WordPress is a popular content management system (CMS) used by millions of websites around the world. If you’re building a WordPress site, you need a reliable web hosting provider to ensure your site runs smoothly and securely. At Pedalo, we specialise in providing high-quality WordPress hosting services, and we believe there are several advantages to using the same agency that supports your site.
Firstly, hosting with Pedalo means you’re benefiting from our extensive experience with WordPress. Our team of experts knows this platform inside and out, so we can provide fast and reliable hosting that’s optimised for WordPress sites. We use the latest technologies and best practices to ensure your site loads quickly and performs smoothly, even as your traffic grows.
Secondly, hosting with Pedalo means you have access to the same team that built and maintains your website. This means you can easily get support for any issues that may arise, whether it’s a technical glitch or a question about your site’s content. You won’t have to worry about dealing with multiple companies or service providers – everything is handled by one team that knows your site intimately.
Another advantage of hosting with Pedalo is that we offer a range of hosting plans to suit different needs and budgets. Whether you’re running a small personal blog or a large enterprise site with millions of visitors, we have a hosting plan that can meet your needs. Our plans are scalable, so you can easily upgrade or downgrade as your site’s needs change over time.
Hosting with Pedalo also means you’re benefiting from our commitment to security and reliability. We take the security of your site seriously, and we use the latest technologies and best practices to ensure your site is protected from hackers and other threats. We also monitor our servers 24/7 to ensure they’re running smoothly and can quickly address any issues that may arise.
Finally, hosting with Pedalo means you’re supporting an independent, UK based business that cares about its customers. We pride ourselves on providing personalised service and support to each and every client, and we’re always here to answer your questions and help you succeed online.
In conclusion, hosting with Pedalo is a smart choice. Our expert team can provide fast and reliable hosting that’s optimised for WordPress, and you’ll benefit from having a single point of contact for all your website needs. So why wait? Contact us today to learn more about our hosting services and how we can help you build and maintain a successful WordPress site.
If you are a website owner, you may have heard of GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation. GDPR is a set of regulations created by the European Union to protect the personal data of EU citizens.
The GDPR legislation applies to all businesses that process the personal data of EU citizens, regardless of whether the business is located in the EU or not. At Pedalo, we understand the importance of GDPR compliance, and we’re going to explain why it is so critical.
Protects Your Customers’ Data GDPR compliance is critical for protecting your customers’ personal data. This includes any information that can be used to identify an individual, such as their name, address, email address, and phone number. If your website collects or processes this information, you are required to comply with GDPR. Failure to comply can result in hefty fines and legal penalties.
Builds Customer Trust GDPR compliance can also help build trust with your customers. By complying with GDPR, you are demonstrating that you take their privacy seriously and that you are committed to protecting their data. This can help build a positive reputation for your business, leading to increased customer loyalty and sales.
Improves Data Management Practices GDPR compliance requires businesses to implement robust data management practices. This includes regularly reviewing and updating data privacy policies, implementing data protection measures, and keeping accurate records of data processing activities. By implementing these practices, you can improve your overall data management processes, leading to better decision-making and increased efficiency.
Avoids Legal and Financial Penalties Non-compliance with GDPR can result in hefty fines and legal penalties. The maximum penalty for non-compliance is up to £17.5 million or 4% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher. This can have a severe impact on your business’s finances and reputation.
Sets a Standard for Global Compliance GDPR is a global standard for data protection, and compliance with GDPR can help your business prepare for future regulations. By implementing GDPR compliance measures, you are setting a standard for global compliance, ensuring that your business is prepared for any future regulations that may arise.
In conclusion, GDPR compliance is critical for the success of your website and business. At Pedalo, we offer GDPR compliance services to help you meet the requirements of GDPR and protect your customers’ data. Contact us today to learn more about our GDPR compliance services and how we can help you protect your business.
As the most popular Content Management System (CMS) on the internet, WordPress is a go-to choice for businesses of all sizes. If you’re considering a website redesign or starting a new website, here are some advantages of using WordPress as your CMS.
Easy to use WordPress is an intuitive and user-friendly CMS. With its simple and easy-to-use interface, you can quickly add and update content, images, and videos without needing to know HTML or other coding languages.
Customisable WordPress is highly customisable, allowing you to create a unique website tailored to your brand’s needs. With thousands of free and premium themes and plugins available, you can easily add features, functionalities, and design elements to your website.
SEO-friendly WordPress is designed to be SEO-friendly, with built-in features such as customisable permalinks, XML sitemaps, and SEO plugins that help optimise your website’s content for search engines. This can help increase your website’s visibility, drive more traffic, and improve your search engine rankings.
Secure WordPress is a secure CMS, with regular updates and security patches to protect your website from cyber threats. Additionally, there are many security plugins available that can enhance your website’s security, such as two-factor authentication, firewalls, and malware scanners.
Mobile-responsive WordPress is mobile-responsive, meaning that your website will look and function well on all devices, including smartphones and tablets. With the increasing number of mobile users, this is essential for ensuring that your website reaches and engages a wider audience.
Scaleable WordPress is scaleable, meaning that it can grow with your business. As your business grows and your website’s needs change, you can easily add new features, functionalities, and pages to your website without needing to start from scratch.
Cost-effective WordPress is a cost-effective CMS, with many free themes and plugins available to use. Additionally, the low maintenance and upkeep costs make it an affordable option for small businesses and startups.
In conclusion, WordPress is a popular and reliable CMS that offers numerous advantages for businesses of all sizes. At Pedalo, we specialise in WordPress website design and development, and we can help you create a custom WordPress website that meets your business’s needs. Contact us today to learn more about our WordPress services and how we can help your business grow.
If you’re running a WordPress website, security should be at the top of your priority list. Even if you have just one site, it’s important to make sure it is secure and protected from malicious attacks. Here at Pedalo, we understand that WordPress security can seem like an intimidating task but with the right measures in place, it doesn’t need to be!
First things first, why is WordPress security so important? Let us break down some of the most common threats that could target your WordPress website:
Malware & Viruses: Malicious computer programs can infect your system and cause damage to your files or data.
Brute Force Attacks: This is an automated attack designed to break into your website by guessing passwords.
Data Theft: Hackers can gain access to sensitive data stored on your site, such as customer information or financial records.
Phishing Scams: Attackers may try to trick you into giving them access to your system by sending fake emails that appear legitimate.
These are just a few of the potential threats out there and if left unchecked, they could cause serious harm to both your business and customers. That’s why it’s so important for WordPress site owners to take steps towards securing their websites. Here are some tips for getting started with WordPress security:
Keep Your Software Up To Date: Make sure all software (including WordPress itself) is regularly updated with the latest versions in order to keep attackers from exploiting any outdated vulnerabilities.
Use Strong Passwords & Two Factor Authentication: Implementing strong passwords and two factor authentication will help protect against brute force attacks while also making it harder for hackers to guess user credentials.
Install Security Plugins & Firewalls: Installing plugins like Wordfence or Sucuri can help detect malicious activity on your site and block malicious requests before they reach the server level. Additionally, setting up firewalls can further protect against potential attacks by blocking certain types of traffic from entering your network.
Monitor Activity Regularly : It’s vital that you monitor activity on a regular basis in order ensure nothing suspicious is happening behind the scenes! You should also regularly review logs and audit trails in case something does go wrong. This way you’ll be able to identify any suspicious behaviour quickly and take action accordingly.
At Pedalo we understand how daunting WordPress security can seem at first but these tips should get you off on the right foot! With proper measures put in place, you’ll have peace of mind knowing that both yourself and customers are protected when using your website or online store powered by WordPress
When it comes to keeping your WordPress website running smoothly and securely, one of the most important things to consider is making sure all of your plugins are up to date with any available updates. Manually updating each plugin can be a time-consuming process and if you don’t have the correct process, it can also be risky just updating them on the live site. The core WordPress files and also some themes will require updates on an ongoing basis too. As such keeping on top of plugin updates often gets overlooked by busy site owners. That’s why Pedalo offers an automated plugin update service that makes it easy for WordPress users to keep their site installations current without having to worry about doing it themselves.
Pedalo’s automated plugin update service does the hard work for you by checking your installed plugins and WordPress files daily against its database of the latest versions available from each respective developer or publisher. When new updates become available, our system automatically downloads them and applies them directly into your WordPress site, so you don’t have to do anything yourself! This ensures that all of your plugins and the core WordPress installation remain up to date with the latest security patches and bug fixes released by developers, on a daily basis, helping to protect against potential vulnerabilities and security risks.
Plus, Pedalo also provides comprehensive reporting on which plugins were updated and when they were last checked so you can easily track any changes made over time. Also, if something goes wrong during an update (like a compatibility issue between two different versions), our support team is immediately alerted every evening, and they will be on hand to resolve any issues quickly and efficiently.
Keeping your WordPress site secure shouldn’t be complicated or stressful – let us handle the technical details while you focus on creating great content!
Sign up today for Pedalo’s automated plugin update service and start enjoying peace of mind knowing that all of your plugins stay safe & up to date!
Text content is one of the fundamental elements of on-page SEO.
In the SEO industry, we often speculate about possible unconfirmed factors used in Google’s ranking algorithm, however it’s clear that the search engine tends to favour sites with high-quality text content.
Though it’s undoubtedly true that text content is important, the qualities needed for text to have the greatest SEO impact are less obvious.
There are many questions around text content that remain unanswered: How much does the amount of text on a page influence rankings? What is the ideal length of text content? How much do spelling, grammar and overall readability factor into how Google treats a webpage?
Alongside these questions around the qualities of text content, another area which receives a lot of speculation involves the position of text content on a page. SEO and web development professionals often use the phrase ‘above the fold’ to describe content which is within the browser window when viewing a webpage, without needing to scroll down.
Content which is contained ‘above the fold’ has been widely speculated as having more impact on SEO than content contained further down. In practice, this would mean that keywords contained here would have greater impact on a page’s rankings. However, the validity of this speculation is still relatively unknown.
On one occasion, when asked whether Google treats pages differently depending on the position of content, John Mueller, Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, responded that it, in fact, did not:
However, on a separate occasion, Gary Illyes, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, stated that where content is placed on a page can impact rankings. He noted the impact on mobile devices specifically, where text displays differently on mobile and desktop devices:
With this confusion in mind, we set out to answer one of the most asked questions around text content in SEO… Does the position of on-page text content have an influence on SEO rankings?
our method
To answer this question, we decided to conduct an experiment.
This was designed to test a specific hypothesis: that text content containing keywords, which begins further down a webpage (especially out of the user viewpoint), will be penalised by Google in terms of keyword rankings, and will rank lower than webpages where text content starts at the top of the page.
If this hypothesis is proved to be correct, then we would know that the location of key text content is a Google ranking factor.
choosing keywords
To conduct this experiment, we began by creating a keyword that did not have any pages ranking in Google’s search results. This was done so that Google would have little information about the term used and users would not be searching for it, thus ensuring our experiment results would be fair.
We created the word ‘larantigranolo’, a fictional new product, as our keyword. Our next step was to create a series of websites to serve as test environments, in order to observe the SEO impact of text content placement.
We created five new WordPress websites, each with 300-word articles about larantigranolo. The content on these sites treated larantigranolo as a new type of coffee that “everyone is raving about”:
Each website’s content also included a mention of the fictional, made-up region larantigranolo coffee comes from, ‘heventizazar’, as a secondary keyword to track.
All five websites contained the same number of keywords mentions, with the two target keywords positioned in similar locations throughout. The only significant difference between the sites was the position of the heading and text content.
The target keywords used to measure results were as follows:
larantigranolo coffee
larantigranolo
heventizazar
You can see the content for the experiment websites at the addresses below:
prekenolosusa.uk
wendevantoi.uk
hajinadanlo.uk
narimatoos.uk
pasrengenio.uk
It’s important that we point out the caveats to our experiment. As with all SEO studies, the order in which each site was indexed by Google may have impacted the end results, although all domains were registered on the same date and content was published on the same date. No domain had any prior history before we conducted this experiment.
To ensure that we kept each site on an even footing, we avoided ever clicking through to the sites from Google’s search results, and no links were built to any of the sites. In addition, each website had only a single page, to ensure no other content influenced the rankings of the studied pages. All sites also used the same WordPress design and structure.
results
To determine whether our hypothesis was correct, we tracked the keyword rankings of each of our five websites. Over the course of two months, we monitored which websites gained visibility for each term.
The top performing site in terms of rankings was prekenolosusa.uk. This now ranks first for both ‘larantigranolo coffee’ and ‘heventizazar’. This is also the website where the first keyword mention within the text content is highest on the page.
These rankings were verified using rank tracking software which emulates different locations, as well as manual, incognito browser checks.
The prekenolosusa.uk domain started to rank well for our target keywords in May 2021, eventually reaching number one positions in June:
Based on the performance of this site, our hypothesis seems to be correct – that content which begins higher up on a page ranks better in terms of SEO for relevant keywords.
However, other domains in the experiment are not directly in-line with our hypothesis.
To show this, we have created the tables below, comparing how far down text content is on each page against the ranking for each tracked keyword. For ‘position on page’, 1 is highest on the page and 5 is lowest on the page.
For the keyword ‘heventizazar’:
For the keyword ‘larantigranolo coffee’:
For the keyword ‘larantigranolo’:
Although not every domain’s ranking correlates with the position of text content on their page, the page with the highest-positioned content does rank higher than all other domains for two thirds (two out of three) of the tracked keywords.
Below, we show how mentioning the keyword earlier in the text content also correlates with rankings for our target keywords.
In this chart, first/second/third paragraph refers to where each site had its first keyword mention in the text content. The site with keywords in the first paragraph ranks in position one for both ‘larantigranolo coffee’ and ‘heventizaar’.
In the chart below, we show how this performance changes when the average position of all three keywords is taken into account. Here again, the ‘first paragraph’ website still ranks at the highest average position.
However, in both charts, we can see that the site which had its first keyword mention in the fourth paragraph of text is ranking higher than we would expect.
This may be due to factors other than on-page text. Although we registered all the domains and published content on the same date, it’s possible that Google discovered this website earlier than others, and has treated it differently as a result.
In addition, although the amount of text content is the same and the structure is similar across our five experiment websites, the use of language or sentence structure may have had an unforeseen impact on keyword rankings.
In any case, our overall results confirm that the often-used logic, that keyword mentions ‘above the fold’ and as early as possible within text content, is sound.
putting the results into practice
The findings from this experiment results can be used to inform how webpages are created and designed from an SEO perspective.
For long-term SEO strategy, website designers and content producers should bear in mind that ‘above the fold’ text content containing target keywords is likely to result in improved rankings.
It would be prudent to consider whether image carousels, videos or graphics are best placed at the top of webpages. The results of our content experiment suggest that textual elements, containing keywords – such as paragraphs and bullet point lists – should be placed highest on the page to maximise SEO performance.
Over time, perhaps we will gain further clarity from Google around how text content placement influences its ranking algorithm.
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