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How to Sell on Pinterest Without a Website

You don’t need an online shop to sell on Pinterest, but owning one can give you the upper hand.

The only problem is that managing an eCommerce store is expensive.

On the other hand, selling on Pinterest has a low entry barrier. So it’s an excellent place to start even if you can’t afford a website.

Plus, Pinterest has many engaged users who are happy to buy your product, craft or offer. This is the only social media network where the most significant users hold the most disposable income in America.

This guide shows you how to sell to these top spenders on Pinterest, whether you own a website or not.

What Pinterest Brings to the Table
Selling On Pinterest Without a Website
Organize Your Products into Boards
Publish Your Products as Pins
Promote Pins on Pinterest
Go Beyond Pinterest
Blog on Medium
Selling On Pinterest With a Website
Set up Your Online Store
Add Your Product Catalog
Create Rich Pins
Stay Organized With Product Groups
Prompt With Shopping Ads
Wrapping It Up

What Pinterest Brings to the Table

Pinterest is not just a visual discovery engine. The social network brings more to the table.

With 433 million monthly active users and over one billion web visits in August 2022, the platform offers businesses new opportunities to reach highly engaged audiences.

Data Source: SimilarWeb

Also, data shows that about 38% of pinners have a college education, whereas Snapchat is 20%, Twitter is 32%, and Reddit stands at 15%, offering you access to a sophisticated market.

The social network enables about two billion monthly searches.

The company’s data revealed that 97% of the searches are unbranded, providing a level playing ground for all competing brands. However, for context, 42% of Google search queries are with branded keywords, meaning many searchers already have a brand in mind before searching.

Also, 80% of pinners said they discovered new products or brands on Pinterest, and 85% buy things they’ve seen from brands. Additionally, pinners are 55% more likely to buy a product after seeing a visual on Pinterest compared to other platforms.

The platform is not all talk and no action.

For instance, nearly nine in ten weekly pinners make buying decisions on Pinterest, and 50% of users have bought after seeing a Promoted Pin.

Pinterest might not be as popular and imposing as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and TikTok, but the user engagement shows the platform can hold its ground against some perennial favorites.

Its numbers are impressive, making Pinterest too good to pass up.

Selling On Pinterest Without a Website

You can sell on Pinterest without a website.

It’s an excellent option for affiliate marketers. A Pinterest business account will work best since it lets you monitor analytics and run ads. You might also need a Facebook page and a Medium account to further your marketing.

When you’re ready, here’s how to start selling on Pinterest without a website.

Organize Your Products into Boards

Pinterest Board is a collection of pins.

It lets you stay organized. You can create different boards to categorize your products. For example, having boards for televisions, sound systems, video players, and other products in your catalog will make sense if you deal in electronics. You can further classify the boards into sections, like LG, Samsung, and Sony.

Boards make it easy for shoppers to find your products.

To create one, log in to your profile and click the Saved tab.

Click the + icon to reveal a drop-down menu, then select Board from the options.

Enter the product category in the name field to create the Board.

Open the newly created Board, click the ellipsis icon (the three horizontal dots), then the Edit board option to type a befitting description for the Board.

Use the Organize option to create and organize the pins into sections.

Publish Your Products as Pins

Create visually engaging pins to display your products.

One exciting thing about Pinterest is that you can create unlimited pins for the same product using different visuals, titles, and descriptions. And the more pins you create, the greater your chances of increasing your visibility and CTR.

The mistake most brands make is creating a single pin for a product and leaving the rest to fate.

But it doesn’t work that way.

As a visual discovery engine, you’ll need to create a lot of pins to stand out and hold your ground on Pinterest. It also lets you cover most of the keywords pinners use to discover products on the platform, stretching your visibility further.

To create pins, head to your profile and select Create Pin from the Create drop-down to begin.

On the next page, select the Board you wish to have the Pin on from the drop-down, then enter the Pin’s title. Of course. Use the keywords people are likely to search for to target Pinterest searchers.

You can see in this Pin that Cicinia, an online retailer of bridal dresses and accessories, uses searchable keywords in the title. But the Pin doesn’t have a description. Don’t make the same mistake.

Write a compelling description to entice users to click your link.

You can search your keywords on Google to see what other brands have as their descriptions if you don’t know what to write. Then, add a discount code to the description if you have any. It supports up to 500 characters, so make the most of it.

Finally, upload your visuals, add your alt text describing the visual you uploaded, then include the destination link, in this case, your affiliate link, and publish the Pin.

Repeat this step for the rest of your products.

Promote Pins on Pinterest

Pinterest comes with a built-in ad manager.

With this tool, you can promote your pins to the perfect audience. It lets you target people based on demographics like age, gender, and location. You may also run campaigns based on their interests or search terms.

Additionally, Pinterest allows advertisers to upload their customer lists for custom targeting. However, it works best for sellers that own a website.

Running ads means you don’t have to compete with the over 240 billion pins for attention. Instead, promoted pins put you on the spot and in front of the right people.

Dimniko, an online advertising agency, helped a client sell over 22,500 products with Pinterest ad campaigns, generating up to 11-times ROAS.

The brand pivoted to Pinterest after experiencing slow sales from other channels. According to them, the client spent around $15,000 daily on Facebook ads, generating $3 million monthly in Shopify; that’s $6 for every $1 spent on ads.

But with Pinterest, they generated $1.29 million with $116,000—$11.12 per $1.

Dimniko advised Pinterest advertisers to kill assets that didn’t meet the KPI in the first seven days and scale the budget of the top performers by 20% every two to three days.

They admitted that half of their sales were due to their retargeting strategy and suggested that new advertisers should start with their existing buyers and ‘actalikes.’

Go Beyond Pinterest

Several opportunities exist for you outside Pinterest.

Depending solely on the channel to reach prospects is a considerable risk. The platform only controls about 450 million of the estimated 4.7 billion global social media users, so there are always more people to reach.

You can do this organically by publicly sharing your pins or boards using trending and relevant Twitter and TikTok hashtags. Also, brands like Bergdorf Goodman use Facebook to promote their pins.

Like them, you can post your pins’ links as updates on your Facebook page.

Promote the post to reach more people.

Blog on Medium

Nearly 43% of global internet-enabled persons use ad blockers, meaning there’s little future for intrusive marketing.

So, content marketing is a no-brainer.

It lets you reach prospects through organic search when they are most likely to purchase. Also, creating consistent, valuable, and engaging content helps you answer customers’ questions, build trust, and influence buying decisions.

Studies found that content marketing generates three times more leads than traditional marketing channels. Also, brands that create content have a six times higher conversion rate than non-adopters.

Thankfully, you don’t need a website for content marketing with Medium. It’s a free and intuitive online publishing platform that lets anyone create, share and discover content.

Sign up on the platform. Research keywords and create quality content with them. You can repurpose the article into a video with tools like Lumen5.com and share it on YouTube.

Selling On Pinterest With a Website

A website puts your Pinterest marketing on steroids.

At least you won’t have to upload your products manually. Instead, the platform can automatically pull your products from your online store to Pinterest and update your catalog regularly. It also lets you retarget non-converters and upsell existing buyers, improving conversion and customer lifetime value.

Follow these steps to connect your website to Pinterest and sell on the platform.

Set Up Your Online Store

Create an online store if you don’t have one yet.

Pinterest currently supports Shopify and WooCommerce stores and online shops that can integrate with the following:

Lengow
ChannelAdvisor
GoDataFeed
Feedonomics
Products

Next, add the website to your Pinterest business account to claim ownership. Verifying your site allows you to access analytics for the pins you publish from your website and pins other users created from your site and get a verified merchant tag.

You can claim your website by adding a DNS TXT record to your domain host, uploading an HTML file to your website’s web server, or adding an HTML tag to your website code.

Add Your Product Catalog

Upload your catalogs to start selling on the platform.

Catalogs are a feed ingestion tool that lets you connect your eCommerce shop to your Pinterest store. The file lists all your available products and their corresponding attributes, creating a data source for the Pinterest store.

Pinterest ingests the data source every 24 hours to create your product Pins and process up to 20 million products per account. You’ll need to contact Pinterest support if you have more than that number of products.

You can add up to 20 data sources to promote your products across different markets, languages, and currencies. However, uploading your data sources to Pinterest is only available in selected countries. If you’re eligible, the steps here can get you started.

Alternatively, you may use third-party integrations like Shopify’s Pinterest app and Pinterest for WooCommerce plugin to get your products on Pinterest. Tools like Lengow, ChannelAdvisor, GoDataFeed, Feedonomics, and Productsup can also streamline your Pinterest data ingestion.

Create Rich Pins

Rich Pin is a step up for Pinterest pins.

They have extra information like price, product availability, description, and product link, providing pinners with rich shopping experiences. Rich pins encourage higher click-through rates, enabling you to sell more. They also make better ads.

With rich Pins, you don’t need to update your product Pins manually whenever the need arises. Instead, they update automatically each time you change your product titles, description, price, or availability.

Another fantastic thing is that rich Pins require only a one-time, easy setup. Pinterest will convert all your product Pins to rich Pins if you enable the feature for your account, and new Pins will appear as rich Pins.

Shopify natively supports Pinterest product-rich Pins, so it doesn’t require manual setup. Open any product page, copy the link and append .oembed to the URL, then validate with the Pinterest Rich Pins Validator.

If your store runs on WooCommerce, install the Yoast SEO plugin and enable Open Graph in the plugin setting. Next, copy any of your product URLs and validate. It’s that easy.

However, you’ll have to roll up your sleeves for custom sites.

It requires you to manually add rich metadata to the header of all your product pages. Pinterest supports Schema.org properties. Use any product schema generator like Merkel Schema Markup Generator to generate the JSON-LD code for each product page.

Next, use Google Tag Manager to add the code to the page’s HTML.

To begin, log in to your account and select Add a new tag under the “New Tag” section.

Choose a name for your tag, then select Custom HTML as the tag type.

Scroll down to Triggering to choose a trigger, then click the + icon.

Name your trigger and select Page View as the trigger type. Next, choose Some Page Views under the “This trigger fires on” section.

Specify your trigger condition, save and then publish your tag.

Repeat the steps for all your product pages, then validate any URLs to apply for rich Pins.

Stay Organized With Product Groups

Product groups help you manage your inventory.

It also lets you promote a product category instead of individual Pins. You can create a product group manually or leave that for Pinterest to handle if you use Shopify. The app can automatically sync your Shopify collections to create relevant Pinterest product groups.

The auto-created product groups include All Products, Top Sellers, Back In Stock, Best Deals, New Arrivals, and Most Popular.

You can add others manually if you need different product groups like brand, custom label, product type, category, or gender. First, ensure the fields exist in your data source and name the products based on your chosen filters.

Follow these steps to create a product group:

First, log in to your Pinterest business account from your desktop.
Click Ads on the top menu and select Catalogs.
Select View product groups, then Create product group.
Apply filters to select the products for the group
Go to the next page and enter a name for the product group.

Prompt With Shopping Ads

A website lets you take your Pinterest ad campaigns to a new level.

For instance, you can retarget non-converting shoppers to recover lost sales or upsell active buyers to improve their lifetime value. You may also create an act alike (equivalent to Facebook’s lookalike) audience to reach your ideal prospects, eliminating guesses from your targeting.

However, the first is to install the Pinterest tracking tag.

It’s a code snippet that lets Pinterest track your store visitors and their actions while on your site. The code helps you measure your campaign performance, optimize your conversion, build a targeting audience and become a verified merchant.

To install the tag, log in to your Pinterest ads account, click the Ads tab on the top menu, select conversion from the drop-down, and follow the rest of the instructions to complete the process.

Create your audience and run shopping and personalized collections ads to promote your products. Also, launch dynamic retargeting campaigns to upsell buyers and retarget shoppers that abandoned their carts. Run these campaigns concurrently for the best results. This resource can guide you in setting up high-converting Pinterest ads.

Also, don’t forget to promote your store outside Pinterest for maximum reach.

Wrapping It Up

So you don’t need to own a website to sell on Pinterest.

With just an affiliate link, you can get started on the platform. That might even change soon. The social network is piloting a feature that lets shoppers checkout and pay for items on Pinterest so that they don’t have to leave the app to complete their purchases.

The in-app checkout will probably redefine social commerce in the coming years, and getting onboard Pinterest and setting up your stores now means you’ll always be ready for the mad rush.

Thankfully, the tips in this article can get you started.

Featured image by rawpixel.com on Freepik

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The post How to Sell on Pinterest Without a Website first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

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9 novembre 2022/par Service comm.

Thinking Like a Hacker: AWS Keys in Private Repos

Actualités, Méthodes et organisation des process IT

About This Series

Last time, we covered a scenario in which a threat actor found leaked RSA private keys used by a TLS wildcard certificate for “Poor Corp.” By chaining the leaked private key with DNS misconfigurations, the attacker was able to impersonate a Poor Corp subdomain and use it to create highly effective phishing emails.

In this series, we will dissect not just what an attacker can do to get access to credentials, but also what they would do after getting that initial access. We will walk through a different threat scenario in each part of the series and tell stories of malicious hackers that are either true, based on a true incident, or reasonably theoretical.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

1 novembre 2022/par Service comm.

How to Start a Web Design Agency in 28 Days: Week Three

Actualités, Actualités

Two weeks ago, you started a web design agency. Last week you began to define your agency by choosing clients, setting red lines, and writing your elevator pitch.

This week, we will implement some practical solutions before problems occur. Remember one task per day; it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Day Fifteen: Terms of Service

In the rush of excitement surrounding a new project, it’s too easy to skip the preliminaries and jump into work. Before you know it, you’re halfway through the job, and it’s too late to set terms.

Your terms of service document is a formal statement of the terms under which you agree to work. This document is best prepared by a legal professional with experience in your jurisdiction, but you can write it yourself with a bit of guidance. Fortunately, as a web design agency, you’re not supplying physical products, which simplifies the document considerably.

You should include a statement limiting your liability. You need to assert your intellectual property rights. Unfortunately, you also need to include details of what happens when a client fails to pay an invoice.

Write the document in clear, friendly language. Don’t use marketing speak, and do not try to disguise anything onerous. A good client will respect you for being upfront in a professional manner.

Your terms of service should be on your website and sent to potential clients alongside any quote — I know some people who send their terms in the same PDF as the quote, so the client can’t overlook them.

Day Sixteen: Project Management

Project management is probably the most crucial skill you’ll have to master. Meeting deadlines, bringing in enough work to cover the bills, and not pulling all-nighters depend on effective project management.

A huge and ever-growing number of apps promise to help you with project management. We have a list here of some of the best. However, if you already have a tool you use to manage your work that you’re comfortable with, consider sticking with it. Do not fall back on a notes app or a pen and paper.

Remember: organizing your work days is not billable. The more you can automate this process, the better.

Day Seventeen: Quotes & Invoices

Up until now, we’ve deliberately done one thing per day. Today, we will do two because they’re so closely related.

There are all kinds of business documents that pass money back and forth between companies, for example, purchase orders or credit notes. For a small web design agency, you’ll need two: a quote document and an invoice document.

Invoices are documents requesting payment and providing the details for payment. Quotes are previews of an expected invoice.

Some people like to have a receipt document that they send out to acknowledge payment. However, in my experience, sending a hand-written email is better; it’s an excellent opportunity to personalize your communication and foster a good relationship.

There are legal requirements that vary by jurisdiction, but an invoice typically includes: your trading name; the invoice number — an incrementing number code; your tax code if you have one; your address; the time the client has to pay — “Net 14,” meaning the total amount within 14 days is standard; the date issued; the client’s name and address; a list of services provided together with the rate for each service and the total; the pre-tax total; the total amount of tax; the total; and most importantly a way of paying.

Back on day two, you contacted your tax department to determine your liabilities. You may or may not have to charge sales tax or VAT. Always include the amount of tax on your invoice, even if the total is $0, so it’s clear whether or not it has been charged.

A quote document is virtually identical to an invoice, except that you remove the payment requests. You should also add a note stipulating how long the quote is valid — 3 months is standard.

Plenty of services will create these documents for you as part of an accounting system. For example, Xero, FreshBooks, or Bloom. Even PayPal will allow you to send invoices. If you prefer, you can create your own quotes and invoices and send them as PDFs — this option is best if you want total control over your documents’ design, but it will take longer, and it’s worryingly easy to make a mistake.

Day Eighteen: Social Media

Start today by researching social media accounts. Look at the list of target businesses you made on day eight; which social media channel do they use the most? For example, if the niche you picked on day three is restaurants, they probably use Instagram. If you chose retirement communities, they probably use Facebook.

Once you have a clear picture of your clients’ channels, pick one (yes, 1) and register an account.

Social media is a significant drain on your time and provides considerably less return on investment than you might expect. So, choose one service that your prospective clients use and start building your profile. It’s far better to invest your time and effort in a place your clients will notice you than to spread yourself too thin.

Day Nineteen: Domain & Hosting

It’s another two-task day. We’ve grouped these together because domains and hosting are frequently rented together.

Back on day nine, you selected your tech stack. You’ll be building your own site with the technology you offer clients, so it’s important to ensure your hosting enables this. If you intend to develop with WordPress, you need WordPress hosting. If you intend to build with Wix, you need a Wix account. If you’re planning on offering any kind of web app, you probably need Netlify.

Whatever you choose, choose something appropriate for your tech stack. The only exception is if you plan to specialize in a niche service like Shopify, which is entirely inappropriate for an agency portfolio.

There are endless debates over whether or not you should register a domain with the same company that hosts your site. Everyone seems to know someone who knows someone who registered a domain, and then something improbable happened to cause them to lose the domain that wouldn’t have happened if they’d hosted separately.

Back in the real world, simplicity is a gift you give yourself. Choose a reputable company, register a good domain, host in the same place, and let their support sort out your DNS for you — many good hosts will even give you free domain rental for a year to entice you to take up their hosting.

Good hosting is reliable, with plenty of room to grow. If it can be cheap too, that’s a bonus. It’s common to start with bottom-end(ish) shared hosting and expand to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) at some point in the future.

Day Twenty: Email

Despite the massive growth in messaging apps over the last decade, email is still your most important business tool.

Depending on the hosting you set up yesterday, email inboxes may have been included. If not, you’ll need to set up a separate email provider.

You’ll need a general email address. Traditionally this has been info@, but hi@, hey@, hello@, and ciao@ are a little more friendly.

You need a personal email address that’s just for you. For example, I use ben@.

You also need a separate account for finances that you can use for invoicing and services like Stripe and PayPal. accounts@ or billing@ are fine.

Finally, you’ll need to set up a catch-all email forwarder for all the times people guess your email, mistype your email or assume you used info@. Forward those emails to your general address.

Once that’s done, set up an email signature for each account. Include your logo, contact details, and the social media address you set up a couple of days ago.

Finally, update your email address with your hosting company, social media account, and business accounts.

Day Twenty-One: Rest

That’s it for this week. So shut down your machine, go outside, ride a bike, go on a hike, learn to skateboard, and relax with family and friends.

We’re approaching the sharp end of this process, and next week will be busy, so do whatever you do to recharge your batteries.

Featured image via Pexels.

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The post How to Start a Web Design Agency in 28 Days: Week Three first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

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19 août 2022/par Service comm.

Image CDNs: How Edge Computing Provides a Faster Low Code Image Solution

Actualités, Actualités

Many websites today use some type of traditional Content Delivery Network (CDN), which means improvements in website load times, decreases in bandwidth, and better redundancy and security. But not everything is optimized, specifically when it comes to images, and image CDNs can help with that!

Traditional vs. Image CDNs

A traditional CDN treats images as static. If you want to tailor images to better match various mobile device types, then you need to create many variants of each image and upload them to your web server. It also means you must develop responsive code that will tell the server and CDN which image variant to deliver. This is clunky, time-consuming, and inefficient. For a large website, the amount of code needed can be astronomical. Using this static image model, there’s just no realistic way for each image to be effectively sized and compressed for every possible device model – at this point, there are thousands of them. The combination of these two unfortunate factors leads to potentially slow load times and poor UX caused by oversized images delivered to mobile devices.

So what is an image CDN? An image CDN builds on the traditional CDN model with the addition of device detection and image optimization. Instant detection of the device model and browser requesting the images is done right at the device-aware edge server (true edge computing!) Additional information, including screen resolution and dimension, pixels per inch, and support for next-gen image formats (such as WebP, JPEG 2000/JP2, and AVIF), provides even more details crucial for superior image optimization. Using this information derived from device-aware edge servers, the image CDN optimizes each image and serves the perfect version for each device and resolution, meaning users get the finest webpage experience faster.

A Bit About the Edge (Whoa, Living on the Edge?)

With a single server website, a web request would have to travel from the requestor, back to the origin server (wherever that was geographically located), be processed, and then travel back to the requestor. Depending on the physical distance between the requestor and the origin server, this could introduce a great deal of latency, which means lag time on page loads.

A traditional content delivery network (CDN) is a global network of servers that optimizes web performance by using the node geographically closest to the user for faster delivery of assets. It takes static content like images and stores them on the edge. But usually, these edge servers are relatively simple in terms of their role in business processes. They mostly index, cache, and deliver content. And traditional CDNs like to keep edge servers simple because of concerns over CPU usage, storage, and scalability.

But what if these edge servers could also provide computing power that enhances performance and business processes? This is called edge computing. Slowly, CDNs are starting to open their edge servers to allow enterprises to deploy apps/services on the edge. Likewise, Cloud computing networks (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) provide virtualized server capacity around the world for those who want to use geographically distributed servers. In a sense, Edge Computing is a marriage of the CDN (where edge servers synchronize/work with each other) and Cloud computing (where servers are open to applications).

Edge computing is a fascinating concept, but what is the killer app that will enhance business processes and improve website performance? The addition of device detection to edge computing provides the ability to transform from delivery of static images to a new model where images are dynamic and tailored exactly to devices.

Edge computing is computing that is done in a geographically distributed space, with many servers located at or near the source of the web request. This reduction in bandwidth and latency leads to fast processing times, increased site speed, and improved customer experience. And edge computing doesn’t require new infrastructure — it leverages the networks of existing providers to create Points of Presence (POP) around the globe.

The Edge Servers are…Aware?

Device-aware edge servers, like those used by the ImageEngine image CDN, take edge computing to a new level. Device detection is actually one of the use cases where edge computing really shines. Normally, the edge server would have to send a Javascript query to the device to figure out any information about a requesting device’s model, browser, operating system. But with a device-aware edge server, the User Agent string is captured and decoded. This contains all of the information necessary for device detection without the need for any back and forth – a definite speed improvement. So you’re starting ahead of the game!

Each time a new request comes to the device-aware edge server, the image is processed by that server (meaning optimized for that specific device parameters) and stored right there in cache, primed for future use. This is done in three stages: changing image size based on device resolution, compressing the image using an image optimization tool, and selecting the most efficient file format for the device.

If the device-aware edge server has already processed a request from a similar device model before, then it can serve the device-optimized image from its edge cache, leading to a lightning-fast server response — and ImageEngine’s device-aware edge servers can serve up cached images 98% of the time! Not only is there geographical proximity because of the distributed global POP network, but the smaller size of the optimized image compared to the full-sized original cuts up to 80% off the image payload. This can cut up to several seconds off page load times. When almost 70% of people say that page speed influences their likelihood of making a purchase, every single second counts!

Some image CDNs detect the device information and group the devices into “buckets” of similar types and serve an image based on that type. While this is certainly an advancement over a traditional CDN, and works passably well for some common devices, it still isn’t a truly optimal solution. There are so many variants of browser, screen size, resolution, etc., even among very similar devices, that images are still often oversized (too large payloads) and lead to poor load speed. A true image CDN, such as ImageEngine, serves the perfect image for every device, every time.

So Now You Want To Get Started (Don’t Worry, It’s Really Simple)

One of the best things about the ImageEngine image CDN is the ease of integration – and it can integrate into any platform that supports a 3rd-party CDN. All you need is to sign up for an account and receive a delivery address during your two (yes, 2!) minute signup process. This delivery address is used to redirect image traffic for optimization and superior delivery performance. Next, you’ll have to make some slight adjustments to img tags on your website, but that’s really all the work you’ll need to do. There are no DNS changes during a standard (generic delivery address) integration. You read that right, none at all. Contrast that to a traditional CDN integration, where there is just no way around some messing around in the DNS – in fact, usually some fairly extensive DNS changes.

This low-code, virtually no code, integration saves you time. It saves you money. It saves you the hassle of putting multiple team members on a new project. And it means that you can be up and running in about 15 minutes with a standard install. You can be serving optimized images to your site visitors at blazing fast speeds before lunch! And don’t worry, ImageEngine has an experienced integration support team available to answer any questions you might have.

There’s also no issue with adding the ImageEngine image CDN on top of an existing CDN. Traditional CDNs may have security features that you may prefer to keep for your site. It requires slightly more integration but provides the same benefits of a solo ImageEngine implementation — screaming fast image load times and perfectly optimized images from device-aware edge servers. All that is recommended is that the ImageEngine image CDN actually serve the images directly, not simply process them, to get maximum benefits.

Adopt an Image CDN and See The Benefits

We’ve learned that image CDNs bring numerous benefits to your site AND your business. Using device-aware edge servers, image CDNs provide measurably better UX to your visitors. Pages load potentially seconds faster with perfectly optimized images, meaning your customers get to the heart of your message right away, and you don’t lose potential sales.

Image CDNs are actually 30%+ faster than most traditional CDNs, improving site speed accordingly. From an SEO perspective, that’s huge! And your SEO gets an additional boost from the improvement to your Largest Contentful Paint scores (which can help you gain valuable rank on Google’s SERPs). Implementation is simple and fast. You get all this, plus cost savings: since you have smaller payloads because of the fully optimized images, you’re delivering fewer gigabytes of data.

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The post Image CDNs: How Edge Computing Provides a Faster Low Code Image Solution first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

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10 novembre 2021/par Service comm.

CERTFR-2021-ALE-005 : Multiples vulnérabilités dans Microsoft DNS server (12 mars 2021)

Actualités, Sécurité de l'information et du SI, Sécurité de l’information, Sécurité du système d’information

Contexte

Sept vulnérabilités concernant le serveur DNS de Microsoft ont fait l’objet d’un correctif à l’occasion de la mise à jour mensuelle de mars 2021. Parmi ces vulnérabilités, deux permettent un déni de service alors que les cinq autres permettent une exécution de …
Source de l’article sur CERT-FR

12 mars 2021/par Service comm.

Finding Your Way With Domain Mapping

Actualités, Actualités

It’s no secret that having a custom domain name is an essential piece of any company’s branding strategy. While there are a myriad of hosting plans available that offer domains like your company.webhost.com, making the shift from one of those to simply yourcompany.com is an important step.

However, your domain branding strategy need not end there. Domain mapping offers an opportunity for web developers and online business owners the ability to improve their marketing campaigns, protect their brands from competitors, cut down on costs, and develop a more efficient workflow.

What is Domain Mapping?

Domain mapping refers to how visitors to your website are directed to different domains and subdomains and what URLs will be displayed in the visitors’ browsers.

When you first set up your online business, one of the very first things that you do is register a domain name for your company website. But depending on the business, it could be wiser to actually register multiple domain names at once. This is because you will want to lease the primary domain name you plan on using in addition to all related TLDs. This way, cybersquatters will not be able to hold your domain name hostage, especially once you have grown into a more established brand.

For example, if you register the name yourcompany.com, you might also want to register yourcompany.net and yourcompany.org. Then you might set up a URL redirect so that visitors to the latter two sites will be redirected to yourcompany.com. However, with a domain redirect, visitors to yourcompany.net and yourcompany.org will be redirected to yourcompany.com, meaning the URL in their browser will appear as yourcompany.com no matter what they typed.

With domain mapping, this isn’t the case. A visitor to yourcompany.net will still see that URL in their browser even if the content is actually being hosted on yourcompany.com.

Benefits of Domain Mapping

Although domain mapping may seem a bit esoteric and complex at first, it serves several purposes and offers many benefits:

1. Make Web Addresses Easier to Remember

Imagine that your restaurant chain, Larry’s Lunches, just opened a new chain on 116th Street in New York City. Your first instinct may be to direct customers to larryslunches.com/116thstnyc, but that domain is a bit long and hard to remember. Instead, you might want to register the domain larrys116th.com for customers for that specific store.

With domain mapping, you can serve up the content from your main domain, larryslunches.com, while still having your visitors see larrys116th.com. This makes it easier to brand your sites without having to manage several different sites.

2. Boost Your Web Development Career

If you are a web developer yourself but are not admittedly well-acquainted with domain mapping already, you would do well to change that.

One of the easiest ways would be to look at online web development programs that one can take to read through documentation to get caught up to speed on how domain mapping can help their efforts and how to implement it. These kinds of programs can be more comprehensive than university courses and offer an impressive 88% job success rate for those who successfully complete the programs.

3. Shield Your Brand from Competitors

Remember, it’s a good idea to purchase several different related domains in anticipation of competitors snatching them up from you. Choosing the right domain names is essential to protecting your brand.

For example, Larry’s Lunches might want to snag larrysnyclunches.com and larrysfamouslunches.com as well. However, simply leaving those domains parked can be a bit of a waste, and managing multiple domains can be a pain in and of itself.

But with domain mapping, you can manage those domains just as easily as if they were your primary site, so you no longer need to leave them empty.

4. Save Time and Lower Development Expenses

Development isn’t cheap, and time is money. While the maintenance costs for a website are already high enough, adding in separate domains can sometimes break the bank due to the increased complexity of managing so many different moving pieces.

Domain mapping can lower expenses and save time by keeping everything tidy and in one place. By managing everything from a single WordPress installation, for example, you can push updates to all your subdomains at once, saving you from the tedium of going through each domain and making the same updates.

5. Manage Client Sites from One Place

If you’re a freelance developer or run an agency, using domain mapping for some of your clients’ sites can save you time as well. For example, if several clients want blogs, and you use the same infrastructure for them, you can easily push updates and changes to all of them at the same time. In short, domain mapping can make maintaining sites much easier and quicker.

How to Implement Domain Mapping

If you’re sold on the benefits of domain mapping, here’s a quick primer on the steps you’ll need to take to get started:

Choose a domain registrar: The ideal registrar you choose should come with a number of important features including adequate hosting for keeping your website visitor friendly, SSL certification to ensure security, 24/7 customer support, comprehensive packages that make it easy to operate your online business.
Register the domains you’re interested in: These can either be domain misspells (otherwise known as typosquatting), like youcompany.com, yourcmpany.com, etc, or related domains like yournewproduct.com, yournewlocation.com, etc. Whatever you decide to go with, you’ll need to have it registered before you can get started.
Install WordPress Multisite: WordPress is one of the easiest ways to develop websites, and that holds true for domain mapped sites as well. Plus, considering WordPress sites account for over a third of the entire internet, you can’t go wrong with the famed CMS. All you need to do is install WordPress and, once that’s installed, open wp-config.php and add define(‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true) above the /*.
Configure your DNS settings: Next, you’ll need to point all your name servers to your hosting account. These changes can take up to 72 hours to go into effect.
Add domains to your hosting plan: From your hosting platform, you’ll need to link your custom domains. You can usually do this from your cPanel.
Map subsites to your custom domains: Once you have your domains set up, you’ll need to link them through WordPress. To do so, simply login and navigate to Sites -> Add New. After you assign them a subdomain or subdirectory name, you can click Edit and add your custom domain. Then just hit Save Changes, and you’re good to go.

Take note that domain mapping is not necessary for transferring a domain name. When you map a domain, you’re simply telling your domain where it can find your website on the internet through having your name servers updated. When you change your name, it only affects where the domain has been resolved.

The Bottom Line

While domain mapping isn’t necessary for all websites, it can still be a major timesaver. By utilizing it properly, you can greatly improve the standing of your online business by saving time and money, making website management easier, and improving the branding of your sites.

Featured image via Unsplash.

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Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

26 août 2020/par Service comm.

Grab Free SSL Certificates From ZeroSSL

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Like it or not, we’re slowly edging towards a two-tier web: those sites that are secure, and…everything else.

There was a time on the web, when we didn’t have SSL certificates, and lots of people’s data got stolen. To address the problem, and regain users’ trust SSL certificates were introduced to secure sites handling sensitive data. And because they were initially a niche technology, you paid through the nose for them.

(An SSL certificate, for those that don’t know, is the difference between http:// and https://)

Then, thanks in part to privacy initiatives, and in part to high-profile data breaches, a few big players decided that all data should be protected. And the next thing you know, Google’s using SSL certificates as a ranking factor. And then suddenly browsers are warning people that non-SSL certified sites are insecure and they should “Get Out of Here!” And before long your hobby blog about cat-friendly board games is being billed hundreds of dollars a year just to be seen on the web.

Choosing whether to jump on the SSL bandwagon is simple: you have to have one. Finding an affordable SSL certificate, now that’s a challenge.

Most hosting companies will provide you with an SSL certificate as an add-on, and they’ll charge you anything up to $200 per year for it.

That’s why we’re blown away by ZeroSSL, because ZeroSSL is the first practical opportunity to grab an SSL certificate for your site, for free!

Get an SSL Certificate for Free

Now, it must be said that ZeroSSL isn’t the first place to offer a free SSL certificate. Plenty of hosts offer a “free” SSL certificate for the first year, when you pay for premium hosting. And there’s Let’s Encrypt which offers free certificates if you can work out how to access them.

ZeroSSL is just the first place to offer a genuinely free SSL certificate that you don’t need a post-grad degree in server engineering in order to use.

Get a Free SSL Certificate from ZeroSSL

Using ZeroSSL’s free-forever plan you can register three 90-day certificates entirely free. You’ll never need to pay for them, just renew every few months.

ZeroSSL also offers a variety of packages for simplifying your SSL management. The Basic package for example starts at $8/month and offers unlimited 90-day certificates, and even three 1-year certificates so you can renew annually and forget about them the rest of the time.

ZeroSSL also scales; if you need unlimited 1-year certificates — because you have, erm, unlimited websites? — that’s possible too.

Where ZeroSSL Excels

ZeroSSL offers a number of benefits over its competitors.

Firstly there’s the full-featured management console, that makes SSL management transparent. It sounds like a little thing, but with many other suppliers the first thing you know about your SSL certificate expiring is your site breaking.

ZeroSSL…makes managing your certificates…insanely easy.

ZeroSSL has an easy-to-use REST API, which can be used with the language of choice: PHP, Ruby, ASP, anything. It makes managing your certificates for multiple sites insanely easy.

Verifying SSL certificates can be confusing, and technically difficult. But ZeroSSL streamlines the process with automatic CSRs and one-step email validation (even for multiple domains) — considerably faster and easier than industry standard DNS validation. There’s even a one-click check to make sure your certificate is installed correctly.

Most importantly, ZeroSSL offers superb technical support on all of its paid plans. So if you’re one of the many people who started reading this post without fully understanding what an SSL certificate is, you can be confident that if you run into difficulties getting set up, there’s someone available 24/7 to dig you out of the hole.

Getting Started with ZeroSSL

If by now you’re planning to try ZeroSSL, the best place to start is the free-forever plan. ZeroSSL allows you to upgrade, downgrade, or cancel at any time, so it makes sense to start with the no-credit-card option and upscale if you need it.

Using ZeroSSL’s dashboard you can create a free 90-day SSL certificate in minutes, and the step-by-step installation instructions will guide you all the way through.

ZeroSSL’s 1-year certificates are the gold-standard of SSL protection

ZeroSSL auto-generates certificates in different formats depending on your choice of platform, to speed up installation.

You can register certificates for multiple domains — you will have to verify each domain individually, but it’s simple to setup. Premium plan users can even use wildcards, allowing you to secure a site with multiple sub-domains, from a single certificate.

ZeroSSL’s 1-year certificates are the gold-standard of SSL protection and are the option that most site owners will come to rely on.

If you’re running an agency and you’re responsible for maintaining multiple client sites, ZeroSSL is made for you. ZeroSSL’s dashboard gives you one central location to monitor the status of all of your SSL certificates, and you can set expiry reminders to notify you by email when a certificate is about to expire.

Automated SSL Renewal with ZeroSSL

If that sounds too much work, and you’d like to automate your SSL certificates, ZeroSSL has you covered.

ZeroSSL works with both its own dedicated ACME Certbot, and more than ten other third-party ACME clients to fully automate your SSL certificates absolutely free, on a rolling 90-day schedule.

If you really know what you’re doing, you might even consider the ZeroSSL’s REST API. It enables certificate creation, validation, renewal, and management using HTTPS Get calls and JSON responses. The API handles millions of requests per month using 256-bit bank-level HTTPS encryption. You can access the API for free, and the Pro plan offers unlimited access.

Go Get Certified

There are millions of sites that drop traffic every month because they lack an SSL certificate.

Whatever your site, it’s not a question of whether you need an SSL certificate, it’s how you can affordably manage to create, install, and monitor a certificate.

ZeroSSL solves all of the problems of SSL certificate management, and for the majority of users, its free-forever plan is all you’ll ever need.

Head over to zerossl.com today to boost your traffic with a free SSL certificate.

[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of ZeroSSL –]

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Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

14 juillet 2020/par Service comm.