But the truth is, it does matter. Your hosting provider can affect your site’s performance, load times, security, and user experience, for better or for worse. And not all hosting providers are created equal.

What is website hosting?

Think of hosting as renting space for your website to live on. And as is true with real estate rentals, they run the gamut: you have some that are in run-down neighborhoods, and some in upscale gated communities.

When it comes to hosting for your business website, trust us when we say you want the upscale gated community.

If you’re a business owner, you know that your reputation is paramount to your success. You need to put your best foot forward at all times to your customers, prospective customers, and the community. Some of the most frantic phone calls we’ve received over the years are from business owners who’ve just been informed by a customer that their website has been commandeered by the “adult film industry” or ads for Viagra. How embarrassing and frustrating! They call us in a panic to get it fixed immediately… but unfortunately, it’s not always an easy fix.

Another issue with poor hosting is slow load times, which is also frustrating for users and can cause them to click away from the site and pursue another company altogether (I’ve done this myself. I mean, if a company doesn’t put much effort into their online presence, how good can they be?) In this day and age, an outdated website with broken links, broken plugins, incorrect information, and unresponsive (not mobile-friendly) design can pretty much guarantee you lost business.

Why do websites get hacked?

We build websites on the WordPress platform, for many reasons. Without getting too technical, WordPress is an open source CMS (content management system) platform. WordPress is by far the largest and most popular CMS platform available.

About 75% of websites that use a CMS are built on an open source platform like WordPress. Here’s what open source means:

• The software is free to use (i.e., no license fees)
• It’s supported by a large community of developers — code is always being improved, new features/functionality added, and bugs and security vulnerabilities are fixed quickly
• The code is accessible to developers, allowing for customization of the website or changes to hosting

However, since the code is accessible with open source CMS, this can make websites more vulnerable to hacking.

How do you solve this potential problem?

Two ways: A solid, reputable developer and a solid, reputable hosting provider. We’ve combined the two with our Managed Hosting solution.

Hosting Options

Here’s how we explain hosting options to our clients. The way we see it, you have three options for hosting:

1. Managed Hosting with Website Muscle – best option
2. Hosting directly with WP Engine – business class hosting provider
3. Hosting with a discount provider – not recommended

I’ll break these down for you below.

Hosting with WP Engine – BUSINESS CLASS HOSTING

Whether you choose Managed Hosting with Website Muscle or hosting directly with WP Engine, your hosting provider will be WP Engine. The main differences are whose account you’re on, who is logging into the site and performing regular updates and maintenance, and who you contact if you have questions or issues related to your website performance.

WP Engine is, in our opinion, the absolute best choice for hosting provider for business websites. We have chosen to trust them with our own website and hundreds of client websites because they are the most reliable solution for WordPress websites.

Here are some of the benefits to hosting with WP Engine:

• Daily site backups — no other hosting provider that we know of does this
• Fastest page load speeds (this directly affects SEO, as does uptime/downtime)
• One-click restores and one-click manual backups
• 24/7 customer support — and it’s very good
• Security — WP Engine offers security measures no other hosting provider offers
• SSL Certificate for security
• And many more! Check out this glowing article by a Denver-based marketing agency for more WP Engine benefits.

Cost: Hosting your website with WP Engine costs around $30-35 per month. Our clients can get a discount because we are a WP Engine partner, and usually you save money by paying for a year up front.

Discount hosting providers cost around $5 per month, which may seem attractive to you. However, the phrase “you get what you pay for” absolutely rings true here. It’s well worth the extra 25 bucks or so a month for the added security and peace of mind that your website is loading fast, being backed up daily, and secure.

One Important Caveat to Hosting Directly with WP Engine:

Your website is built on a theme and likely has several plugins installed. These are software that, just like your iPhone, needs updating from time to time.

If you have your own hosting account, that responsibility falls on you. Failing to log in and perform updates to WordPress, plugins, and themes can result in outdated software that detrimentally affects your website’s speed, functionality, SEO, and user experience.

Managed Hosting with Website Muscle – BEST VALUE

This is THE best value to you. Unlike hosting directly with WP Engine, you won’t be responsible for maintaining and updating the site, because we’ll do it for you.

For $100 per month, we will will pay your hosting fee to WP Engine AND take care of the following:

• Log into your site monthly and perform all necessary updates to WordPress, plugins, and theme
• Address any outdated or unsupported plugins that could pose a security vulnerability
• Be your point of contact should you have questions about hosting or site functionality (so rather than calling WP Engine, you can call us)
• Hacked Site Guarantee – In the unlikely event your site gets hacked, we’ll work with WP Engine to fix it right away
• Set up Google Analytics and send you reports (upon request) of how your site is performing
• Up to one hour of client support requests per month (text changes, image swap-outs, etc.)

Hosting with a Discount Provider – NOT RECOMMENDED

The third option you have is to host with a discount provider. We’ll just flat-out say that we do not recommend this option. After 12+ years in business, we’ve learned that what our clients save in monthly fees with a discount provider, they usually make up for (and then some) in headaches and frustration… as well as the actual cost of fixing problems the hosting company didn’t address.

Nevertheless, some of our clients still choose to go with (or stick with) a provider other than WP Engine. If you decide to host your website with or move your website to a different provider, please note that additional costs may be incurred. We build all our sites in a development environment housed in WP Engine, and working with different hosting providers to transfer a website can be time consuming and complicated, depending on the hosting provider.

Conclusion

Your hosting provider is actually a really important part of your online presence. We believe Managed Hosting with Website Muscle provides the best value to business owners. Your website will be hosted with the best WordPress hosting provider available, and we will take everything off your plate to ensure your site is up-to-date, secure, loading fast, and running smoothly — while you focus on running your business.

The post Why Your Website Hosting Provider Matters appeared first on Website Muscle.

So we’d like to explain what a Website Muscle wireframe is, and how we will use it for your project.

According to a well-known online encyclopedia, a website wireframe is “is a visual guide that represents the skeletal framework of a website.” Spot on, Wikipedia. Spot on.

We’re not as fancy as Wikipedia, so we call our wireframes “stick figure drawings”. We’ll definitely wireframe the home page of your new site, and in the case of larger or more complex sites, sometimes one or two more “key pages” as well.

When do we create a wireframe?

We create the wireframe after we’ve gone through our Discovery and Strategy process with you and the sitemap has been confirmed. Essentially it’s time to wireframe when we feel we have a good handle on what elements or sections are going to be the most important for 1) telling your story and 2) reaching your target audience.

What’s the point of a wireframe?

We consider a wireframe to be the first step in website design. We want you to see bare-bones, without any fonts, images, or colors, what will be included on the home page. That’s because the content and messaging of your website is more important than the particular shade of blue or whether the font is serif or sans serif. (I know, how dare us. We’ll get into all that later.)

We want your initial impression of the home page to be solely based on:

1) what’s there and
2) in what order.

Once you approve the wireframe, we’ll start designing and add in the fun stuff – design elements like your logo, images, fonts, and colors.

What feedback do we need?

We’ll present the wireframe to you accompanied by a handy dandy screenshare video, where we walk you through our thought process and intent behind each section and its placement on the page. That should help you understand what we’ve done and why. Ideally nothing should come as a complete surprise, although pleasant surprises are always appreciated.

We will ask for your feedback so we can either make adjustments to the wireframe or proceed to design. To help you give us the most useful feedback, try to answer these questions when you view your wireframe:

• Is there anything on the wireframe that shouldn’t be there?
• Is there anything missing from the wireframe that should be there?
• Is the order of sections appropriate? In other words, does it flow well for you?

Again, keep in mind that the page will look much prettier when it’s designed. We’ll add lovely images and other nice touches to break up the sections, evoke some emotion, and so forth. The wireframe’s job is to make sure everything’s there that needs to be there, and nothing’s there that shouldn’t be there.

Here’s an example of a wireframe and designed home page.

So that’s the 411 on wireframes. Hope this helps, and if not feel free to reach out with any questions. We’re here for you!

The post What’s a Wireframe? appeared first on Website Muscle.

Most likely you, as a business owner, have gotten wind of the onslaught of recent lawsuits against businesses by individuals with disabilities claiming inaccessibility to the businesses’ websites.

More and more demand letters are going out to businesses for inaccessible websites. As a result, businesses are being exposed to hefty fines, costly litigation, downtime in running their business, and damaged reputations.

Could this happen to you? What can you do to prevent it?

KEY POINT: It has become clear that the ADA accessibility requirements do not apply just to physical barriers, but to virtual barriers as well.

We have a potential solution. Read on.

What’s Happening in the Law

In 2010, the Department of Justice, the federal entity tasked with the ADA’s regulation and enforcement, issued an “Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking”, basically giving notice that it would be seeking to amend Title III of the ADA to expressly include websites.

Recently, however, the DOJ formally withdrew the notice, indicating the regulations would not be coming anytime soon.

Since 2010, a LOT of courts have ruled on the issue, and… the results have been, well, clear as mud.

We won’t get into all the case law here, but here’s one noteworthy outcome:

In August 2016, the DOJ ruled that UC Berkeley was violating Title II of the ADA (like Title III above but applies to government entities). The DOJ instructed UC Berkeley to use the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as a guide to measure the usability and accessibility of its web content.

If you’re interested in reading the WCAG 2.1, click here.

What Does All this Mean?

Here’s our best scholarly answer:
You probably need to do something about it. We’re not entirely sure what.

Helpful, right?

Here’s what we know:

• There are currently no defined laws as to what web accessibility actually means for businesses
• The courts are divided on their rulings
• The DOJ recommended the WCAG as a guide

There’s a lot of gray area, a lot of unanswered questions, and courts are going in all different directions. But one thing’s for sure: businesses ARE being successfully sued.

When the DOJ does finally rule on the issue, it’s a safe bet that web content will need to be accessible on some level.

What are Your Options?

We expect this to be an ongoing issue. Demand letters are being sent and lawsuits filed in increasing amounts.

The way we see it, you can:

• Do nothing and take your chances (not recommended, but up to you)
• Hire an ADA consultant and potentially spend a lot of money on unclear law
• Have us install an accessibility widget on your website (we see this as the best proactive approach)

Our Recommendation

We’ve discovered an innovative web accessibility widget called UserWay, which is supported by WordPress and backed by tons of positive reviews. We’ve installed it on our own website. To see it  in action, check out the blue circle on the right hand side of the page.

Learn more about UserWay here.

We’re offering to install the UserWay widget into the code on every page of your website, as well as an Accessibility Statement page (linked to in the footer of your site).

While UserWay cannot do Every. Single. Thing. to bring your site to 100% compliance (whatever that means), we believe it provides exceptional modifications to users with disabilities, and greatly helps businesses who want their sites to be ADA compliant.

Whatever you decide, we believe it’s better to be proactive than reactive, so we’re recommending you take active measures to make your website more accessible to users with disabilities.

Next Steps

If you’re interested, give us a call right away and we’ll ensure your site is compatible with the UserWay widget. If it is, we’ll get started on installing it onto your site.

DISCLAIMER: While we cannot guarantee that these measures will shield you entirely from threats of litigation, we are confident they will bring you very close to ADA compliance. We believe a business that is obviously concerned with ADA compliance and is taking measures to improve its website’s accessibility is less exposed to the attention of a law firm on the hunt for non-compliant websites.

The post Is Your Website ADA Compliant (and Does it Need to Be)? appeared first on Website Muscle.

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So many small business owners fall into the trap of perfectionism. But we all know what happens when we get too picky — a big fat NOTHING. Perfectionism doesn’t serve us, it works against us. We become our own worst enemy and productivity and efficiency go out the window.

Don’t get me wrong — it’s great to pay attention to detail and to have high standards for yourself and your business. But when it cripples you from doing what you need to do, that’s not healthy. And your business will suffer the consequences.

I have fallen into this trap myself, and I’ve seen the devastating results it can have. I’ve had to work hard at it, but I find that the mindset of “Done is better than perfect” is nearly always accurate.

The post Done is better than perfect appeared first on Website Muscle.

Hey, it’s Tyree from Website Muscle again. If you’ve been watching the videos or have read the e-book on our Top 10 Must-Do’s for Good Blog Posts, thank you! I hope you’ve enjoyed them and found them to be valuable for your own blogging.

As always, if you have any questions, I’m available and love to discuss this stuff. So, I wanted to give you my bonus number 11 must do for good blog posts, Videos.

It’s exactly what I’m doing now, and as you can see you do not have to be a professional in order to do it. So, if you’re not a fan of being in front of the camera, you’re not alone, but you might want to think about conquering that fear.

Benefits of Blog Videos

Videos actually have a higher chance of ranking on the first page of Google keyword results for videos than text pages. Also, more people prefer to watch videos nowadays than to read text.

With that in mind, video watchers tend to be more serious buyers, and video marketing has been responsible for more page views on a website, more time spent on a website, and more conversions completed on a website.

It might be a good idea to think about repurposing your blog posts into short videos. It also really helps to showcase your personality too, and get people to know, trust, and like you.

Search-Friendly Videos

And just a couple tips for making your videos Google friendly before we wrap up. Put keywords into the titles, descriptions, and tags. Post them on YouTube and then embed them into the relevant pages or posts on your website.

You can create a video library on your website so Google knows where to find your content, and link to your website at the beginning of the videos if you can.

Ultimately, it really just helps to do it. I’m using a tool called Soapbox by Wistia to create these videos now. So it doesn’t have to be professionally done, it doesn’t have to be crazy good, just putting yourself out there. And it’s good — good for your growth as a blogger, and hopefully for business growth as well. Again, I hope you’ve enjoyed this series and found some value in it.

Learn more about effective blogging with our “Blog Writing Guide” eBook. Download it here.

Happy blogging!

The post Top 10 Must-Dos for Good Blog Posts Bonus: Videos appeared first on Website Muscle.

Hey guys, it’s Tyree from Website Muscle. We are going through our top ten must-dos for good blog posts and we have reached number ten: the Call to Action.

What Do I Do Next?

So, a reader has finished reading or scanning your amazing blog post. What do they do now? Calls to action, or CTAs for short, that answers the question: What do I do next?

Think about the next step that you would like a reader to take once they’ve gone through a particular post. Should they read more? Should they read something else? Should they contact you? Is it time to buy something? Set up a meeting?

Whatever the case may be, tell them. Don’t ever assume that they know what you want them to do, and don’t put the ball in their court. The ball is always in your court. So keep asking, keep asking, keep asking.

We like to use the analogy of marriage: keep asking them to marry you. Ask for their hand in marriage until they dump you or until they say yes. Just no restraining orders, please.

Call to Action Best Practices

So we recommend at least one, but maybe two calls to action per post or page on your site. The two types are a main call to action which is that direct, “Will you marry me?” Buy now, contact me, set up a meeting, let’s do this.

A secondary call to action is a little less forward, and it’s a good option for readers who are not quite ready to seal the deal but they might be open to a second date. So, read more, learn more, download this free offer, sign up for our newsletter and so on.

Free offers are really highly recommended, like our e-book that we’ve created with our top ten list. It’s a great way to get people into your sales funnel because you can get their typically gated content, you can get their email address, and then you can continue to woo them with your great content until they’re ready to say yes to you.

Don’t ever neglect to include a call to action. It’s one of those things, again, you might wait till last, but don’t put it least, because it is very important.

Here’s a call to action for you: Our “Blog Writing Guide” eBook has 10 tips on crafting the best blog posts possible. You can download it here.

The post Top 10 Must-Dos for Good Blog Posts #10: Call to Action appeared first on Website Muscle.

Hey, it’s Tyree from Website Muscle. We are going through our top 10 must-dos for good blog posts, and we’re onto number nine — Categories and Tags.

If you have done any blogging, you’re probably familiar with these. But categories and tags are really nice ways to segment the content of your blog posts based on subject matter, theme, or keywords.

The main purpose behind categories and tags is user experience, which is important to keep in mind. We want to organize the content so that it’s easy to access for our readers, and they can find what content they’re interested in.

Get Cozy with Categories

Categories are usually more broad, general topics. They can include a number of different posts.

Do not select all the categories when you’re publishing your blog post! It should not apply to all your categories, and that defeats the purpose of organizing your content. We usually recommend one or two, and no more than two categories per post.

(Also, please uncheck “Uncategorized”. That should not be one of your categories.)

Category Audit

Every once in a while we recommend going back and doing an audit of your blog and seeing how many post fall under each category. Sometimes the categories that you think will be really valuable are not relevant anymore.

Make sure that you’re updating your blog categories regularly. If you only find one or two posts in a category, you might want to consider merging it with another category. You can also create subcategories within a general category for more specific sorting.

All About Tags

Tags are more specific than categories. They’re more like keywords. Think of them as the index words in the back of a book for reference. If you’re interested in a very specific word or topic, you can get to that through tags.

Nowadays, blog tags work more like hashtags on Twitter or Facebook. Users can click on a tag and see all the posts that use that same tag.

In other words, use as many tags as you want. Just make them relevant to the subject matter.

Remember, use categories sparingly. We should be really intentional and make sure that the categories actually have posts in them, and select no more than two per post. And then again, tags, you can do as many as you want to. Just make that they’re valuable.

Our “Blog Writing Guide” eBook has 10 tips for developing blog posts for your business. Get the inside scoop for free by downloading it here.

Happy blogging!

The post Top 10 Must-Dos for Good Blog Posts #9: Categories and Tags appeared first on Website Muscle.

Hey guys, I’m back! It’s Tyree from Website Muscle. We are going through our top ten list for must-dos for good blog posts and we’re on number eight: links.

External & Internal Links

There are two types of links: external links and internal links.

External links are when you link to someone else’s website, another article, another post, or what have you. You’re linking away from your website.

Internal links are links to other pages on your website and are highly recommended for blogs. When you write a new post and you refer to a topic you’ve written about before (which you will do eventually), take a few extra seconds, highlight that text, and link to your previous post.

This helps users stay on your site longer because they might find something else interesting to read on your site. We want to make it as easy as possible for them to find more of your content to engage in.

External links are okay too, especially when you are quoting someone or using another site for inspiration and you wanna link to that. Maybe sourcing an image. But please make sure that external links always open in a new tab. We do not want to usher people away from your site, okay?

If your external link opens in a new tab, your user still stays on your site, but they can go to that other tab if they want to see the source of the link. So, use links, but just be sure that they open…external links open in a new tab. Internal links don’t have to. That’s totally up to you.

Our “Blog Writing Guide” eBook has 10 tips on creating effective blogs for your audience. If you’re interested, download it here.

Happy blogging!

The post Top 10 Must-Dos for Good Blog Posts #8: Links appeared first on Website Muscle.

Hey everyone, it’s Tyree from Website Muscle, and I’m back with our top 10 must-dos for good blog posts. We’ve reached number seven, focus keywords.

Understanding Focus Keywords

If you are accustomed to writing blogs and posting them in your WordPress platform, then you’ve potentially seen the section down at the bottom. There’s a blank field for focus keywords, and that is what I’m talking about.

Remember, keywords are still important for SEO. They don’t carry the weight that they once used to, but they are still super critical to optimizing your blog post for Google rankings.

So, building a keyword strategy is part of the initial planning process that we talk about in our intro video. I recommend creating a top 10 list of keywords that you’d like to rank for. Then you can build your post strategy and your content strategy around those. Then you can do some basic monitoring using Google Analytics to see how your posts are performing.

Long-Tail Keywords

Your focus keywords are the terms and phrases that you want your post to rank for in search engines like Google. To do that, especially when you’re starting out, you’ll usually aim for what we call long-tail keywords.

You will most likely have keywords that are very general and broad, and those will be really hard to rank for because they’re super competitive. The more specific, niche, and targeted you can get with your focus keywords, the more likely your post is going to be able to rank for it.

Let’s say you’re a massage therapist. Massage therapy is a very broad, general keyword. It’s going to be highly competitive and difficult to rank for.

A long-tail keyword for a massage therapist might be corporate chair massages, or sports injuries massage, so on and so forth. So, those might be more likely to reach very specific users who are looking for that service.

Using Yoast SEO

In your Yoast SEO WordPress plugin, you’ll see a blank field at the bottom of each post for your focus keywords. Once you put those in, Yoast SEO will give you tips on how to optimize your post.

When we’re creating content with Yoast, we always shoot for a green light, which means your post is as optimized as it can be. Sometimes you have to settle for yellow, but no red lights — no red lights!

Yoast has lots of tips on their website for how to choose focus keywords, which is linked in our ebook. So set those set those focused keywords, so that you can see what kind of traffic your posts are getting.

Our “Blog Writing Guide” eBook has 10 tips on effective blog posts. Get it here.

Happy blogging!

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