One major factor that can impact the accuracy of Google Analytics data is cookie blocking. Cookies are small pieces of data that are stored on a user’s device and used to track their browsing habits. Some users may block cookies in their browser settings, which can prevent Google Analytics from tracking their website visits. This can result in underreporting of website traffic, as the data only reflects the visits from users who have not blocked cookies.

Another factor that can impact the accuracy of Google Analytics data is changes to iOS that block tracking information. In 2017, Apple released iOS 11, which introduced a feature called Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP). ITP uses machine learning to identify and block third-party cookies, which are used by many tracking tools, including Google Analytics. This can result in underreporting of website traffic, as the data only reflects the visits from users who are not using iOS devices with ITP enabled.

There are also other factors that can impact the accuracy of Google Analytics data. For example, some users may use ad blockers or privacy extensions that block tracking scripts, which can prevent Google Analytics from tracking their website visits. Additionally, some users may use VPNs or proxy servers, which can make it difficult to accurately track their location and demographics.

It’s important to be aware of these limitations when using Google Analytics and to consider other sources of data when analyzing your website traffic. While Google Analytics is a valuable tool for tracking and analyzing website traffic, it’s not the only source of data and should not be relied upon exclusively.

In conclusion, Google Analytics is a powerful tool for tracking and analyzing website traffic, but it’s important to be aware of the limitations of the data it provides. Factors such as cookie blocking and changes to iOS that block tracking information can impact the accuracy of the data. It’s important to consider other sources of data when analyzing your website traffic and to be aware of the limitations of Google Analytics.

But CloudFlare does other things than just deliver copies of your network. It also provides protection against various forms of attacks, and it provides a fast nameserver service for your website – a nameserver is what allows visitors to find your site.

Think of a Content Delivery Network (or CDN) as basically a chain of outposts for your website with location all around the world, and your name on the door.

But my website works fine – isn’t that enough?
No, it’s not really nowadays. The days of hosting a static website on a server in a corner of a data center is over. With the current speed of mobile/cell phones, and internet connections people expect a rapid website. Now, if you’re a local shop owner in – say – Santa Barbara – and your provider is just down the road, it might very well be enough, and nothing else is needed. At least until someone takes a run at your website and either tries to crash it, or even worse – hack it. You see a CDN does more than just provide faster service. It also protects against a DDOS attack, and can provide Firewall rules. Even if you have your own Firewall, they can protect your site from ever being reached. You can actually hide your website completely behind a CDN so nobody can see where it is.

CloudFlare also provides a fast, free DNS, which is always a plus.

It also means you can save $$$ on your hosting plan, since you can have a small server behind the CDN as they provide the horsepower for serving the data to the world.

Benefits:

• Firewall
• DNS service
• DDOS protection
• Content Serviing

The best part of CloudFlare is that the basic Tier is free. As in zero dollars. There is no sensible argument for NOT using them, even IF you’re a local shop, and once you go from local to regional, national or worldwide it’s an absolute must.

Try to go to amazon.com – see how fast it loads. Despite having thousands and thousands (millions by now?) of products, their website loads very fast.

Does your site load as fast? It should, and it can. Especially if you run an ecommerce website.

How much does it matter. Research is showing that once you pass 2 seconds load time, people start abandoning your website. Two seconds. Count them… One… Two… And your revenue starts dropping. That is not a lot of time. Think about it – have you visited a site where the pages are slow and thought “COME ON” – we all have, and that is not good for business.

The load speed has a psychological effect, same as in a store – how quickly do you get service? Nobody likes to wait. Quicker service feels psychologically more professional.

But this is not something that happens by itself. Most ecommerce shops on WordPress runs WooCommerce. If you install this, and run a simple shop from there your load times might be as much as 4-6 seconds per page. This is too slow. It can – and should – be made faster. There are multiple techniques to reach this.

First you need a good host. Running a store in a shared environment with other shops is not recommended. You need a proper dedicated instance which only hosts your website. Preferably a scalable one, where you can scale up the power available as your business grows.

Second you need to have a cache module installed in WordPress itself. A cache modules basically combines resources on your page, and serves them as one, and creates faster, static copies of pages.

Finally you need to use a Content Delivery Network such as CloudFlare which can service your website even faster since they have a local copy of it.

Neither of these things need to be expensive, but they do need to be set up and implemented properly. The load speed also need to be monitored over time, as WordPress is a bit of a slob, and the database can slow down if not cleaned from time to time.

Recently on one of our sites we had the issue that the server periodically was massively overloaded, and the website slowed to a crawl. The server had a load factor of over 75 – full load was 4 (yes, four), so it was overloaded with almost a factor 20. The reason? A bad bot. A specific bot was trying to index the site at a ferocious speed. This was enough to completely overload the otherwise proper sized webserver for the client.

Bots such as Semrush Bot, MJ12 Bot and DotBot just needlessly slow down your website.

216.244.66.242 - - [01/Oct/2021:10:11:51 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 301 255 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DotBot/1.1; http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/dotbot, help@moz.com)"

But aren’t bots good? Yes, most are. We all want our sites to be included in search engines, such as Google, Yahoo etc, however there are some indexing services which are NOT being used for search indexes. Instead the data are being used internally for their customers to show comparative data and in order to provide a service to their clients. This means that unless YOU are their client, you have absolutely ZERO benefit from this. One might even argue that you have a negative benefit, as it might allow competitor analysis on your site from your competitors.

So – why allow it? There is NO benefit to doing so for you, and you really should block them.

How to block them.

There are 2 simple methods (we recommend using both) to blocking them completely. One is to block them on your server itself. In order to do that, you can change your .htaccess for apache to prevent them (we can help you do that).

The other method is to block the site in CloudFlare (or whichever other CDN you’re using. You are using a CDN right?). You do this from their Firewall settings.

Once you have done this, you’re no longer providing free data to another company, and lower the change of your website being overrun by bad Robots.

The two biggest platforms are Shopify and WordPress (with WooCommerce). But what is the difference? Is one more expensive than the other?

There are some major differences between how the platforms work.

Shopify is a dedicated ecommerce platform built for that purpose. They’re not meant to host regular websites (it wouldn’t make sense), and they provide a complete integrated platform for ecommerce.

WooCommerce is an ecommerce extension built on top of WordPress. WordPress is the worlds most used Content Management Platform and there are almost 50mio websites hosted on WordPress.

What do we recommend? This certainly depends on the purpose and content if your site. If your site is a pure shop-only website, you can use either. It might be quicker to get started with Shopify, but it also carries a monthly cost, which can add up if you need several modules. If you’re running a site with a mix of content and ecommerce, you absolutely need to do it on WooCommerce.

If you’re selling subscription services, it tends to get more complicated. Those are available on Shopify, but are somewhat expensive, and due to Shopify’s integrated platform, they are built externally. This means you are no longer using the Shopify platform entirely, and it can get a tad messy from our point of view. This can be solved easier on WooCommerce, but it does require additional modules, but has not extra transaction cost.

Shopify advantages:

• Integrated platform
• Great themes (costs between $100-$500)
• Good statistics
• Payment systems provided

WooCommerce advantages

• Complete control over everything
• Cheaper to get started
• If your website has both regular content and ecommerce you can do a lot more

So unfortunately the answer to “What do we recommend” is – it depends. As much as we hate that answer ourselves, it really does. We do lean towards shopify for ecommerce, since the backend is easier to manage for most non-tech people, and the whole interface feels a lot more streamlined, but it depends on what your goals are for your site.