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How To Improve Your Website Speed

1) Minify CSS and JS files

2) Remove old or unwanted pages

3) Remove duplicate entries from all pages

4) Remove old or commented entries from all pages

5) Avoid comments in the pages

6) Configure E-Tags (Entity Tags)

7) Use GET for AJAX requests

8) Make AJAX cacheable

9) Make sure there are no access to non-existing pages which cause 404 errors

10) Do not scale images in HTML

11) Have a custom 404 page

12) Create a favicon – which is small and cacheable

The Disadvantages of Spam

Spam is annoying. If you’ve ever had to go through your email account, weeding out the relevant emails from the junk messages selling miracle hair growth lotions, free subscriptions to dating websites, and overnight penis enlargement then you’ll know exactly what I mean!

Spam also risks severely damaging an internet company’s reputation.

The Benefits of Spam

Many who have had their own business, have unashamedly used various mediums (MySpace, email, Twitter, Facebook) to send potential consumers messages containing links or details about their products.

This helped them to get more users using their services or products, and also made sure the band met the minimum attendance targets whenever we were playing live.

Can you believe that, for example some gigs will not allow to book a business unless its members bring at least 40 new buyers along with them. As a result – unless you have 40+ friends who are willing to hop on a bus to King’s Cross on a rainy Wednesday night – this can be a big hurdle that prevents bands from getting enough bookings.

Luckily, my band was able to reach much larger audiences through the medium of the Web.

Advantages of Sending Bulk E-mails Through E-mail Marketing

Send Emails Pretty Fast

Personalized Emails

Eye Catching Emails

Increases Brand Value

Subscriber Management

Automatic Bounce Handling

Scheduled Emails

Batch Delivery

Take Care of Email Delivery

Nice Reports

Why You Should Not Use Mail Clients For Sending Bulk Emails

Do you send Greetings to your clients during festival time such as Christmas, New Year, Eid, Diwali, National Day, Onam etc.? Do you send other news & announcement emails periodically to your clients and potential clients alike?

If the answer is yes – Are you sending them from an email client such as Outlook or Gmail with the email addresses of all clients added in To field or CC or even Bcc for confidentiality? If the answer is no – It is time to start sending those emails as it can help boost your sales directly as well as indirectly. If the answer is yes – Are you sending them from an email client such as Outlook or Gmail with the email addresses of all clients added in To field or CC or even Bcc for confidentiality?

Sending Greeting or other messages & Pictures are much recommended as it helps to build a close relationship with your clients, but it is not a good practice sending them via an email client as aforementioned.

Subscriber Management

The newsletter system setup by Mizzle can manage your subscribers quite easily even if it grows into millions. Just watch your subscriber count growing at a rapid rate and organize the subscribers as you like.

a) Subscriber Count Grows at faster rate

Mizzle would create a subscribe page on your website so your visitors can subscribe to the newsletters if they would like. As even a first time user can subscribe into your mailing lists means the count grows at an unexpected rate.

b) Multiple Subscriber Groups

You would want to keep multiple subscriber groups so that you can send a Festival greeting all your contacts including your competitors while you would want to send a promo only to your customers. This is pretty easy with our newsletter system.

c) Facility to Quit Receiving Emails

Does Low Website Speed Affect your Business

Load speed is the base of any great website, and so you need to take it as it is the foundation of your website. If your site is slow, it’s pushing you backward.

Let’s look where all it gets affected.

1. Conversions and Sales

2. From Visitor’s point of view

3. Low Page Speed Hinder SEO Performance

4. Slow Website cause Higher Bounces Rate

Best Signs of  A Conversion Rate Optimization Expert

Wondering who is the CRO expert and their qualities?

Well the real truth is that they are rare. Lot of content marketers out there, coders everywhere, SEOs in abundance, and social media gurus on every door, but conversion rate optimizers? Where are they?

Read on to understand the best qualities of an CRO “expert,” check if these qualities are in you.

And if they don’t, it’s not too late to rise in the ranks. You won’t merely discover if you’re a CRO expert. You’ll also discover how to become one.

1. Understands that Conversion Optimization begins by analyzing About Your Target Audience

2. Creates A Strategy and Testing Plan Before You beginning to Run the Tests

3. Never Edits Anything On A Website Without First Running A Test

4. Knows the danger of depending On Your ideas, opinions, feelings, or experience

5. Data equals Life

6. Is great at Copywriting

7. Views CRO As An Ongoing Process

8. Develops A Conversion Optimization Heuristic, (well that’s what it’s called)

9. Realizes that CRO is more than The Testing

Does Website Speed Affect your Business

Speed is the major issue for all the generations alike, all over the world, and when it comes to the new generation of mobile internet users, they need everything within a second. Have you heard a loud hard clap? A time of that single clap is what mobile internet users give to find anything online these days. Yes you heard me right and Just imagine what will happen if the website loads only after 10 seconds or worse takes a whole minute. Gone are the days when people held their breaths and chose to sit it out for some good minutes for most ‘errands.’ Instant gratification has pushed our tolerance level to ‘waiting’ almost to it’s final boundaries which is nil.

The current tool set for evaluating speed through these types of correlations are extremely limited in most people’s experience. There are many speed evaluating vendors like gomez, akamai, and other vendors and most don’t have the expertise required in most people’s opinion. An ideal speed evaluation tool that most of us would love to use, should monitor web application performance and correlate conversion rates.

Facts that matter

If a website based on e-commerce is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second delay in page download could likely cost you a loss of $2.5 million in sales every year.

7% reduction can be seen in conversions due to one second of page delay.

38% of consumers say that they’ve come across a website that wasn’t available.

40% of mobile internet users give up on a website that loads only after 3 seconds.

47% of people expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.

51% of consumers say that they’ve regretted using a website that ended as an error, froze and ultimately crashed.

73% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that was too slow to load.

These stats were taken from the website blog.kissmetrics.com.

Well based on this matter, it’s widely believed that website speed has lower than 1% effect on overall ranking. Google does acknowledge of the fact they do take website speed into consideration however they are yet to make public the aspects that really matter in this regard.

Even then It cannot be forgotten that after optimizing, many websites did see a hike in traffic (from search engines or otherwise). Let me remind it to you that you are speeding up the website loading to bring more conversions after traffic sets in, and your users are benefitted too and not for the sake of Google rankings alone.

Website speed is imperative for user experience, therefore if your site has low speed, there is no use of keeping it that way. Now what benefit will you get from search engines traffic, while visitors need to wait for 20 seconds just to have a look at your websites content. Eventually even before the page has loaded customers would’ve left.

What you should know about Spams

Those annoying messages, emails, and other forms of unsolicited communication that we receive are lovingly called ‘spams.‘ Sometimes you get them in such large amounts that can be quite bothersome.

It is fairly obvious about the disadvantages of spam (irritating people, wasting their time, and taking up space on people’s hard-drives are just a few), there are also a handful of benefits to spam that are worth to be mentioned.

Top 5 PHP Security Tips

Input data validation

1) input data validation is an integral part while developing an application. It is easy to hack your application if there is no data validation in place for user inputs. Make sure you validate the data executed by eval() if you ever want to use eval() in your code. This is a must thing to do when user generated content is executed by eval().

a) First thing to do is pass all variables through PHP’s htmlspecialchars() function. The result of htmlspecialchars() function is safe to be displayed on a page. The htmlspecialchars() function converts special characters to HTML entities. b) Remove backslashes (\) from the user input data with the PHP stripslashes() function. c) PHP 5.2 and later has a great function called filter_var for data validation. filter_var will sanitize and validate data. Read more about filter_var here.

Switch to PDO or MySQli

MySQL is the original extension designed to interact with MySQL database while developing PHP applications. It provides procedural interface and easier to understand. Since MySQL extension is deprecated as of PHP 5.5.0 all future development should use either PDO or MySQli. Even though MySQLi also offers a procedural API, PDO is most recommended due to its advanced features and database driver support.

$_SESSION

Session variables stores information to be used across multiple pages. Use session variables to secure the pages that are accessible only by the logged in user.

Always use .PHP as extension.

If you use .inc, .conf etc as the file extension, the server will display the contents of the file instead of executing the code when called directly. This is dangerous if you have application configurations such as database logins in such files.

Error reporting

Things To Remember While Coding

1) Semicolons. Leaving out the semicolons will end up with “Parse error” while running your PHP script.

The semicolons completes a PHP statement. PHP reads a statement until the semicolon or the PHP closing tag. PHP doesn’t care how many lines of code you have written or how many blank spaces you have in your code. PHP checks the code until the next semicolon and treats everything before the semicolon as a single statement. Even though semicolons are not needed for the last PHP statement before the closing tag, It is always a good practice to put the semicolons at the end of each statements.

2) Dollar sign. A variable must start with a dollar($) sign. Make your script easier to understand by using descriptive variable names like $firstName, $address, $dateOfBirth instead of $var1, $var2, $var3. This will help you in troubleshooting the script. This will also make your script understandable by a third person.

3) Single/Double Quotes. Everything inside the single quotes are treated as plain string while things inside double quotes will parse the variables by replacing them with their values.

$firstName = "Sam"; echo 'Hello $firstName'; // Output: Hello $firstName echo "Hello $firstName"; // Output: Hello Sam

4) Keywords. Constants should not be given names that are PHP Keywords. Keywords have certain meaning and PHP treats them as PHP feature of the same name. Some of the PHP keyword are echo, print, continue, function etc.

There are four types of errors in PHP

1. Syntax Errors Syntax errors are caused by typo in your code. A missing semicolon, parenthesis or quotation mark may result in syntax error.

2. Fatal Errors Most common fatal error occurs while coding are of undefined function or class. The error itself tells you which function or class is not defined.

3. Warnings Warnings often appears when you include a non existing file or pass incorrect number of parameters to functions etc.

4. Notices A common notice you will see while coding is of “Undefined index”. These notices are helpful while debugging the code.

Debugging Techniques

1) echo $var; – use echo to print the variable so that you can confirm the value in that variable. You can use this in POST/GET handling to confirm whether the script has expected value in POST/GET.

2) var_dump ($var); – var_dump is useful while dealing with arrays and objects. It displays their complete structure so that you can check if the array or object has the correct value.

3) die (“value in var: $var”); – die will end the script after printing the message. You can use this anywhere in your script while debugging.

Quick comparison between PDO and MySQL

1) MySQLi supports only MySQL database where as PDO supports different database systems like Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL etc.

2) PDO supports named paramaters which makes it flexible and easier. MySQLi doesn’t support named parameters. MySQLi provides question mark parameter binding and we must keep track of paramater order.

3) PDO::quote() not only escapes the string, but it also quotes it. In MySQLi, mysqli_real_escape_string() will only escape the string. you need to manually apply the quotes.

4) PDO has a dedicated function to get single column value PDOStatement::fetchColumn Where as MySQLi doesn’t have any.

5) Error Handling: PDO has a built in class to handle the errors. PDO::errorInfo() returns an array of error information about the last operation performed.

6) Both PDO and MySQLi supports prepared queries which helps preventing SQL injection security issues.

7) Both PDO and MySQLi offer an object-oriented API, but MySQLi also offers a procedural API – which makes it easier for newcomers to understand. On the other hand, once you master PDO, you can use it with any database.

Benefits of HTTPS

1) Communication between the browser and the web server are encrypted. 2) Users can verify the authenticity of the website using the SSL certificate installed. 3) Protects user’s sensitive informations 4) Increases user’s trust and confidence 5) Increases company’s reputation over the Internet 6) Higher ranking in Google search results.

Basic work flow of HTTPS

1) User browser requests a website using the HTTPS://www.domain 2) Web server sends the public key of that domain with certificate 3) Browser checks the certificate and its expiry date. 4) Browser generates a random key using the public key found on the SSL certificate and sends it to the server 5) Server decrypts the random key using the server’s private key. 6) Server send the requested website page to the client browser encrypted with the random key. 7) Client browser decrypts the web page using the random key and displays the content to the user.