The SiteGround Blog

14 Years of WordPress Playlist

It's that time of the year when we're getting ready to celebrate another WordPress anniversary. Tomorrow, May 27th, WordPress turns 14! To mark the occasion the SiteGround way, we made a playlist featuring a track by every musician that's ever had a WordPress release named in their honor. The mix did wonders for our productivity in the office, so we decided to share it. We hope it makes your day better, whether you had to spend it working on your website or celebrating. Enjoy and a Happy 14th Birthday to the whole WordPress community!

Let’s Encrypt Interface New Options

Making SSL certificated accessible and used by everyone has been our ongoing effort for more than a year now. We were among the first to provide the free Let’s Encrypt certificates. Then, we automated the SSL issuing for all accounts. Later, we upgraded our WordPress plugin, SG Optimizer, to allow 1-click WordPress SSL configuration. Now we’re making the next step - our latest upgrade to the Let’s Encrypt tool in cPanel allows you to force all your domain traffic through HTTPS with a single click regardless of the application you are using. Read below to find out what are the new options in our Let’s Encrypt interface.

How our new anti-bot AI prevents millions of brute-force attacks

For the last few days we have been gradually launching a new AI-based bot prevention system on our servers developed by our own DevOps specialists. We are already seeing amazing results from the operation of the system. Each hour it blocks between 500 000 and 2 million brute-force attempts across all our servers. Thus, we have prevented an unknown number of potential unauthorized logins, but what is even more important -- we have managed to save an enormous amount of server resources that can now be used for a meaningful and legitimate activity by our users.

Our Top Support Rep in April

Elena is a member of our Technical Support team and this month she became the top rated representative by our customers. So we interviewed her about her life in and out of SiteGround. Find out her favorite books, music and why she thinks she doesn’t actually work a single day in her life.

SG Optimizer – Our WordPress Plugin

In 2012 we released a SiteGround WordPress plugin. Its purpose was to connect the WordPress installations of our users with our caching service - the SuperCacher. For many years all updates we have made to the plugin were only related to the caching functionality. However, in the last few months we have added two completely new functionalities (HTTPS switch and PHP 7.0 updater) and have changed the plugin name to SG Optimizer. To learn more about what is now included in the SG Optimizer read below.

Our Top Customer Care Rep in March

This month we present to you Nikola Nikolov - our customer care rep who achieved the highest customer satisfaction rate in March. His formula for success is simple - set a goal, follow through and add generous doses of coffee. During spring, if he is not immersed in a fantasy book, he can be spotted playing basketball outside. Find out more about Nikola in his interview!

OptinMonster for SiteGround Users

Email communication is one of the foundations of an effective online marketing and a key to growing your business. But in order to start an email communication, you need to get those visitors’ emails first. One of the best ways to do this is to convert visitors into subscribers while they're still on your website, using opt-in forms. And some of the most effective opt-in forms are the dynamic ones that grab your visitors’ attention instantly - the exit pop-ups or floating subscription bars for example. But how do you create and implement a beautiful and effective opt-in popup form without having a team of designers, marketers and developers? A good option used by many of our customers is OptinMonster - a tool for a hassle-free lead generation. And through a recent SiteGround partnership with OptinMonster our users can now get a 30-day free trial and some special discounts.
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Get your WordPress on PHP 7.0 now!

We have just released a new version of our WordPress plugin 3.2.1 the SG Optimizer, which allows you to move to PHP 7.0 with a click. We encourage all SiteGround customers to utilize this great option and make their WordPress installation run on PHP 7.0 now. PHP 7.0 has been available on our servers for over a year and it is high time that all of our customers take full advantage of the considerable performance boost it provides.