Monat: August 2020

“A recurring question from our customers is how to move emails from one account to another. With the implementation of our email migration tool in Webmail, this has become a breeze!”

Included with all web hosting packages at One.com is your own personal email on your own domain, where you can create as many email accounts as you want. The benefits are obvious.

• It looks more trustworthy and professional.
• You have the full control over your content since it’s stored on your own web space.
• Access your email everywhere in Webmail, or through a client with IMAP, POP or Mobile Sync.

The question isn’t, whether you should start using email on your own domain: but how to migrate from your old address to the new.

Use the email migration tool

With this in mind, we have added the email migration tool in Webmail. It allows you to migrate emails from other accounts to an account on your domain. You can migrate emails from other accounts hosted at One.com but also from third-party services like Gmail and Outlook. The only thing you need to do is enter a working email address and the corresponding password, everything else happens automatically.

The emails are placed in the same folder structure as they are on the account you are moving away from, so it’s easy for you to find them again. Once the migration is done, you can move them to other folders on your account.

Check our guide for more information on how to use it: How can I migrate emails to another account?

Your emails are your own

At One.com we believe that you should have full control over your own content, including your emails. If you want to take your emails somewhere else, for any reason, you should be able to do so. That’s why we have always kept it easy to set up your account on other clients and devices.

You can also forward emails to other accounts, create as many addresses as you want, and delete them again. The new migration tool fits perfectly with this philosophy, and we hope you will find it just as useful as we do.

“There is an ocean of WordPress plugins to choose from. This means that the plugin that you need, is probably out there. But how do you find it and how do you know which one to pick? Don’t worry, in this article we explain what is important when you choose a plugin and how you tell if it’s a good one.”

Where do you begin?

You probably start looking for a plugin because you need some functionality – maybe you want to add a contact form or want to improve SEO for your site. Figure out what you need the plugin to do, before you begin your search.

We recommend that you start by doing a search in Google, for example, “best contact form plugin WordPress”. When you have found a plugin that seems promising, look it up in the WordPress plugin directory to see more detailed information, and then finally download and install it.

How do you know if a plugin is any good?

The obvious way to get to know if a plugin fulfils your needs is by simply trying it out. But, you probably don’t want to waste your time testing hundreds of useless plugins. To help you separate the wheat from the chaff, look out for the following criteria:

Updates and compatibility

A plugin that doesn’t get updated regularly is less secure and makes your website vulnerable to hacking. Hackers use known security holes in older WordPress versions to inject the malicious files or scripts. Regular updates are also required to keep the plugin compatible with the latest WordPress version, seeing as WordPress is updated all the time. Finally, regular updates indicate that the developers who created it, are still invested in the performance and maintenance of the plugin. It happens all too often that a plugin is abandoned because the creators lost interest or don’t have time to keep it up-to-date.

You can see when a plugin was latest updated in the WordPress plugin directory. Here you can also check with which WordPress versions it is compatible, and read the changelog to get an indication of how often updates are released.

Active installations

A lot of active installations show that a plugin is popular, which is a good indication that it is working well. If a plugin uses a lot of resources or doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, people wouldn’t keep using it. This doesn’t mean that a plugin with only a small number of active installs is necessarily bad – new plugins usually don’t have a lot of users yet.

Reviews from other users

Reading reviews from other users can tell you if the plugin that you want to install suits your needs. I find it often very useful to read a bunch of the 1 and 2-star reviews and see if the issues described there are a deal-breaker for me. It may very well be that users give a bad review because of a missing feature that I don’t need.

Responses from support

Having someone that can help you when you encounter issues with the plugin is very important. So it’s a good idea to read some of the existing and resolved support issues, to find out if they have a quick response time and if things get solved.

There are a number of plugins that we at One.com advise you not to use, either because it slows down our servers, or has a bad reputation. Make sure to check that a plugin that you consider using isn’t one of them. You can find the complete list here: Discouraged WordPress plugins.

Try it out!

When you have found a plugin you like, it’s time to see how it performs “under the hood”. After all, you wouldn’t want a plugin to noticeably slow down your site. To find out if it affects the speed of your site, you can run a speed test on a speed checking service website, like Pingdom or install a plugin like Query Monitor.

Do One.com recommend any plugins?

Yes, we do! We have thoroughly tested some plugins on our servers and can wholeheartedly recommend them.

• • Wordfence security – WordPress is one of the most popular and used platforms to build a website and with this, you definitely must have a security plugin that defends your website from hackers and spammers.
  • Yoast SEO – With an SEO plugin you can monitor your website traffic and see how it performs in search engines. This can help you to increase the number of visitors and possible sales.
  • WP Super cache – If you want to have your website load faster, a caching plugin is recommended. If you have one of our WordPress packages, you can also use our own cache plugin called Performace Cache plugin.

You can find a complete list of all the recommended plugins in the Plugins section of the One.com parent plugin. If you don’t have it installed yet, check our guide on how to do this manually: How do I install the One.com parent plugin?

If you keep these tips in mind, you should have no problem finding the plugin that you need.

“Want to increase your sales? You can now offer discounts or free shipping to your customers with coupons in your Online Shop. To get the discount, your customer only needs to type in the coupon code into the coupon field during checkout, simple and easy”.

Introducing coupons in the Online Shop

We all know it. Who doesn’t like a discount on selected items in the cart or 10% of the entire cart and of course free shipping to wrap it off? Coupons and free shipping are custom ways to attract, maintain and reward customers. And today we experience a market with broader and even more creative ways of selling than ever before so the use of coupons as part of your sales activities can play a crucial factor to increase your sales.

That’s why we are delighted to introduce two types of coupons to that you can offer to your customers:

• Percentage based coupons
• Free shipping coupons

With the percentage based coupons, you can give a percentage off the whole cart or only specific products or categories. The free shipping coupons offer your customers free shipping, for all destinations or only specific ones.  You can set up minimum requirements for usage, in the form of a minimum purchase amount or a minimum number of items in the cart before your customer can use the coupon, for example, 25% off on orders over €100,-. With a usage limit, you can set the number of times a coupon can be used in total.

Reward your customers with free shipping

Free shipping is a way to satisfy your customers and letting them know you appreciate them. That way they are more likely to revisit your shop. You can also make an existing campaign even more attractive by adding free shipping in addition to the discounts.

Set an expiry date and create a state of urgency

You can choose to set an expiration date on your coupon. It can be a great motivation for your customers to use the coupon before they have forgotten all about it and for them to get what they want now and not in a week. You can also work with, let’s say, some weekend offers in a variety of ways.

Want to learn more?

If you want to learn more about coupons, have a look at this detailed step-by-step guide on how to create coupons for your Online Shop.

Happy selling!

“WordPress is one of the most flexible content platforms on the market. You can customize your WordPress with thousands of themes and plugins. The problem is, the more you add, the more your database gets cluttered which makes it run inefficiently. In this blog post, we advise you on how to deal with the cleaning up”.

A typical WordPress install consists of both files and a database. A Database is like a filing cabinet for your WordPress site. It stores all of your content, including posts, pages, links, users, latest revisions and, comments as well as the specific settings for your site – including themes and plugins. This is a lot of data! So, if you’ve been using WordPress for a while, there is a big chance that your database is filled up with data that you no longer need. It’s time to clean up!

Optimizing your database not only helps to speed up your site so that it loads faster, but it also frees up some significant space in your database, which makes it run more efficiently. The database is a crucial part of your WordPress site – without it, your site doesn’t work. We advise you to take extreme caution when you make changes and to create a backup of your database before making modifications.

Cleaning the options table

Some tables are used every day to make your WordPress-site run, for example, the wp_options table. These tables consist of a lot of data that you eventually need to clean up. The wp_options table stores all your settings including the site URL, the currently used theme, and a list of the active plugins. Also, a lot of plugins and themes, store bits and pieces of information in this table that help rendering the page. When you remove a plugin, it can leave traces in your options table that clutter things up and should be removed.  To find out if that is the case, you can search for it manually in the database.

How do you find unused plugins in the database?

It is tricky to know exactly what to search for, as a plugin can be written in a variety of ways. An example is a plugin like ”Really Simple SSL”. The plugin could be called ”really simple ssl”, ”really-simple-ssl”, ”really_simple_ssl”, ”reallysimplessl”, or something completely different in the database. This is how you do:

1. Go to phpMyAdmin and select Databases in the top.
2. Click the Database-name (for example domain_com), and go to SQL.
3. Paste in the following SQL query:SELECT * FROM `www_options` WHERE `autoload` = `yes` AND `option_name` LIKE `%plugin%` Replace www_ in www_options with the database prefix you have used, and replace plugin in %plugin% with the name of the plugin that you want to remove traces from.
4. Press the Go button, it should list all the rows that were left by the specific plugin.
5. Remove the rows by pressing the Delete button.

Note: You need to adjust the query to include the table name. Many WordPress installs use wp_ as prefix, and then the options table would be wp_options. If it’s a subdomain (e.g. test.domain.tld), one-click installs will use the folder name as the prefix, e.g.: test_options. In some cases, you should also add a number: test0_options.

How do you remove transient data?

Aside from the plugin and theme-specific data, your database also contains transient data, used to store temporary information in your database. Normally transient data is removed automatically, by the plugin that put it there. However, if you remove the plugin, the transient data that is stored in your database at that time, won’t be removed and remain in the database forever, unless you manually remove it.

The steps in removing transient data are similar to removing plugins. You can easily identify them because they usually have the word transient in their names. You can use the following query to select them:

1. Go to phpMyAdmin.
2. Paste in the following SQL query:SELECT * FROM `www_options` WHERE `autoload` = 'yes' AND `option_name` LIKE '%transient%'
3. Press the Go button, it should list all the transient rows.
4. Remove them by pressing the Delete button.

Alternatively, you can also use a plugin like transients manager to manage your transient data.

Going Further

The procedures listed above is one of the many tips you can find in optimizing your database. If you like to go beyond, you can also delete the old unused plugin tables (if you have one), delete spam comments, old posts, deleted posts etc. Alternatively, you can also use some plugins to do this for you. Cleaning up your WordPress database is not just an optional thing but rather should be done regularly.

Want to learn more about WordPress?

We have numerous WordPress-guides for you ready in our support section, please have a look if you need inspiration or help.

“Crisp and vivid images is what we usually aim for when placing photos on our website. If photography on your own isn’t your thing and you want to display high-resolution photographs in your website, One.com now offer you free stock photos in Website Builder! Isn’t it amazing?”

The free stock photos are available when using the new Website Builder tool. You can add up to 3 images for free with Website Builder starter while the Website Builder Premium subscription will let you add as many photos as you want.

How to add Free stock photos in Website Builder?

In a few steps, you’re all set.

1. Drag and drop the Gallery-, Image- or Slider component on the desired page.
2. In the pop-up window click the button: “Free from One.com”.
3. Select the Category, Images or Illustrations and from here you can see various subcategories.
4. Once you have selected the desired images, click the button: “Add to page”.

Is it possible to edit stock photos?

If you want to enhance some of the free stock photos like adjusting the contrast, saturation or brightness, or even adding text and stickers to create something unique, you can use the built-in image editor in Website Builder. Check our guide for more information: How do I edit an image in Website Builder?

With free stock photos, you get photos of the best quality with high definition and resolution. There are several advantages in using high-quality photos on your site. We have listed the most important for you:

How can photos of high quality improve my business?

Higher SEO ranking
Images in high resolution on your site will potentially enhance your SEO ranking. When you put aesthetically pleasing pictures in your site, it will provide helpful visuals to the visitors. With this, you will engage the users to browse through your website pages and eventually lower the bounce rate, which may hurt your SEO ranking. A bounce rate refers to the number of visitors entering and leaving your site again, rather than staying to view other pages on the same website.

Convert traffic into leads
SEO experts believe that using high-quality images will increase your chances in converting your traffics into leads that will turn into income! With heaps of images available in free stock photos in Website builder that ranges from different categories, you will surely find the photos that you have been looking for helping you tell a story of your services or products.

Get your images shown in search results
With the recent change of how a search engine like Google display search results, eye-catching and top quality photos will help to boost your website’s online search ranking. Google is now more inclined to show imagery in the search results, which is helpful when people are searching for a specific topic, aside from the traditional text-based results.

Image optimization may be an underprivileged SEO strategy, but it’s worth considering spending time on if it may increase your traffic and hence opportunities for increased sales. That’s why One.com offers you the option to download amazing photos to enhance your website. From now on, displaying quality images will be a game changer for your marketing.

Check our guide for more information: Free stock photos from One.com in Website Builder

Note: The usage of free stock photos in Website Builder is solely for your web space in One.com. It should not be used for any other digital purposes outside One.com. Please read our terms of use for images.

“Our Website Builder has a much improved Mobile View! You can now rearrange the order of components and show the most important things for mobile visitors first.”

One of the most requested features for Website Builder was a better experience on mobile devices. That’s why we are delighted to let you know that the latest release of Website Builder comes with an optimized view on mobile and the first version of the Mobile view editor.

Smarter publishing

Website Builder now has a much better understanding of how to order your site in mobile view. It will automatically group components that belong together and add white spaces to make this more obvious. You need to republish your site to enjoy the latest mobile view optimizations.

Rearrange how your site looks on mobile

We have also added a Mobile view editor that allows you to rearrange the order of components in mobile view. If the automatic optimization hasn’t structured your website exactly as you want it, you can now adjust this manually. You can also add more white space, by placing a box component around one or more components.

The changes you make in the Mobile view editor, don’t affect how your site looks on a desktop.

The Mobile view editor is still in Bèta, meaning it’s not yet complete. We will keep improving it and will also add more features. For more information on how to use it, check our guide: How do I optimize my Website Builder site for mobile?

Hide components or lock them to the bottom

Components that are set to be hidden in mobile view, won’t be visible in the Mobile view editor. Template components that are stuck to the bottom of the page can be recognized by a blue padlock and you won’t be able to move them. If you want to change these settings, you can to do this from the desktop editor.

Keep in mind that mobile view needs to be active to use the optimizing features. If mobile view is deactivated, your visitors will always see the desktop version, regardless of the device they are using. We recommend that you keep it enabled because it improves your SEO ranking, and it is more user-friendly for visitors accessing your site on a mobile device.

“The most important is to remain calm. Do not reply or pay. In most cases you can just delete the email and go on with your day. This blog post deals with these threatening emails to avoid the worry they often cause.”

Scam emails causing concern

In the last few months, a special kind of scam emails has been going around and is causing a lot of concerns for recipients worldwide. You have probably already received one of these, know someone who has or heard about it in the media. In the emails, the scammers claim to have gotten access to your account or computer and prove it by showing a password. Then they claim to have recorded you in a private moment and threatens to expose it to your friends, family, and everyone you know unless you pay.

The most important thing when receiving one of these emails is to remain calm. This new scam is very hurtful and goes directly for blackmailing the victims. Even so, we recommend you to not reply or pay. In most cases, you can just delete the email and go on with your day.

Password included in the email

The main concern we experience is that the email includes a password that the user is using at the moment or has used earlier for their account. Your passwords are safe with us. Our highest priority is security and to make sure to keep your data safe. In most cases, we see, that the email address has been used as a username on another site either in the past, or still is, and that place has had a data leak. Most people tend to use the same password in multiple places because it is easy to remember, therefore it becomes very easy for hackers to use the leaked login details everywhere else where the same combination of email address and username has been used. The password in the email is from one of these data leaks and may not have been in use for years. Hackers have large databases of such stolen data and usually use it to gain access to accounts and send spam.

It is a very good idea to change your password on a regular basis, as well as all your other passwords. Having different passwords for various sites is always a good idea. And of course, make sure your passwords are secure and not commonly used, such as PASSWORD, name and birthday or ILOVEYOU. Sentences, with or without spaces, are one of the safest passwords you can use; it is very hard for a bot to guess and you can more easily remember it. Add a special character for extra security.

You should also check if your email password has been leaked before so you can take precautions and keep you and your data safe.

Email from your own account?

The scammers are very clever and hide their tracks in many ways. One of the most obvious is that it seems like the email was sent from your own email address, even though it was not. This is called spoofing and it makes it look like your own address is the sender. Modern email technology makes this possible. If you are not sure, our support is always ready to help you check. A good tool against spoofing is setting up an SPF record. It lets other servers know which servers are authorized to send your emails. If an email arrives with your email as sender but the server is not on the list, the email will be flagged as suspicious and, in many cases, completely denied. But please note that this is dependent on the receiving server checking the SPF. Not all servers do, and then the email will be delivered regardless.

If you have a website with a form where visitors can send you messages, it is a good idea to make sure that the form is secured and cannot be abused.

What should I do?

Change your passwords
Always start by changing your password if you are still using the password mentioned in the email anywhere. Anywhere where you have used the same combination of email address and password is vulnerable, and it is a very good tactic to change the password to a secure one.

Delete the email
There is no risk as long as you do not reply, click on any links or pay them. You can report the email to the local authorities, but most of them have already received many reports of the same kind so it might not be needed. Check with your local authorities if you are not sure.

Check antivirus and updates
Make sure your computer is safe with antivirus software and regularly updating everything, so you have the latest security updates for your systems. Set up SPF for your domain to help prevent scammers begin successfully in pretending they are you.

Turn on the spam-filter
Quite a lot of the scam emails are automatically tagged as spam so do yourself a favor and make sure to have turned on your spam-filter from the email settings.

If you have any doubts or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us. Our live chat is always open on One.com/chat.

“On December 3rd 2018 we are removing the PHP versions 5.6 and 7.0 from our servers. All web spaces that are using these versions at that time, will be updated to PHP 7.2.”

On December 3rd, 2018 we are removing the PHP versions 5.6 and 7.0 from our servers. All web spaces that are using these versions at that time, will be updated to PHP 7.2. The reason for these updates is that PHP 5.6 and 7.0 are reaching end-of-life.

During the first half of November, we will update all web spaces that are using PHP 5.6 or 7.0 to version 7.2. At this time you can still go back to the previous PHP version. If your site isn’t working as expected after the update, you still have a couple of weeks to fix things.

What does it mean when a PHP version reaches end-of-life?

All PHP versions have a lifecycle of roughly three years. After its initial stable release, a PHP version is actively supported for 2 years. During this time there will be regular releases that fix bugs and security issues.

After these two years, the PHP version will be supported for an additional year, but only for critical security updates. A year later, the PHP version reaches end-of-life and will no longer be supported by PHP.net. Meaning that even critical security fixes are no longer fixed making it much more vulnerable to exploits.

Read our guide to find out more about the reasons for updating PHP: Why do I need to update PHP?

Will your site be affected?

That depends; if your site is created with HTML, like Website Builder, it won’t be affected. If your site is using PHP, like WordPress, then it might.

Whether your site is affected depends for a large part on if you have recently updated your CMS and plugins to the latest version. If you are regularly updating your site, then the PHP update should not be a problem, on the contrary, it may even improve the performance of your website, especially if your site is running on WordPress.

How do you know what version of PHP you are currently using?

You can see this in the One.com control panel, under PHP & Database – Maria DB. Here you can see the version you currently use and change to another version. Keep in mind that it does take 20 minutes for the change to take effect.

If your website is using PHP 5.6 or PHP 7.0, you will also get an email from us where we inform you about the upcoming update.

What should I do if my current PHP version is 5.6 or 7.0?

In that case, you need to update, preferably to PHP 7.2 because it is the newest version that has the longest support time left, until November 2020.

We recommend that you do this as soon as possible, before support for PHP 5.6 and 7.0 stops on December 3rd. That way you can still go back to the previous version if it turns out that your website doesn’t work as expected. Reverting back to the last version PHP will make your site working again, giving you the time to fix things.

What can I do to make my website compatible with PHP 7.2?

If you use a CMS, like WordPress, then it’s straightforward; update everything to the latest version, including your plugins and themes.

Are you using the newest version of your CMS, and do you still have issues? Then this is most likely caused by a plugin or theme. To find out which one is causing problems, we recommend that you deactivate all plugins and themes that are not installed by default. Next, update PHP to 7.2, and then one-by-one reactivate all plugins and themes again.

Check our guide step-by-step guide on how to safely update PHP for WordPress: How do I update PHP for my WordPress site?

If you are using PHP code in your site, that was custom-made for your website, updating it will be more tricky. Most likely the code needs to be rewritten by a developer to make it compatible. For more information check our guide for tips on how to go about this.

Are there any benefits to updating PHP?

Yes, there are! As with all things on the internet, PHP is continuously being developed and improved upon. Each version is a little bit better. For example, compared to PHP 5.6, PHP 7.2 makes WordPress sites on average two times more responsive.

Then there is also the security aspect to consider, a lot of deprecated code has been removed in PHP 7, leaving fewer options for hackers to exploit and making it more robust.

“We have heard the need for a little help getting started with the Online Shop, which is why we are proud to show you our new starting page.”

Apart from the starting page, we have some additional smaller but delicious updates for you to make it even easier to set up your online shop! In this blog post, you get a quick introduction.

Get a smooth start with our starting page

With the latest release, the starting page of the Online Shop is updated with a cleaner look and easy-to-understand interface informing you where to start to set up a successful Online Shop. Each of the buttons takes you directly to the part of the online shop where you can set those specific settings. Let’s have an example: after you have added your payment method, you can easily go back to the starting page, now showing that part of the settings as completed! From there on, you get advised to continue to add a payment option and then eventually, publish your webshop. Nice and easy!

After the shop is up and running, the new starting page will also include helpful error messages about e.g., the currency compatibility or captured card payments that need to get manually handled by the shopowner. An error message appears if you enable iDeal and set it as a payment option for countries not supporting iDeal.

Payment options moved to ‘Settings’

To make it easier to go to payment options, they have been moved to their own category under ‘Settings’ in the Dashboard.

Add a privacy policy to your shop

As you probably know from other online shops, a privacy policy is a statement or a legal document that informs your customers how your company or website collects, handles and generally processes data of its customers and visitors. In itself, it’s nothing new but now you can also add a tailored privacy policy to your online shop. When it is enabled, your customers need to accept it before placing an order. You find it under Settings > Checkout > Terms, right below the sales terms & conditions. You must formulate it yourself to make it fit your business.

Specify your own buy button text

If you have your shop embedded into another CMS you can now specify your own buy button text, by changing the parameters for the button called “buyButtonText”, as highlighted in the image below. The functionality is not yet available in Website Builder but can be embedded using the code component if you want to personalize the buy button.

Stay informed about new updates

As a final comment, I want to let you know that you can always check out the “What’s new” feature with notifications added to the Online Shop dashboard. That way you will always be informed about changes to get the most out of the Online Shop.