The SiteGround Blog

Google Starts Serious Security Talks with the CMS Community

Last week, Chicago was the coldest place on earth! This was all over the news. The temperatures dropped to -30 degrees Celsius (-22 Fahrenheit) with a wind chill of -50. I consider myself lucky to have been there to witness this rare polar vortex. However, I was in Chicago for a different event, one that didn’t make the news but was just as exciting -- the Google CMS Security Summit.

Close to thirty top security experts from Google, different CMS platforms, and hosting companies came together to discuss how to make the internet a safer place for everyone. I consider myself even luckier to have been a part of this discussion as a representative of SiteGround.

For two days, we talked with the representatives of WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, PrestaShop, TYPO3, Squarespace, Symfony, Sucuri, Wordfence, and more. It was inspiring to see how organizations that are competitors when it comes to attracting the end user to their platforms, can actually be unified for the higher aim of making the internet safer.
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Meet Our Top Customer Care Rep for January

We are excited to start our Customer Care of the Month series in 2019 with an updated format. It allows us to add broader answers of our teammates. The winner this month is Veronika - one of our most cheerful colleagues. She joined the team less than a year ago but she already managed to achieve the amazing 99,73% Happy Clients Rating. In our talk, Veronika shares her thoughts on what it is like to be a Customer Care representative, what did she wish people knew about her work, and one useful must-have tool she recommends to WordPress users. Find out more in the interview!
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Best of 2018: More Site Speed, Better Security, Plenty of New Tools, and 98% Client Satisfaction

This year was quite busy and eventful for us at SiteGround. We worked hard on multiple projects that extend and improve the tools we offer, enhance the performance of all websites on our platform, and block millions of security threats daily so that they never reach your sites. It’s been a remarkable year, but what matters most for us is what difference did it all make for you. Judging by the outstanding 98% client satisfaction in our end-of-year survey, our efforts did not go unnoticed. Here are some of our highlights of the things we launched that helped us get your high mark.

Our Top Technical Support Rep in December

At the end of 2018, we are excited to introduce to you one of our devoted Tech Support team members. Nikolay is extremely hardworking, and he truly enjoys helping users solve their hosting issues. He is a top performer in December with the amazing 99.18% happy clients rating.
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How We Updated 700K+ Sites to WordPress 5 and What We Learned in the Process

Over the last week, we gradually rolled out WordPress 5 through our auto-update system. We took a different approach for this update as this version introduced one of the biggest changes in WordPress so far: the new block-based editor also known as Gutenberg. Updating hundreds of thousands of active WordPress installations, especially when such an anticipated and, at the same time, feared change is happening, can be a serious challenge. Today, we’re happy to report that less than two weeks after its release, most of our WordPress clients are already using the latest WordPress 5 version. The process has been quite smooth and we wanted to share our insights and encourage more people to make the move to a great block-based editing experience.
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Your Most Common Gutenberg Questions Answered

A few months ago we introduced our WordPress Community Ambassadors. We announced that we would support these very deserving individuals to travel and speak at WordCamps, so they can continue to share their expertise and lift up other WordPress users. Now, we want them to have their place on our blog with the same purpose in mind - educate and help our readers understand better the ins-and-outs of WordPress.

The first post that we will share with you is by Joe Casabona on Gutenberg - the hottest topic in the community for the past 10-12 months. Joe is a fantastic trainer, whose talent is to make complex things easy to understand for anyone. In the past year he has worked tirelessly to produce training material for Gutenberg, the new block editor included with WordPress 5.0. This is his first article for the SiteGround blog, enjoy!

WordPress 5.0 was recently released. The most notable new feature in 5.0 is the new editor, based on blocks and also known as Gutenberg. While it’s sure to really improve the content-creation experience, there are a lot of questions surrounding the update and what it means for current websites. Here are the answers to some of the most common inquiries both the SiteGround team and I have received from WordPress users so far.

Our Roll-Out Plan for WordPress 5.0

The most anticipated version of WordPress, version 5.0, is now officially released. It will substantially change the way people edit their website content by introducing the new block editor (also known as Gutenberg). To make the transition to the new editor as smooth as possible, we have temporarily stopped the automatic WordPress updates. After its restart, we will automatically install the Classic Editor plugin along with the new WordPress core update. This will give you the opportunity to take full advantage of all the great options in the new block editor, while being able to easily switch to the old way of editing your posts if you need to.

The New Version of Our SG Optimizer Plugin Is a Game Changer for Your WordPress Performance

Early versions of our SG Optimizer plugin had one single purpose: to connect WordPress with the reverse proxy caching system set up on our servers. Over the years, we have added multiple features like PHP and HTTPS management options that allow even more control over SiteGround’s server environment right from the WordPress backend. With the new release, not only have we greatly enhanced the existing functionalities, but we’ve also included some of the most popular application-based performance optimizations. Now, our plugin is an all-inclusive performance solution for WordPress sites hosted on our platform. Our SG Optimizer has always been an invaluable tool in boosting site performance and now we’ve pushed its capabilities even further. Internal speed tests of the new version show an additional 20-30% performance improvement even for well-optimized sites. And when you use the plugin on a site that runs on an old PHP version and/or has poorly-optimized content, the benefit can easily go up to 500%!