How to Prepare for Online Sale? Six Essential Tips

Online sale can be a very difficult period for web-project developer, and we have prepared 6 valuable tips on how to organize it successfully and reduce stress together with outcomes from traffic spikes.

   1.     Check Your Server in the Course of Sale

Site breakdown is a real disaster that can spoil the entire event. Before starting to sale, notify your web-hosting provider about possible traffic spikes, and make sure that your server will be able to deal with the load.

2.    Order a CDN to Improve Page Speed and Reduce Server Load

To supply end-users with the best experience, it is strongly recommended to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). It decreases load on your server by transferring various web assets (images, JavaScript, CSS from servers). Besides, it boosts page loading times and makes up for trouble-free website surfing.

3.    Social Media Must Help You

Interaction with your customers is absolutely a need to improve brand loyalty. Besides, it allows finding out what your customers want, and informing them about fresh releases and sales. There are so many popular social media channels, that you just can’t ignore them!

4.    Make Sure That Customers Will Make a Purchase Simply

Is shopping on your web-site easy and comprehensible? Provide your customers with a clear and simple way to order items. The process of shopping should be enjoyable, and there should be clear logical steps to find and purchase an item. Aim at making your web-site as user-friendly as possible.

5.    Implement Analytic Tools and Use Them Regularly

If you need detailed information about your customers, including how much time they spend on web-pages of your site, location, etc., top-notch analytics should be provided. That will help you to target the audience more effectively, and improve site performance. There are lots of free analytics tools in the Net, including such solution as Google Analytics.

6.    Create an Extensive Customer E-mail Database

E-mail marketing is another way to keep customers informed about recent sales. If you send letters with recent promotions and sales on regular basis, it is more likely to attract visitors. The most reasonable way to do that is E-mail list segmentation. If a customer made a purchase on your site once, there is a high chance that he will make order one more time, and become a regular client.

Difference between CDN pricing models

Traditionally, CDN providers offer two types of payment: pipeline pricing and per-gigabyte pricing. Which one is more suitable for you?

Per-Gigabyte Pricing: For and Against

In this case, a user can exploit as much bandwidth as required during the billing period. Sometimes, providers offer packages of 100 Gb, 10 Tb, and many other variations, while others sell bandwidth by gigabytes (for instance, $0,05 per Gigabyte).  This payment model is convenient for online businesses that usually need some certain amount of bandwidth, and face traffic spikes quite often. The model’s strong side is that you pay only for resources that you really used, regardless of the time and number of requests.

Reasons to Choose Pipeline Pricing

This model would be ideal for web-projects with great online presence. A provider allows you providing some certain amount of bandwidth per second, and if the limit is not exceeded, you will pay what is expected. It is also called 95/5 model, because a user is allowed to use more bandwidth in case of traffic spikes only 5% of time. As a rule, it is one and a half day (hours of traffic spike are summed), while the rest of the month bandwidth limit should not be exceeded. Otherwise, you will have to pay more. Samples of bandwidth usage are taken every five minutes. When counting the price of service, 5% of highest traffic samples are ignored, and the rest 95% are analyzed. If they are within limits, it is good for user. Thus, clients who manage their bandwidth would definitely benefit from such payment system. If you don’t face traffic spikes on a regular basis, this is the most sensible solution.

SpaceCDN offers hundreds of CDN solutions with per-gigabyte pricing. If you have mission-critical projects and face with traffic or request spikes occasionally, this would be a perfect solution for you!

3 Things About Cyber Security You Need to Know

Loss of mission-critical data on a server is a real nightmare of any web-developer. That is why cyber security is, and has always been, a very important issue. Even if you think you will never face such a problem, keep in mind these three simple facts.

1.   Cyber attacks are not necessarily personal. So you haven’t done anything bad and think there is no one willing to hack your site? In fact, cyber criminals do not care whose site to crack – they simply look for web-projects with vulnerable codes with the help of bots and automated methods. So if you were attacked, it just means that your site is among thousands of vulnerable websites. And hackers did not aim to do harm personally to you – they have just revealed your outdated plugin. How to defense your project and data from automated attacks? First, use basic protection methods (complicated password, updated plugins and software). Secondly, make sure your web-hosting provider offers security features.
2.  Cyber safety is your responsibility, too. You can do a lot to make your site code inaccessible for hackers. Most often, home computers, websites and e-mails become objects of cyber attacks. Even such factors as encrypted networks, secure buildings, and updated software of server already contribute to high security level. Do not send important data or update your website via public Wi Fi or an unsecure machine – this can easily make your data vulnerable.
3.   Security improvement is a never-ending process. Whether you like it or not, cyber security is really effective only when you do regular upgrades. Password changing and software updating alone cannot guarantee 100% protection. You should also review systems and security policies, and better implement a two-step authentication.

How to Optimize Images for Web

When it comes to website performance, most aspire to increase loading speed with the help of CDN and powerful servers. But there is one more way to boost up page loading: image optimization contributes to faster work considerably. What are common methods and gimmicks to optimize pictures for web?

Optimization for improved performance

Scaling is necessary before uploading. It can be done with the help of Paint, Photoshop or Gimp. That helps to save resources and improved work with Google Pagespeed’s guidelines. You can also upload images of different resolutions for them to suit different devices.

Studies show that images constitute about 62% of page weight. Thus, their size should be reduced in most cases. A good way out is lossless compression – a picture becomes lighter without quality loss. There are different services for that, for instance, Optimus Image Optimizer. Depending on image format and size, up to 70% of size can be compressed.

Responsive image technique allows loading images of different scale basing on the size of display. It is done with the help of scrset and sizes attributes, which are the part of HTML specification.

Consider using new formats: WebP and SVG. They are of smaller sizes, and allow saving high quality while reducing webpage size. WebP is a creation of Google to compress photos, it allows decrease page size on 70% or even more, depending on the number of images on it. SVG file type is also characterized by small size. It can be animated or changed with the help of JavaScript. Unfortunately, this format is not allowed to be used on some platforms, for instance, WordPress.

Optimization for SEO

Choose appropriate image names: it will make it easier to work with them down the road. If there are multiple words, divide them with hyphens: Googlebot sees them as a separator, while underscores make it read a combination as one word.

Every image on a page should have alt text. It is a short description of what is on the picture. Google values them, as well, and determines how the image is ranked, and whether it is related to the content. Besides, alt description is often used by blind or visually impaired people accessing site with the help of screen readers.

Image optimization will make your web-site load faster, increasing its ranking in search engines.