Our Client Wins the Startup Contest!

Breaking News! Our WEB4PRO team is so happy to tell that our client Miras Nurakhmetov with his Linguahub.me startup won the money prize to the value of 150 000 tenge and ability to become a resident of Tech Garden acceleration in Open Innovations Startup Tour 2017.

We a glad to contribute a little bit to his business success by developing the website for his startup Linguahub. It was a good job. We highly appreciate our partnership and continue on to cooperate with Miras. WEB4PRO team likes to work with good people who have bright and interesting ideas. So, as you see, this creative cooperation and inspiration by the project can be useful for our clients. This event means a lot for us, and it’s so pleasant to get a good feedback. That means we are on the right course.

“I was very impressed with the level of professionalism of Web4Pro team especially Irina Bondarenko and Marat Mingazov. Very committed team and finishes the project no matter what. Price/quality ratio is at its finest!”

– Miras Nurakhmetov

Congratulations, Miras! We are so glad to take part in your business success and help your Linguahub.me website achieve the best results! We are proud of this and want everybody to learn more about Startup Contest and Miras’s project on Forbes.

Now, welcome to Linguahub, the place where everyone can pick interesting language courses.

Pleasent Surprise From D&CO Partner

It’s so pleasant to get Christmas and New Year’s presents from friends, but even more pleasant to know that these friends are your reliable partners. Today WEB4PRO team was enjoying a tasty gift from a good partner – D&CO.

That wonderful cake was just fantastic and had a real taste of friendship.

We wish the pinnacle of success to your project. And we believe that any great idea can bring even the greater results! We are proud of our partnership and happy to help you in reaching your business success. Let your life be so beautiful, tasty, and colorful as this wonderful cake!

Thank you, dear partner and friend! Thank you, D&CO.

Case Study: Magento and CRM Integration

Now our Magento® team is working on a complex and interesting task: Magento and CRM integration. Integration with CRM influences users registration in the system and checkout process. We built a special architecture, in order to integrate these two systems. It allows us reaching the required result. Let’s start from scratch and figure out what the CRM is and why it’s so useful.

CRM and eCommerce

In plain words, CRM is a huge database where the data about products, customers, and orders are stored. It allows you to gather the all needed information from your offline shops, online stores, and apps in one place. It drastically simplifies the process of store management and interaction with your customers. So if you have the CRM, its integration with your one or more online stores will be a great solution.

How Magento and CRM Work Together

So, you have a CRM which is connected to your Magento based online store. The process of interaction between Magento and CRM is the following: the user logs in. If he doesn’t exist in Magento database, the data from CRM are extracted and sent to Magento. It’s a useful solution in case you need to transport the data about your customers from your CRM to Magento based online store.

As you can see, it’s a complicated process of working with data. It needs the deep exploration and a complex approach. There is a wide variety of CRM nowadays. In our case, we have a custom CRM. So the approach couldn’t be standing here. This case requires the unique solution and a special custom API development. API is a programming interface that allows you to manage the interaction between two projects.

How to Fix Magento Module Conflicts

Hi everybody! The winter holidays have finally passed, and our Magento® specialists team is working on their various tasks. Today we will share a few words on our development processes and thing we are working on now and have already done.

Magento Module Conflict Fixing

Our Magento specialists faced the conflict of two Magento modules. It’s a pretty common situation but could be a difficult issue. The most popular reason for modules conflicts in Magento is that one or more modules files replace the same files in Magento core. Usually, it happens with some custom and complicated modules. For example, such modules as shipping and payment modules don’t replace the files, they just plug and extend the functionality.

But we have some custom modules and need to make them be friends. The problem is that with their installation together, the function of changing the image in order had been broken.

Surprisingly, but there are different Magento extensions that will never cause the conflict on Magento. Why? – It’s quite simple. Such extensions plug into Magento architect like the adds on and have no negative effect on each other. But the custom modules are much more complex.

Resolving Magento Module Conflicts

We practiced several methods of resolving Magento module conflicts.

The first one is related to the source of the problem: when you install the custom module to Magento, it doesn’t just plug in. In most cases, it rewrites some default Magento files. That’s why we should fix this issues. Here are the things we can do:

1. Try to switch off the rewrite coding.xml in conflicting file. Merge the code from this file to another conflicting file.
2. Switch off the rewrite in coding.xml, and then extend the other extension with PHP file of conflicting extension.
3. You can make the one extension depend on another one. Use capability for these purposes.

There are the easiest ways to fix the conflicts. But you can also detect the conflicts with some special Magento Extensions. Here, on Magento Commerce, you can choose the best one for your needs. But some other issues need the more complex approach.

Our Magma Email Template is in TOP Best!

2017 New Year is already on its way, and all of us begin to create the list of things we want to do the next year. Some goal, some wishes, and dreams. Several of them will come true, some of them not, but anyway, it’s a very good idea.

Now we would like to recall some achievements we have this year. And one of them is really pleasant for us. It’s connected not only with a professional and technical side of our job, but also with some kind of art and creativity, and of course, contains a part of our soul.

Meet Magma, professional email template. We are pleased to know that it got to the list of TOP best email templates for MailChimp 2016 on Envato, well known and very interesting resource on web design.

Magma. Professional Email Template

Magma could be interesting for anyone who runs some business and uses email newsletter like one of the marketing tools. It’s useful email template for the business newsletter, developed in clean and modern design. It has a lot of space and is perfect for those who tend to minimalism. Its elegant style will help you to present your brand in the best way.

The features of Magma:

• 35 blocks in drag-and-drop, which you can choose and change according to your needs and a type of newsletter;
• much clean white space, which focuses the subscriber on your product;
• flat design and modern fonts;
• “Blog”, “Reviews”, “Partners” blocks;
• compatible with MailChimp and GetResponse;
• mobile-friendly;
  commented HTML code;
• allows to build your own layouts;
• compatible with most modern browsers and mail clients.

It already has 5 stars and 245 downloads on ThemeForest. Those people have already got all benefits of email marketing with Magma. Join them and share our happiness! By the way, another blog included our Magma to the list of best email templates for MailChimp. Weelii thinks that it should be among 31 best HTML business email templates. It’s joyful. And that means we are on the right course.

A goal for the next 2017 year – new great product, which will be pretty useful for you, our dear clients. Thank you for staying with us.

Page Loading Speed and Conversion

Page loading speed drastically influences your conversion rate. If the website is slow, visitors are not ready to wait for the full page loading and then go away. Chances to get orders to fall down, and the conversion rate decreases. Sounds not good, isn’t it?

But we can avoid this situation and optimize our websites performance. Why not give a try?

We are going to focus on the factors, which influence page loading speed, find out the connection between the website performance and conversion ratio, get the formula of conversion rate, get the average and ideal time of page loading, and learn how to improve page loading speed and increase conversion value.

Everything is not so difficult as it seems at the first glance. Let’s get it started!

Conversion Meaning

First of all, let’s start from scratch and make it clear what the conversion means.

Conversion, in the meaning of Internet business, is the value of targeted actions, which the users perform on the website. For example, it could be the number of orders in the online store, clicks on the context advertisement for those, who use Google ads. Even likes and shares of an article in a blog could mean conversion. It depends on the goals you set for your marketing strategy.

In plain words, it’s an action you want to get from your website visitor.

Here a bright life example of conversion.

Let’s recall Queen rock group concerts. There are thousands of people in the stadium who came to see their concert. They were visitors. Look at the image below. Freddie Mercury makes a call to action: he aims the audience sing with him. Thousands of people are singing, not only listening. They perform the targeted action. This is conversion.

What Is The Conversion Rate?

Conversion rate (CR) is the percentage of website visitors who perform the targeted action on a website.

Here is a formula of conversion rate:

CR = (Visitors who took an targeted action/ All website visitors)*100%

• Let’s imagine that you have 1000 website visitors monthly.
• 300 of them buy something.

The conversion rate will be the following:

CR= 300 / 1000 * 100%
CR= 30%

So, the conversion rate will be 30%.

The more is the conversion rate, the better.
It is the main index of efficiency in Internet Business, especially in eCommerce.

Now we are going to consider not so the positive situation as the previous one. But it’ll allow us to find the critical link between the website performance and conversion rate.

How Page Loading Speed Affects The Conversion

Okay, let’s imagine that someone has an eCommerce website, but it’s slow. And you visit this online store. You are going to buy some present for your friend. So you come to the website and wait one second, two seconds, three seconds, four seconds… Don’t be surprised! Just measure the time. Are you ready to wait so long? Perhaps, you are not. So the reality says that you would rather wait no more than 2 minutes and then go away to the other online shop.

And just think, there are thousands of people like you, who will do the same. They are the visitors and potential customers. They could buy products. But they didn’t. Let’s think that it was 3K of you. Here is the conversion rate which would have been if the website had been fast.

3K visitors come to the website.
Perhaps, 700 people buy something.

CR=700 / 3000 * 100% = 23%

What Happens For 3 Seconds

Here is the reality, if the website is slow, and page load lasts more than 3 seconds.

3K visitors come to the website.

According to Akamai research, 40% of ready-to-buy visitors won’t wait for full page load. So, the number of orders (NO) decreases:

NO= 700 possible orders – 40% of possible orders;
NO= 700 -280 = 420 orders.
CR=420 / 3000 * 100% = 14%.

The situation of this kind is very common, especially during peak hours, the world store holidays and sales, when the number of website visitors becomes enormous. Very often websites even crash and don’t stand the load.

In the example, we see that conversion rate falls down almost by two times! How come? The results of world research will make it clear.

How Page Loading Influences Visitors’ Behavior

If the website loads slowly, the company loses money quickly, – it’s a proved fact in practice.

57% of visitors, who come to the web page via mobile devices, and go away because full page loading lasts more than 3 seconds.

Reducing the speed of targeted page loading by one second causes the following effects:

• reducing the number of page views by 11%;
• reducing the number of satisfied visitors by 16%;
• reducing page conversion rate (CR) by 7 %.

Akamai American company research has shown that:

• 47% of users expect that web page must be loaded in 2 seconds;
• 40% of users can leave the website if it’s loaded more than 3 seconds;
• 52% say that fast page loading influences their loyalty;
• 3 seconds of waiting reduce the visitors’ loyalty by nearly 16%.

The fact that page loading speed influences the users’ behavior is proved by the other research – The Gomez Peak Time Internet Usage Study, conducted by Equation Research:

• 85% said they were not ready to return after the unsuccessful try to open the website;
• 75% of visitors went to the competitors’ websites in the peak hours;
• 50% users expressed the less positive opinion on the company, which has the slow website;
• 30% shared their negative impression with their acquaintances.

The visitor will leave your website before you show your advantages.

Almost 75% of online shoppers who had trouble with website performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again. And obviously, they would also recommend their friends not to buy or pass by those websites.

And What about Google and Yandex?

The search engines don’t like slow websites. Since January 2016, Google has been officially considering page loading speed for ranking websites. The slower websites get less targeted users than their fast colleagues. Yandex appreciates the human factor: if the page is loaded slowly, people often close it without waiting for the full load.

That’s it. It’s nothing to add. We need to have our websites optimized.

How to Check Your Website Page Loading Speed

Before speeding up your website, let’s check it for page loading time and mobile friendliness. Here are several free online services that will help you to check the speed of your website.

Google PageSpeed Insights

This Google’s test shows the level of your website mobile friendliness and how well its pages are loaded. You see the result in color and points. If the color is green, you are on the right way, and everything is okay. But if the color is red, you need to make some improvements.

Pingdom

Another great and careful tool is Pingdom. It’s pretty useful when you want to know page loading time and measure the exact parameters that build your website performance.

What does it can?

• shows the exact page load time;
• displays the size of a web page;
• gives a total mark for the website performance;
• allows us to conduct the website speed test from different world locations;
• creates the grid with exact sizes and time for content elements load;
• provides you with recommendations on how to improve the current situation.

We found it very helpful and suggest you try it out.

Website Grader

And one more tool in our list is Website Grader. It helps to know how strong the website is and shows its parameters in three colors and grades. For example:

• website performance:
• mobile friendliness;
• SEO;
• security.

And, of course, it gives you exact recommendations on how to increase the website speed and improve the other important parameters.

Finally, we are at the last targeted point of our way. Now we’ll learn how to improve the website performance and increase a conversion rate as a result.

Top Tips on How to Improve Page Loading Speed

Now we should reduce some unnecessary things, in order to speed up the website. Here are the elements we should pay attention to:

Optimize your code. Here we talk about CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. In most cases, websites with low performance have some issues with the code, especially CSS. If you put all your CSS into one file, it will be much better than when the website loads styles from different places. Also, the same situation is with HTML. Cut off unnecessary parts of the code, make it shorter, and your website will work faster.

Use image compression. Large and heavy images slow down page loading speed. Such tools like FileOptimizer or famous Adobe Photoshop will help you to optimize your images. In Photoshop, you should choose “Save for web” and enter the necessary image size.

Reduce the number of HTTP requests. Anytime the website is loaded, the browser requests the server. And the more requests it makes, the less is the speed of page loading. So, if you organize your CSS files, and put the information on one website page to one file, it will help to improve your website performance.

Use data caching. It is a good approach for both sides, server and browser. Cache saves and stores the data of previous requests, such as images, styles, cookies. That’s why the time is not wasted for finding all these data, so page loading is faster.

Shorten your links and make them SEO-friendly. The same situation is with links. They should look good and lead to the correct place. Reduce the number of redirects, and it will be required less time to find a necessary page and load it.

Avoid bad requests. Here we should make a pause o the “404 error” and other types of errors, which rise out when we request some web page, and the link is broken. Such links just waste the resources of your website. Consider that, and check your links for bad requests.

Make the responsive design or a mobile version. As we know, more than 70% of users come to the websites from mobile devices. So, your website should be ready for this and be responsive. This way it will be loaded much faster.

And, finally, check your website with Google Speed Test, and you’ll see all the parts you can improve.

Conclusion

Now we see that the conversion rate depends on page loading speed. The faster is your website, the more chances you have to get the high conversion rate.

And, also, mobile devices must be taken into consideration. If we don’t pay attention to their traffic, we lose potential customers. That’s why we should follow several recommendations for a website:

• optimize the website;
• make it responsive and user-friendly;
• keep them it working and maintained;
• update plugins and themes timely.

More Certified Magento Developers!

Breaking news! Our team is proud of the latest events in our company. We worked hard during this year, and finally, this day has come. Our developers passed Magento® certification and got the status of Magento Certified Developer Plus.

How We Became Certified Magento Developers

First of all, they have been mastering their skills and knowledge for several years. Then they prepared for Magento exam, which is pretty complicated and allows the specialists to know their real level of experience.

There were 120 minutes for the test, which included 87 items. The test was based on Magento Comunity Edition 1.9 and Magento Enterprise. You should pay 260$ to try out. Magento U provides the specialists with free study guides. Here you can learn more about Magento certification.

There are two exams in Magento certification – Magento Developer and Magento Developer Plus. Our guys got the last one. They have certificates of Magento Developer Plus.

What Does It Mean?

The level of Certified Magento Developers means that this specialist is:

• skillful in all processes and techniques in Magento;
• experienced in a catalog structure, indexes, promotions, checkout processes, payment and shipping methods, price generation, widgets, API, etc.
• ready to make design decisions on code level;
• skillful in Magento Enterprise Edition;
• ready to go into details and create a unique solution on Magento.

Cyber Monday: Bonus for Winter Holidays

Hi, friends! The Cyber Monday has already passed, but it doesn’t mean that we should slack off.

Do you know that Cyber Monday is not just one day of the year in nowadays reality? It goes on for a month and allows the store owners to get more sales during the month before the Christmas holidays. So, today you have a bonus lap. We are going to boost up the sales even more and get the most benefits from our winter holiday campaign.

You will find the necessary assignments below. Here we go!

Task 1. Prepare Your Post-Cyber Monday Campaigns

Map your points of promotion for the winter holidays. As far as you know, we have several winter holidays, such as Thanksgiving day, Christmas, New Year’s Day, Hanukkah, Free Shopping Day. You can extend this list and come up with your own holidays. But your marketing campaigns should give emotions and attract people to take an action.

Don’t close up your shop in January. If you think that New Year’s Day is the last point of your plan, you are mistaking. What if I say that we can get more and more orders even until February? People like to buy products before and after holidays. Because they are still in the great celebration mood and are ready to use the discounts you give.

Task 2. Create Holiday-Themed Content

Of course, the most important part of the marketing campaign is its content. And this content should turn on people’s emotions. It should make them think about holidays, presents and conjure up the wish to buy something in your online store.Create holiday graphics. GIFs, videos, greeting cards, social media posts, and themed email campaigns will be suitable in this case. They should show and promote top products and related to them. Also, it will be a good idea, if you offer themed products, for example, the warm clothes for the winter, most wished presents for holidays, and so on.

Design the shopping guides for January. Create special offers and coupons to showcase the products that you need to sell. Make these offers interesting and unit the products into useful kits.

Task 3. Give the Reasons to Come Back

Here we need a brainstorm. Why do the customers should come back to our online store? They need some reasons and motivation. Let’s come up with some ideas:

• Provide a discount or bonus that can be used only after January 1st.
• Announce new products you are going to sell in 2017.
• Give the free shipping for the purchase more than the specific sum of money in January.

You can use any great idea that comes to your mind, and try it out.

Task 4. Wrap Your Campaigns Up to the Next Year

Analyze and save all your data. Now you have the results. Compare them with the last year data. You can evaluate what campaigns were the most successful, the income you’ve got and what you’ve done for this. All this data will be useful for you next year when it’s time to prepare a new Cyber Monday campaign.

Screenshot and save every piece of content you have. Why? – It’s evident. Next year you will need them all. Having prepared content will simplify the next year process in several times. So, don’t lose this data.

Cyber Monday Week 4: The Final Stretch

Congratulations to everybody! We have already learned how to outrun the opponents and now have a final point in our plan. This week we are going to finish Cyber Monday preparation. What do you think we should do at the end? Maybe, the best thing we can is to check everything, refresh our marketing campaigns and let them go! So, let’s see what task are waiting for us this week.

Task 1. Update Homepage and Category Page Signage

Add cool images and posters. Our brain processes image 60k times faster than text. So, make the conclusions, friends. You can create amazing holiday designs for your landing pages, but also, don’t forget about the newsletter. By the way, we have many beautiful email templates. You can check them here.

Built out Cyber Monday banners. Use such graphics, as popups, hero images, a countdown, GIFs, promo videos, and other visual things.

Use professional tools. How to create great graphic? Use Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, ask for designer’s help or do it yourself using templates found online or Canva.

Task 2. Schedule and Check Everything

Check your grammar. It’s important to write correctly and check the content for grammatical mistakes. There are many online services that can help you to do this. For example, Grammarly helps to correct your English. Hemingway editor will check your texts for readability. WriteCheck will check your texts for grammatical mistakes and plagiarism.

But also we have a good rule: ask someone to look through your texts. It’s better when two or more people check the grammar.

Put all your promotions and content to one place. It’s necessary because this way you’ll keep everything within reach.

Check your automation. Ensure that you’ve correctly set up all your marketing campaigns, automation emails, segmentation, and templates are ready to go, you’ve optimized your landing pages for desktop and mobiles. If you have a store based on Magento®, you can use our Abandoned Cart extension for your follow-up campaigns.

Here is the good advice on email marketing: send test email campaigns to all emails clients. Make sure that your emails look good at any email client. Also, check your campaigns for the spam words. Try to avoid them, especially in an email subject.

Task 3. Prepare for Activation and Generate Anticipation on Sunday

Make sure that you are ready for activation on Cyber Monday. We recommend you to contact your web hosting provider and make sure that everything is okay. Also, keep the reliable team, which will be responsible for orders, responses for requests, providing technical and customers support.

Launch the day-before social posting. This way you’ll announce your Cyber Monday campaign and surround it with the anticipation.

Case Study EquityX: Website from Scratch

Breaking news! The WEB4PRO team completed the project. We developed the website from scratch for the financial company.

EquityX is a place where their customers can get the most qualitative help on finances. It is the world’s first and trusted marketplace for top-tier startup and expert service providers to collaborate, with equity used as currency. And our main task was to make everything on the website run like clockwork and provided the best user experience.It was a project based on WordPress with the use of Visual Composer.

WordPress is powerful and flexible enough for such kind of website and allowed us to realize all necessary functionalities.

A visual Composer is a good tool for building pages on WordPress. It helps to create the back-end base of the website even without advanced coding skills. So in some cases, it allows a client to save time and money, due to the less number of back-end works. Read more about pros and cons of Visual Composer.

We got a specific unique design from our client, and most of the work was carried out by our professional WordPress.

It took nearly 1 month to launch this project. So now we can proudly say: “Mission Completed!” The website was tested, and it’s doing great.

And we are happy to know that our client, David Paluy, is satisfied. It’s our main passion and goal.

“I asked Web4Pro dev team to help me with WordPress website for my startup EquityX. I got a very professional team who understood my needs, developed quality product and delivered it on time. I had a single contact Sergey that helped a lot and saved my time. He did a great job while raising questions and suggesting immediate solutions. I highly recommend working with Web4PRO! And I will continue my dev with this team for sure.”

– David Paluy, CTO EquityX

Thank you, David! We wish you a pinnacle of success and new great projects!

We are glad to take part in our clients’ way to success. If you are interested in getting a qualitative WordPress based website, you can trust us WordPress development. Just contact our team using “Ask Questions” form below.