The SiteGround Blog

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%!

Our Top Customer Care Rep in November

When Vesela first joined the SiteGround team, she was a bit nervous, but less than 2 years later, she has become a support superstar. Vesela is a friendly and much-loved member of our team. She even has an interesting idea for a movie, featuring her teammates. Find out more about her and how she plans to name her movie in the interview below. 🙂
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SiteGround Gets Inspiration from the Dribbble Community

At SiteGround, we take pride in calling web hosting our “craft.” For us, a craftsperson is someone who puts heart and soul in their work, aims for delivering high-quality service, and pays attention to detail in all aspects of the process. But we were curious: is that how other people see it as well? How do we visually communicate the idea of craftsmanship in the highly technological context of the web hosting industry? Read More

Our Top Customer Care Rep in October

Meet Martin, a top performer in October with the amazing 98.83% customer satisfaction ratings. He is a Bachelor in Psychology so it’s no wonder he always manages to make great conversations, but above all - be helpful! Read more about Martin in the interview below.
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PHP 7.3 is Available at SiteGround

One of the great things about our multiple-PHP server setup is that it allows us to provide the latest PHP versions safely to anyone who wants it, even before their official stable release. As a perfect example, we've added the new PHP 7.3 to the list of available PHP branches you can use on your SiteGround account. Right now, we support PHP 7.3 RC3, which will be replaced by the final version once it’s released (expected in Dec 2018). So if you write your website code, you can start testing it for the upcoming changes.
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TLS 1.3 and OCSP Stapling -Two Ways to Make HTTPS Sites Faster

For the last few years, the trend of moving towards encrypted browsing through HTTPS has been one of the most important developments on the Internet. With the free SSL certificates by Let’s Encrypt and Google openly promoting HTTPS protocol over the more widespread, but unsecure HTTP one, more and more sites have started to use SSL certificates.

We, at SiteGround, are very excited to announce that two recent developments in this area - TLS 1.3 and OCSP Stapling, which will make HTTPS sites faster, are already available on all our servers. Read below to learn how people using SSL will benefit from these innovations.