Tag Archives: Website Maintenance Ireland

Website Maintenance Ireland

Category: Projects
January 18, 2019

Website Maintenance Ireland

Security
Hosting
Updates
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Website Maintenance

2Cubed provides website maintenance and website management for 100s of companies across Ireland, from large businesses in Dublin to smaller, regional companies in rural areas. Ensuring that you have an effective website maintenance plan in place is vital if your website is to be safe and successful. Without a website maintenance plan in place you will place your website at risk to malicious threats such as being hacked.

As part of our website maintenance plans 2Cubed will schedule changes and security updates to your website to ensure that it is protected and performing efficiently. Whatever the size or scale of your company, we can manage and maintain your website, keeping it updated and secure, leaving you to get on with the day-to-day running of your business.

To make things easier for people to outsource their website management to us, we launched our new sister site Website Maintenance which allows new customers to come on board and select the website maintenance package that is suitable for their needs.
2Cubed can help fix your website after it has been hacked, update and secure it with latest patches, install security and SSL certificates, provide web hosting, and set up or migrate email.

Our Services Include:

Website Hosting
Website Monitoring (Pingdom)
Security Monitoring
Fixing Website Hacks
Website Malware Resolution
Imporving Website Speed
Plugin Updates
CMS Updates
Dedicated Suppot Channel Between 9am – 10.30am every morning
(Support@2cubed.ie)

Why website maintenance is so important!

Importance of Web Maintenance
Category: Tips and Tricks
January 16, 2019
When most people get a website designed their main focus is the visual look and the physical content of the website. Most people will spend the majority of the development process focusing on these two things. Once they are happy with both and the website goes live many people think the job is done. This assumption would be wrong as when a website goes live it is of vital importance that they have a long-term website maintenance plan in place. A big part of any website maintenance plan is the regular enforcing and checking of security updates on your website. These updates ensure that all plugins and functions continue to run efficiently and are updated when required, these security updates also help to increase the safety of the website as it reduces malicious threats such as being hacked. While avoiding being hacked is the most obvious reason for websites to keep on top of their website maintenance and security updates there are other risks that can occur when website maintenance is neglected or treated as an afterthought. Three pitfalls that you can encounter if you fail to or simply take too long to do your security updates are as follows: Decreasing of Website Speed One of the main reasons applying updates consistently to websites is such a good thing is because each update brings with it improvements which true to their name “update” the quality and performance of the website in key factors such as speed & performance. By ignoring updates and holding on to older versions of plugins you will find your website’s speed is slower than your competitors which in turn will hurt your SEO as website speed is a ranking factor. Broken Website As mentioned above website updates not only improve key factors such as website speed and performance but also can provide additional new features so to not update consistently when possible would be a very silly thing to do. If you fail to make updates, plugins and functions can become so out of date that they are no longer supported which can cause your website to be broken and will cause a terrible user experience for your users. Rising Time & Monetary Costs When you don’t make updates and problems occur, not only will it cost you time to fix but it can also cause you a considerable amount of money. This is because it can cause a developer to have to spend much more time applying the update than originally would have been required as they now have to fix the broken issues before first updating the website. This will cost you time and money. To conclude having a long term website maintenance plan in place is something that every website should have and it should always be a priority. If you don’t you risk your site being hacked amongst a whole other plethora of pitfalls that can occur. To inquire about website maintenance and website maintenance plans please contact 2Cubed today! You can also contact us on 01 905 8114 or 051-440425, email hello@2cubed.ie Please feel free to follow and interact with us on the following profiles. facebook icon twitter icon linkedin icon Instagram icon Google+ icon

2Cubed Special Update

Website Maintenance Update
Category: News
October 5, 2018
In this special update from 2Cubed we will be sharing some important news and information with you. In this update we will touch on 3 things in particular that 2Cubed will be placing a special focus on in the coming weeks and these are as follows:
  • Upgrading all Websites
  • Updating sites who are compatible to PHP 7.0
  • Applying Purchased SSL Certs
2Cubed are committed to always ensuring their client’s success and security. To stay true to this commitment 2Cubed will be working on all of their websites and upgrading them to not only further enhance their security but also their overall efficiency and performance. If you notice any issues during this period please let us know and we will check if it’s related to our website maintenance and improvement works.  For all sites who are compatible with the newest PHP 7.0 major release we will be updating them to run on this. Up until recently PHP 5.6 was the most modern but with the release of PHP 7.0 this is no longer the case. PHP 7 has many major benefits for websites who have it such as it’s twice the speed of the once most recent version of PHP 5.6 and it was also created with the goal of freeing up space which would lead to improvement on websites. This freeing up of space was done by getting rid of many unneeded functionalities on old and unsupported Server APIs and extensions. If you read our recent newsletter you will know already about the dire importance of having an SSL Cert. In it we mentioned that from August 2018 Google has flagged websites which have not already gotten an SSL Certificate. This was part of the plan first announced at the start of 2018 by Google in its Speed Update which rolled out in July, that it will mark all sites that have not migrated to HTTPS as “not secure.” This change has been brought in by google whose main goal is to ensure their users can safely and securely browse and purchase on the internet. As nowadays people turn to the internet for virtually everything ensuring that users can trust it to be safe is of paramount importance. Online security like having an SSL Certificate is no longer just a good option for a website to have, it’s a necessity. An SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is the standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. This link ensures that all data passed between the web server and browsers remain private and integral. If you don’t have the SSL certificate, a secure connection cannot be established, that means, your company information will not be digitally connected to a cryptographic key. The purchase and application of an SSL cert is a simple but vitally important process that cannot be underestimated as it can be pivotal to the success of your website. To inquire about getting an SSL Certificate for your website to stop it being marked as non-secure please contact 2Cubed today. If you have any questions or queries about any topic we have mentioned in this update or any other general query please do not hesitate to get in touch with 2Cubed!   Please feel free to follow and interact with us on the following profiles. facebook icon twitter icon linkedin icon Instagram icon Google+ icon

Website Performance

Website Performance Ireland
Category: Tips and Tricks
October 2, 2018
When it comes to creating websites everyone already knows how important it is for it to have a great design and presentation and that it actually functions correctly on a basic level. One thing that can be overlooked though is Website Performance such as how it performs in the backend. Having a correctly optimised website that performs efficiently has a whole host of benefits, not only for you but also for your visitors to the site. Efficient Website Performance will result in faster load times and reduced hosting costs which in turn can lead to an increase in google search rankings on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Virtually all websites contain images and graphics of many sorts and sizes and they can do a great job of helping to communicate and shape the message your website is trying to present to your visitors. However, it might not be a common known thing but images can usually be one of the leading causes of sites having long load times. Therefore it is vital to make sure your images are optimised correctly before you upload them, if you don’t it can cause your website to have overly long load times which can end up affecting your search engine rankings. Also if you are trying to load from a slow server this may also cause issues. Website performance optimization is always something that should be top priority, especially when there is so much online competition. It’s also very important when optimizing a website that you don’t forget to optimize for mobile and slower devices as well. Choosing the right web host plan is a smart business move to boost website performance. Having a fast web host is equally as important as any website performance optimization you can make, as it truly is the backbone of your site. It’s true that a cheap host plan may offer you savings at the beginning, but you will most likely end up paying more in the long run in order to serve your website needs as it grows. It’s a smart move to make sure to choose a trusted web host with a right variety of hosting plans to handle all your website resources and requirements. 2Cubed’s sister site Website Maintenance has some great offers available for excellent hosting and much more packages that can help your site to be a success in every area. As you can see these are just a number of steps you can take today to optimise your website in order to improve things like your page load times, position in search engine rankings and your sites overall user experience. To find out more and develop a plan to make your website a success, contact us today! Please feel free to follow and interact with us on the following profiles. facebook icon twitter icon linkedin icon Instagram icon Google+ icon

Local SEO

LOCAL SEO AGENCY WEXFORD
Category: Tips and Tricks
June 29, 2018
Local SEO is an element of SEO which differs quite a lot to the standard SEO process people think of. Local search results also change more rapidly than any other type. National, international etc… Before you start your targeting your local SEO campaign there is some prep work you should make sure you have done, by having this done beforehand it will maximise your chances for success and getting the best results possible so you will rank high within the local listings. There are six things in particular that you should have done before launching your local SEO campaign and they are the following: Have a working Google My Business Page Set Up It’s important that in order to have a strong presence on google that you have set up your Google My Business page. Once you have set it up, you should make sure it includes the following elements:
  • A long, unique description that’s formatted correctly and includes links.
  • Choose the correct and appropriate categories for your business.
  • Upload as many photos as possible onto your google my business page of your business
  • Add a local phone number
  • Add your business address that’s consistent with that on your website and local directories.
  • Upload a high-resolution profile image and cover photo.
  • Add your opening times/days
  • Have real reviews from customers
Optimize all of your landing pages with local keyword data Your landing page is the most important page on your website as it is the first impression a user gets of your website. You should make sure this page is optimized with the correct keywords. A good idea is to incorporate the page with some particular keywords which you think users will use to search with. Ensure your NAP listings remain consistently across the web NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone Number. NAP is critical for businesses wishing to rank well in the local organic search results, because search engines like Google take the data into account when determining which companies to show for their searches. This becomes even more important for Local SEO. You need to ensure that you have your full NAP across your whole website (i.e. every page). Furthermore, you must use the exact same details/format when you mention your address on other websites (i.e. local citations). You should also use Schema.org markup on your NAP to give the search engines all they need to display your company information properly. Generate genuine reviews from your customers on Google and Yelp Local reviews will have a direct impact on your local search rankings, it’s pivotal that you try and gain as many real genuine ones as possible so you’ll want to spend some time acquiring them. Whilst there are many types of reviews from different platforms for now I would advise to focus on getting as many google reviews as possible. Optimize your search engine snippets Google Featured Snippets are very search friendly and they help users to get answers without having to click any pages. By making sure to optimize your search engine snippets you will increase your chances further for ranking as high as possible in the search rankings. Focus on localized link building When you are doing a local SEO campaign it is extremely important that you have done effective link building. Unlike traditional national SEO, Local SEO places a lot more importance on gaining links from other local websites that are relevant to your business and industry. National SEO places a greater importance on gaining as many links as possible from high authority websites and whilst of course that is still something to aim for, with Local SEO the links from websites local to you are what is the most important! Please feel free to follow and interact with us on the following profiles. facebook icon twitter icon linkedin icon Instagram icon Google+ icon

Website Security | Give Your Site A Health Check

Website Security
Category: Tips and Tricks
June 28, 2018
Everyday Websites are compromised, the majority of these security breaches are usually an attempt to use your server for things such as an email relay for spam emails, or to setup a temporary web server which would be used to serve files of an illegal nature. However depending on your website sometimes these breaches can be of an even more serious and dark nature such as hackers attempting to steal your data and/or to actually deface your entire website. There will always be hackers unfortunately, that fact is out of your website’s control, what you can control however is your website’s security. Think of website security as the health of your site, when your website security is strong your site is in good health, when your website has poor or no security your site is in bad health, and just like human’s, when you are feeling weak, it’s harder to protect yourself from dangers. Hackers thrive on sites who are in weak health and vulnerable. So how do I make sure my website is in good health? Well just like visiting the doctor for a check up your should get into the habit of regularly giving your site a health check to see how it’s performing. Two ways in particular of increasing your website security and keeping it in good health are switching to HTTPS and having a Website Security Seal. A great way to protect your site is to make sure you switch to HTTPS hosting, to do this you will have to acquire an SSL certificate. Normally websites are hosted on just HTTP, this is a problem because HTTP is not secure and so hackers can ‘listen’ in on any data that is being passed between your site and a visitors browser. This data could be of a severely sensitive nature such as card details or login credentials such as username, passwords etc.. HTTPS however is stronger over HTTP as it is secure and has an encrypted connection between your website and a user’s browser. This encrypted connection makes it so that any data that may be passed can not be intercepted or “listened” on by hackers. Another reason why your site needs to have HTTPS is that it’s not only just good for security but google have actually made it clear that HTTPS is a ranking factor in their algorithm. Google favours websites who use HTTPS over HTTP. Switching to HTTPS is simply the logical move, not only does it give your site more security, but it will also improve your rankings on the SERP as google favours sites who use it. To get your site to switch to HTTPS you will need to have an SSL Certificate. To inquire about getting an SSL certificate for your site get in touch with us today! As well as switching to HTTPS another way of drastically improving your website security is by having a Website Security Seal. A Website Security Seal is a security feature that monitors your website and it looks for things such as malware in particular. Malware is viruses which have been uploaded by hackers. Think of a website security seal as being like anti-virus for your website. As a user you wouldn’t surf the web without having an anti-virus installed so why would you want to expose your website to potential threats.The seal constantly works in the background and monitors your files and if it comes across malware it will notify you so that you can remove it and keep your site safe. Having your hosting, website security and maintenance looked after by a professional company is simply the smart decision, it will not only give you peace and mind that your site is being looked after by experts but you will also now be able to focus your time on your business and your customers. Also by having a maintenance agreement in place you won’t have to continually pay each and every time you need an update done, you can rest easy in the knowledge that it will be automatically covered by your agreement, it will save you money in the long run compared to having to go it by yourself. Once you think you have done all you can in relation to improving your security then it’s time to actually test your website security and give your site a health check.The most effective way of doing this is via the use of some website security tools, often referred to as penetration testing or pen testing for short. For more information about increasing your website security and making sure it’s in good health contact us today! Please feel free to follow and interact with us on the following profiles. facebook icon twitter icon linkedin icon Instagram icon Google+ icon

The Importance of Google AMP

Category: Tips and Tricks
June 22, 2018
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, it is a Google-backed project designed for any publisher to have pages load quickly on mobile devices. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is designed to enable publishers to easily improve speed and by extension the user experience for their mobile users. Pages who make use of AMP coding actually appear within special places in the search results and with a special “AMP” designation. Before AMP was introduced similar results were possible to achieve but it could only be done by experienced developers through quite specialized performance optimizations and it required a lot of time and was often simply not done as people found it too arduous and/or lack of resources played a factor. The great thing about AMP is that it allows businesses to now do these optimizations quite easily by themselves in quite a quick time. By optimizing your site with AMP you are being proactive and putting yourself in a great position because chances are it’s going to become more and more popular in the future and google themselves are encouraging the use of AMP and are likely to favour pages with AMP when it comes to the search engine listings. When using AMP there are some important considerations to make such as you will have to maintain at least two versions of any article page or post. One version will be the original version of your page or post that users will typically see, and then their will also be the AMP version of that page. Also AMP doesn’t allow things such as form elements so you most likely won’t be able to have elements such as lead forms, on-page comments and other more common elements you may be used to incorporating on your standard page when optimizing them. However despite this, one thing that can’t be denied about AMP is that it truly does provide quite an easy, fast and efficient way of improving your site speed on mobile devices and considering we live in a mobile first indexing world that is more important now than ever. For more advice and information on having a successful website get in touch with 2Cubed today! Please feel free to follow and interact with us on the following profiles. facebook icon twitter icon linkedin icon Instagram icon Google+ icon

Mobile First Web Design

Mobile First Web Design
Category: Tips and Tricks
June 20, 2018
Mobile first web design is exactly what it sounds like, it is the practice of designing first and foremost for the smallest screen compatibility possible and then working your way up from mobile to desktop etc.. The idea behind this practice is that by taking this approach you have designed your website to be a responsive and very adaptive design. This is because you would have taken the approach that is called ‘progressive enhancement’. Progressive enhancement is the strategy that since mobile design is generally the most difficult to do that you should actually do it first and then when you have to design for other devices you will find it a much easier process. The great thing about this approach is that since you have made mobile first web design a priority and since smaller designs will have only essential features you have at the core already the heart of the user experience you’re offering. The opposite approach of progressive enhancement is called ‘graceful degradation’. This would be considered a more old-fashioned practice. Graceful degradation entails building a website that incorporates everything from the start and then starts to strip away parts at a later stage for compatibility on smaller devices. The bad thing about graceful degradation is that it treats mobile compatibility as an afterthought or almost a nuisance and you are cutting down on the quality for the mobile version so you nearly end up with two different websites. The one on desktop is a proper effective one whereas the mobile version ends up looking like a pale shadow of the former. Google now actually indexes sites on a mobile first approach which means they are first ranking your site on how responsive and how well designed it is for mobile, so you can understand if you took the graceful degradation approach you have already shot yourself in the foot as your website will not rank as well as google will judge it poorly even though your desktop site might very well be perfect. We of course then like everyone else recommend that you always take the progressive enhancement mobile-first approach and make mobile a priority not an afterthought otherwise you will live to regret it. When your site looks great on a mobile device, it will translate brilliantly to all other devices. Also when you design for mobile first it’s limitations are forcing you to cut to the heart of things and really prioritize your content. This is unintentionally helping you to make your website better and deliver the ultimate user experience as since you are designing under such tight parameters your site will be very content-focused which in turn means its user-focused. Google will look on you very favorably if you’re offering the user a great experience and you are because you have been forced to cut to the heart of things, and that’s what the user wants, not to be distracted with all the bells and whistles but access straight away to the content they were searching for! What first seemed like a hindrance is actually an unlikely but extremely helpful ally, design your website with a mobile first approach and you have taken the first step to having a successful website, on all devices! For more advice and information on having a successful website get in touch with 2Cubed today! Please feel free to follow and interact with us on the following profiles. facebook icon twitter icon linkedin icon Instagram icon Google+ icon