keep track of your most successful keywords and to keep those bids at a level where your ads are showing up. Otherwise you're missing out on a number of conversion opportunities.

WordPress is a pretty straightforward content management system (CMS) for blogging. It’s fairly quick out of the box, but WordPress has a community of developers that have made plugins to allow WordPress to do pretty much anything you want.  The downside of having so many options for plugins is that we, as webmasters, tend to want to install every plugin we can get our hands on.   When we overload our site with plugins that do everything we think we need, each time a page loads, the site is doing everything. This causes slower and slower page load times each and every time we add a new plugin.  Each and every time a page loads on your site, each installed plugin executes the code and database calls necessary to perform its task. Unfortunately, most plugins are not coordinated to work with each other and many of the same database and function calls will be repeated over and over again by different plugins.  This definitely slows down your site.  Adding a few plugins to your site can increase your page load time by double, triple or even more.  Having one plugin that does everything is not always the solution either, since the plugin may do more than you need and can be slower.   There are several plugins that can help speed things up though and some that can even help you identify what is slowing down your site.  At A2 Hosting, we recommend the W3 Total Cache plugin as a way to speed up delivery of pages on your site. By saving a copy of each page's HTML on the hard drive, W3 Total Cache allows your site to skip a few steps in processing a request from a user.  The site stores this cached version of the page until either new content has been added to the site or the page has reached a maximum age. At this point the next time the page is viewed, a new cached page is created. W3 Total Cache can also enable tools that reduce the file size of pages sent to your users making your site faster especially for users with slow internet connections.   The Plugin Performance Profiler (P3) plugin is a great tool for iden

One of the most valuable, yet under used features of Google Analytics is the Funnel Visualization report. I'll admit that I've always been a bit confused on how to get this report up and running, but after spending a few moments testing it out, it's not as hard as it once seemed.   I can't stress the importance of looking at a Funnel Visualization report to learn more about your site's shopping cart abandonment and determining where you're losing users along the way. You've done the hard work to get the visitor to come to your site. You've sold them on your service or product. Don't make the mistake of losing them in your cart! Funnel Visualization will help you determine what steps in the checkout process may be causing customer confusion or trouble and help you focus on which steps need to be tweaked.   There are other solutions that will help you track movement through your conversion funnel aside from Analytics. However most estimates show that roughly half of all sites use Analytics, so I thought I'd share step-by-step instructions to show you how to set up Funnel Visualization. Best of all, it's a free solution and you can't beat that!   First you will need to create a goal: Click Admin at the top of Analytics Select Goals under the View column Click +New Goal Name your Goal, select Destination from the Type options and click Next step Enter your shopping cart's confirmation page URL in the Destination box. Click to turn the Funnel button on Name and add the URL for each of the shopping cart pages leading up to the confirmation page. Click Create goal.   Now that you've created your goal, it will take Analytics some time to record conversions. To view the Funnel Visualization report: Click Reporting at the top of Analytics Click Conversions, Goals and Funnel Visualization in the navigation menu Choose the goal that you just created if it isn't already selected in the Goal Option drop down. After a few quick steps, you'll be able to see the Shopping Cart Flow at the bottom of this page

Anyone who has experience developing a Single Page Application (SPA) with naked jQuery or raw JavaScript knows that doing so involves a lot of work for basic UI functions like keeping your Model and View in sync. You end up with hundreds or even thousands of lines of JavaScript devoted to basic functionality, before you can even begin writing your application logic. This is why teams of developers have put tremendous effort into making a variety of JavaScript application frameworks. You can take your pick from BackboneJS, EmberJS, AngularJS and others. Each has its own advantages, but for this post I'll just be talking about what AngularJS brings to the table. There's a few key features that make AngularJS distinct from the alternatives. A big one is that Angular templates are written in HTML using directives (HTML5 data elements or custom attributes) for its template functionality. For example, if you have a list element that you'd like to repeat for each entry in an array, you use an ng-repeat directive on that list element like so:     {{ cookie.name }} : {{ cookie.description }} Assuming you have an array called cookies with elements that contain both a name and description, you will get a list as you might imagine from the above in AngularJS Angular will do automatic data binding as well, if the cookies array gets updated in your model, the view will automatically update. That means adding, removing or changing any of the elements in your model is automatically reflected to the user. This is just a very basic introduction to some of the functionality AngularJS has on offer. For a more comprehensive overview I recommend checking out the official AngularJS site which contains detaield documentation as well as a number of videos.

Below you'll find another batch of help articles to help you learn more about WordPress and optimize your WordPress Hosting account! If there are any topics you would like us to feature, just leave your ideas in the comments below.   Using Google Analytics with WordPress Learn more about your websites' visitors and how they found your site in the first place.   Installing and configuring the Google XML Sitemaps plugin Easily generate XML sitemaps for your WordPress sites to help search engines index your web site content faster.   Installing and configuring the Postie plugin for WordPress Learn how you can post to your WordPress site by simply sending an e-mail message.   Disabling plugins in WordPress Did you know you can disable WordPress plugins both individually and all at once? Learn how to disable plugins for WordPress, both individually and all at once.   Installing and configuring the Disqus Comment System plugin for WordPress Add the Disqus Comment System to make commenting easier and more interactive

Thanks to our brand new partnership with ManageWP, your WordPress Hosting service from A2 Hosting now features a free ManageWP account! Use ManageWP to run all of your WordPress sites from a single dashboard! I just ran through the setup and it couldn't be easier. Just click the ManageWP icon in your cPanel account, enter your email address, click sign in and just like that ManageWP will auto-detect WordPress sites on your A2 Hosting account. Your free ManageWP account features include: Manage and update your WordPress sites from a single dashboard 1-click theme and plugin updates Install and manage plugins and themes for each of your WordPress sites Mass spam comment removal Built in page view stats Two-factor login authentication for enhanced security You also get a free 14-day Professional ManageWP trial when you setup your account. In addition to all of the free features listed above, your free Professional trial includes their Google Analytics widget, traffic change alerts, scheduled site backups and much more!   Get started managing your sites with ManageWP now and let us know what you think of this slick new feature in the comments below!

One of the most important tasks for running any ad campaign is making sure that you're properly targeting your audience. One of the advantages of running an AdWords campaign is not only can you closely target audiences that are more likely to convert, but you can also eliminate audiences that are less likely to convert. One of the ways you can do that is by using Bid Adjustments.   To access Bid adjustments, start by clicking on your best performing campaign and then select the settings tab in your AdWords account. From there you'll have the option to select Locations and Devices. Click the Locations tab and set your date range to the last 30-days.   On this screen you'll be able to see which countries are sending traffic that is converting well, and conversely not converting so well. Next to each country, you can click the Bid Adjustment column to increase or decrease each countries bid by a certain percentage. For example, a $1 PPC bid and a 10% increase on US-based traffic would mean the PPC bid would become $1.10 for US traffic. I recommend doing the obvious; increasing the bid adjustment for countries that convert well and decreasing the bid adjustment for countries that don't convert so well.   Next I would select the Devices tab. Here you'll be able to see how well you convert on computers versus mobile devices with full browsers versus tablets with full browsers. On this screen you'll only be able to select a bid adjustment for mobile devices. Depending on whether you convert at a high rate or a low rate on mobile devices, select the proper bid adjustment for this setting.

It's an unfortunate fact that many people don't consider the security of their website very seriously until after they've already had an issue. It's easy to think "I don't need to worry about security, my blog is small!"  But this is like thinking you don't need to worry about getting into a car accident because you drive a small car. There are tons of automated tools for anyone who wants to cause trouble to find potential targets, no matter how small or obscure. So if your site is vulnerable, it's only a matter of time until someone stumbles across it.   That's why it's important to take security seriously before your site is hit. That means keeping your software up to date, using unique, non-trivial passwords and being careful about what plugins, extensions and themes you install. Even when you do all of those things, it's important to montior your site as well. Every day exploits are found in software that was previously thought to be safe   So if you don't have the time or inclination to monitor yoru site 24/7, software like 6Scan can be a huge help.  If you have an A2 Hosting account with cPanel you can enable 6Scan's Free version with only a few clicks. Prime Web Hosting customers also have an exclusive option of 6Scan Premium for only $2.99 (90% off.) Which will not only notify you of issues but fix them automatically.

Thanks to our brand new partnership with ManageWP, your WordPress Hosting service from A2 Hosting now features a free ManageWP account! Use ManageWP to run all of your WordPress sites from a single dashboard! I just ran through the setup and it couldn't be easier. Just click the ManageWP icon in your cPanel account, enter your email address, click sign in and just like that ManageWP will auto-detect WordPress sites on your A2 Hosting account. Your free ManageWP account features include: Manage and update your WordPress sites from a single dashboard 1-click theme and plugin updates Install and manage plugins and themes for each of your WordPress sites Mass spam comment removal Built in page view stats Two-factor login authentification for enhanced security You also get a free 14-day Professional ManageWP trial when you setup your account. In addition to all of the free features listed above, your free Professional trial includes their Google Analytics widget, traffic change alerts, scheduled site backups and much more!   Get started managing your sites with ManageWP now and let us know what you think of this slick new feature in the comments below!

Not only do we have the goal of offering you the fastest WordPress Hosting service possible, we also want to make sure you optimize your WordPress account. Each week we're publishing helpful content to teach you about all the ins and outs of WordPress. Below is a list of just some of our most recent articles:   How To Debug WordPress Learn about WordPress' provided settings used to help debug themes, databases, and more.   ‘Scheduled maintenance’ Message in WordPress WordPress sometimes displays a “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance” message in your web browser when you try to view your WordPress site. Learn what this message is all about!   Enabling and customizing maintenance mode in WordPress Learn how to enable maintenance mode in your WordPress install and how to customize the page WordPress will display when your site is in maintenance mode.   Configuring WordPress Cron Jobs A WordPress cron job can ensure scheduled tasks and other features work in a timely manner.   Scheduling WordPress Post Publishing Learn how to schedule your posts to be automatically published on a future date and time that you set!

By most estimates, an average of 30,000 websites are hacked everyday. This is a serious concern for webmasters. Hacks come in all shapes and sizes including defacements, malicious redirects and theft of costly data. Obviously this is bad news!   The good news is that we offer our HackScan Protection for free on our Web Hosting platform to block common hack attempts. The better news is that we've partnered with website security company 6Scan to provide advanced hack protection. All of our Web Hosting accounts come pre-configured with free 6Scan vulnerability scans.   There's more though! Our Web Hosting customers now save 90% off 6Scan's Professional plan. For a mere $2.99/mo, the Professional plan includes enhanced malware protection as well as automatic vulnerability and malware fixes! 6Scan Professional is also available for Managed VPS customers for $25/mo and Managed Dedicated customers for $50/mo. Add 6Scan's Professional Plan to your account now.   Once you purchase your 6Scan plan, visit our 6Scan Knowledgebase Article to learn how to apply your license to your account.  

I often focus on providing Google SEO and AdWords tips. There's a good reason for that. Depending on which search engine report you pay attention to, Google's search network accounts for about 66% of search engine searches. I thought I would shake things up a bit this month and talk about Bing-Yahoo. After all, you can't ignore the fact that the Bing-Yahoo search network accounts for roughly 29% of searches.   Now if someone asked me how to optimize a site for Bing-Yahoo SEO, I wouldn't have the first clue (and I'm supposed to be an expert, right?). I would instead continue to focus on Google Webmaster's Guidelines for SEO in this case. Use Google's guidelines and any organic clicks you get from Bing or Yahoo should be viewed as a bonus.   What I will encourage you to do however is to look into the Bing-Yahoo Ad Network (we actually offer a $50 Bing-Yahoo Advertising Credit for you to get started). So why focus on Bing-Yahoo advertising, but not SEO? Competition. I'll give you an example. It's no secret that one of the key services we offer is SSD Hosting. One of the keywords we advertise on both AdWords and the Bing-Yahoo ad network is in fact "SSD Hosting". On AdWords our average keyword rank for "SSD Hosting" is 4.6. Our average rank on Bing-Yahoo is 1.3. Here's the kicker; we spend less than half per click on Bing-Yahoo ads versus AdWords. So not only are we paying less for keywords, we're also ranking higher as well.   If you're ready to start advertising on Bing-Yahoo, you can easily upload your existing AdWords campaign into a new Bing-Yahoo account. I've never had much luck using the Bing-Yahoo control panel to do this. Instead just export your AdWords campaign into a .csv file via the AdWords Editor and import it into the Bing Ads Editor. Depending on the size of your campaign, it really shouldn't take you more than 30-minutes before you start receiving affordable, new traffic.

One of our most commonly asked questions from new customers is whether or not we offer discounts. The truth is, we are priced very competitively and we include features competing hosts charge extra for.  Just look at our All Inclusive Hosting page. Some of the free tools we pack into our Web Hosting accounts include Server Rewind Backups, a CDN, Malware Protection, the A2 SiteBuilder and SEO Tools. We include everything you need and charge you one affordable rate without hidden fees. We even have a 30-Day Money Back Guarantee so you can try our service, as well as all of these free features risk free.   That's not to say we're not willing to also give you an extra bonus to try out A2 Hosting. We do in fact offer discounts on your first invoice. Visit the A2 Hosting Coupon page for our 100% reliable current discounts. This you can spend your valuable time building your website on your brand new A2 Hosting package instead of searching the web for past discounts that may have already expired.   Get Your Coupon!