SoBold are thrilled to announce that they have been shortlisted for the B2B Website of the Year at the UK Digital Growth Awards. 

SoBold and Kapow Primary have been working closely together since 2019 to provide teachers with rich lesson plans and engaging experiences for their classrooms.

This nomination is a proud moment for everyone at SoBold & Kapow Primary, highlighting their hard work and dedication.

Leonardo Esposito, Senior Back End WordPress Developer at SoBold.

“When Kapow started, I was just a few months in with SoBold, and I’ve been one of the main developers on the project ever since. It’s incredible how both the project and I have grown. As I became more experienced as a developer, learning new concepts and understanding new things, Kapow was evolving as a platform. The project is now very challenging as there’s more at stake, and it’s so rewarding to see any new feature released successfully, making both Kapow and our customers happy”.

Our Story

How it began

Our journey with kapowprimary.com began in 2019. At that time, Kapow Primary was in its nascent stages, serving 20 schools. Since then, they have grown into a comprehensive online platform, offering lesson plans, resources, and interactive features for primary school foundation subjects.

We joined forces, collaborated and actively contributed to the website design, development and SEO strategy to improve and enhance the website, ensuring it met the needs of teachers.

The dedicated Kapow Primary team at SoBold

What we achieved ⭐

Fast forward to 2024, and Kapow Primary has grown exponentially, now serving over 6,700 primary schools! 

This growth is a testament to the website’s value and the dedication of our teams. We’re excited about what the future holds as we continue to expand and grow. 👀

Here are some key highlights from the past 18 months:

Interactive History Timeline

This feature lets teachers and pupils explore historical periods interactively. It’s a fun way to engage with history, allowing simultaneous exploration of different periods and making historical events more vivid and memorable.

Presentation Mode

We developed a presentation view that streamlines lesson plans. This feature enhances the learning experience for students and saves teachers valuable preparation time, allowing them to focus more on teaching and less on admin.

Curriculum Hub – Coming soon!

The national curriculum can be quite overwhelming! To help with this, we developed a hub that houses national curriculum resources in one place and shows how they align with Kapow Primary’s lesson plans, taking the headache away!

At the heart of everything we do is the commitment to giving teachers the best experience possible. We have a dedicated team to make this happen. Each new addition is crafted with this in mind, ensuring that Kapow Primary remains a trusted educational resource.

Final thoughts

Being nominated for this award means a lot to our team. It’s a recognition of the hard work, dedication, and passion that everyone at SoBold and Kapow Primary has put into this. We are deeply invested in the continuous improvement and growth of Kapow Primary.

Winning this award would be an incredible achievement and well-deserved recognition for everyone involved.

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Back in early October, SoBold made our debut visit to Brighton SEO. Since then, we’ve been busy putting the invaluable lessons from the event’s talented speakers into action, all while navigating Google’s November and December Core Updates. Now the dust has (hopefully) settled on the update-front, and the with next iteration of Brighton SEO still a few months away, we’ve taken the opportunity to reflect on our key takeaways and their impact on our approach.

A functional relationship with your development team is critical for SEO success

During Brighton SEO, a recurring theme across different talks was the challenges SEOs face when working with development teams, particularly those that operate in silos. Whether in-house or outsourced to separate agencies, a lack of communication, deprioritised SEO tickets, and limited understanding of SEO best practices often lead to delays, errors, and missed opportunities. Many speakers and attendees expressed frustration at the need for excessive hand-holding to ensure even basic tasks were actioned correctly.

At SoBold, we avoid these risks with a collaborative effort between our development and SEO teams. As a WordPress-first agency, our integrated approach ensures SEO tickets are prioritised appropriately, and implemented to the highest standard. By removing barriers between teams, we’re more efficient and deliver results that drive SEO success.

Don’t discount the basics

It sounds very simple, but one of the biggest takeaways from Brighton SEO was how critical the fundamentals remain to SEO success. Numerous case studies and real-world examples shared by speakers reinforced that many websites fail to rank well simply because they lack a strong foundation. While advanced techniques and tools may sound exciting, the potential is often wasted on websites that haven’t addressed core issues.

Speakers emphasised that getting the basics right still yields some of the highest returns. Core Web Vitals, metadata optimisation, fixing 4xx and 3xx errors, a clear site hierarchy and URL structure, proper indexation, robots.txt configurations and ensuring basic analytics are in place all play a pivotal role. These essentials are often the difference between stagnation and significant ranking improvements. Ensure your fundamentals are sound before turning to more advanced methods and strategies.

AI can be a game-changer for audits, but nothing beats human written content

AI has been the buzzword of the industry in the past two years. Incorporating AI into everyday tasks to maximise efficiency was a key theme at Brighton SEO, specifically the use of AI to streamline time consuming tasks like audits and data analysis. 

Audits are central to developing an SEO strategy and crafting roadmaps, and leveraging different AI and machine learning strategies to research, collate, and organise relevant data was a hot topic at the conference, with lots of very knowledgeable people offering extremely useful and actionable insights into how existing workflows can be enhanced through AI. 

By leveraging AI tools and machine learning, SEOs can quickly identify technical errors, gather keyword insights and generate comprehensive reports, freeing up more time for the higher-impact strategic work. Speakers showcased actionable ways to integrate AI into workflows, potentially revolutionising the process of audits, roadmaps, and reporting.

However, there are clear limits to the use of AI. While it excels behind the scenes, it falls short when it comes to creating authentic, engaging content. Google’s guidelines, a number of algorithm updates, and leading voices within the SEO community on social media continue to emphasise that nothing beats human-written content based on real expertise and experience. The message was clear: AI can enhance efficiency, but content that resonates with users, builds trust and meets the intent of the searcher must remain in the hands of skilled human writers.

Google’s AI snippets are traffic thieves

Generative AI has been a hot topic across numerous industries since the launch of ChatGPT 3.5 in November 2022, especially in SEO. Google has released numerous updates (to mixed responses) to combat the large influx of AI generated content and the ability for anyone to churn out masses of content on subjects outside their areas of expertise.

There’s no doubt the rise of AI sent internal shockwaves at Google, who had to quickly innovate to withhold a potential threat to their dominance. As a consequence, they released the Google Generative AI Snippets, which generates AI answers at the top of the search results for a range of queries, based on information it’s gleaned from the top ranking pages for said query.

While the concept may seem beneficial to users, the reality is stark for website owners and their SEOs: visibility is drastically reduced. Data presented at Brighton SEO revealed that URLs in Position 1 under these snippets suffered traffic drops of 70%. 

Many SEOs and site owners argue this practice borders on theft, as Google repurposes content with minimal credit or incentive for users to click through, and wouldn’t be able to surface any of this content without the websites creating it in the first place. This controversy isn’t going away anytime soon, and SEOs will need to strategise carefully to adapt to this new reality.

Test, test, and test again

Many of the talks were very insightful, offering new methods and solutions for a range of tasks. But each website is different, and what may have a profound impact on one website may not do the same on another. 

There are very little one size fits all in SEO, and our testing of the new methods and techniques detailed at Brighton SEO has shown just that. We can take the direct learnings from these talks and apply them literally with minimal change, but with benchmarking the initial metrics, examining the difference once recommendations are applied, and tweaking these with our own insights, we can maximise the impact. 

Whilst the wealth of talent and expertise of the speakers at Brighton SEO was at a very high standard, SEOs shouldn’t rest on the laurels and only go as far as these talks suggest, but leverage their own expertise and knowledge, pairing it with the expertise from these conferences to get the best results. Building upon some of the strategies outlined at Brighton SEO and putting our own SoBold-spin on these is already bearing fruit, and testing is at the heart of this.

Final Thoughts

From the importance of solid fundamentals to embracing AI’s potential while recognising its limitations, these takeaways are invaluable for SEOs and developers alike. By testing, adapting, and collaborating, we can turn these learnings into impactful strategies allowing us to navigate the uncertainty of Google Updates, as we look ahead to the next conference in April.

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The type of hosting environment you select will have a strong influence on the success of your website. It’s important for you to find a secure, scalable web hosting service that you have 100% trust in to deliver high-performance at all times.

To simplify the options available to you, this article will break down the various types of web hosting services, and explore the non-negotiables we believe you should be considering in your criteria when making your decision. 

The Fundamentals of Enterprise-Grade Hosting 

Some of the most important things to look for with your hosting environment include: 

Security – Cyber security is obviously an essential priority, and this should be top of your list of criteria in the current climate.

Performance – Your hosting environment should be set up in a way that makes your site capable of handling large surges of traffic.

Scalability – As your business grows, it’s likely that your site’s audience will grow. You need a hosting provider with the capacity to scale your services seamlessly to meet your needs, both now and in future. 

Resilience – It’s important to ensure your hosting infrastructure is robust, and that it can gauruntee you certain performance levels and up-time.

Support – If anything does go wrong, you need to be assured that you have a quick, efficient support service in place to get your site back up and running as soon as possible.

Sustainability – With sustainability a growing priority on the corporate agenda, the carbon footprint of your data centre may be another important factor in your decision.

Option 1 – Shared Hosting Services 

Shared hosting services can provide you with a basic secure server for your website. However, as the name suggests, these servers will be shared with a large number of other businesses. You won’t have any dedicated server of your own with shared hosting. 

This approach does have some advantages, particularly in the area of cost. These shared hosting environments can cost as little as £1,000 per year.  However, the down-sides to this often outweigh that cost benefit. 

In many cases, the low cost of shared hosting services can often be reflected in the performance levels. This is because, with such a high volume of websites hosted on the servers, your performance has no protection if other sites are experiencing high volumes of traffic. 

It’s also likely that you’ll only have access to limited support services when any issues arise. Many of the shared hosting options will have a ticketing system for support, where you’ll be at the mercy of the number of requests ahead of you in the queue. This could result in your website being ‘down’ during times where it’s business-critical.

Option 2 – Private Servers with Shared Hosting Providers 

Most shared hosting providers will offer the option of having your own private server for an extra cost. This is often referred to as a VPS, which stands for virtual private server. 

Rather than sharing a server with thousands of other businesses, you’ll only be sharing with a few others. While this is significantly better than the regular shared hosting options, you can still end up facing similar problems with performance and scalability.

This is another cost-effective approach, though, with some improvements over standard shared hosting. If you rely on an agency to set this up for you, they’ll likely put their smaller clients on a shared VPS and give their larger clients their own dedicated servers to minimise any potential problems.

Option 3 – Enterprise-Grade Private Web Hosting

Often the most reliable and trusted approach to take is to have your own dedicated server, which comes with a wide range of additional benefits. 

With this option, your website is placed on its own private server in the cloud, managed by a dedicated team of specialists who offer personalised, hands-on support and ongoing optimisation.

Security

Enterprise-grade security should be a core part of the hosting service you choose, regardless of whether it’s private or shared. However, you’ll be guaranteed far greater security, with drastically reduced risk, when you work with a private hosting service.

For instance, a hosting provider should offer robust protection for your site, including: 

• Configured firewall options, IP access lists, and anti-phishing attack technologies 
• Full responsibility for rapidly patching OSes and libraries 
• Long-term-supported Linux distributions for maximum security. 

Of course, compliance and certifications are another crucial aspect of cyber security these days. While some shared hosting providers may have the basic levels of compliance in place, most private hosting services will boast: 

• Compliance with ISO 27001/PCI-DSS/TIA-942 
• A 100% pass-rate for any data centre audits 
• 24/7 data centre staffing with experienced engineers and specialist security teams 
• Document review services for your external audits 
• Bespoke consultancy available if you have any major certification requirements. 

Performance 

When taking this approach, you’ll receive your own bespoke service and will be provided with a hosting environment tailored to your specific requirements. 

This will optimise everything included in your hosting package, from your preferred caching, loading speeds, performance requirements, up-time, and more.

You’ll also be able to set up a content delivery network (CDN) to make your website faster and more readily available to all visitors around the world. 

Scalability 

Private hosting gives you the capacity and flexibility to scale seamlessly anytime your website’s traffic increases, or if you have peak times for traffic.

This is an intelligent way to future-proof your investment, with the confidence that your website’s performance will be consistently excellent as the size of your audience increases and your site expands. This also applies to situations in which you need to scale unexpectedly due to short-term increases in demand, ensuring business continuity is always maintained on your site. 

Resilience 

Private hosting providers have guarantees for their resilience, and for your site’s up-time, covering all possible bases. This even counts for unusual scenarios like floods or fires.

It’s wise to look for a provider who offers back-up and disaster recovery services for the maximum resilience. 

Back-Ups: Managed back-up services provide you with a tailored regiment, alongside rigorous testing, for guaranteed restorability. 

Multi-level back-ups are taken for you, both locally and remotely, to minimise risk. You’ll also be able to choose from a range of replication technology options for your load-balancing and various fail-over scenarios. 

Disaster Recovery: Private hosting providers will also use disaster recovery measures, such as geographically-distributed platforms and back-up data centres, providing you with full assurance that your performance and up-time are always maintained.

Your primary hosting platform will be replicated to a disaster-recovery platform, which means that if the primary data centre is ever out of action for a prolonged period of time you can fail-over to the back-up systems. 

While the more basic hosting services can take days to recover in similar situations, which could result in losses of business and even reputational damage, disaster recovery can often be done in a matter of minutes with a private hosting environment.

Support and Optimisation

Trust and confidence in your provider’s ability to deliver on your requirements are a vital part of your hosting service. 

It’s highly beneficial to take an approach that gives you – or your agency partner – a close working relationship with your hosting provider. Availability and accountability are much greater with a private hosting service than with a shared approach. 

A close working relationship provides other advantages as well. For instance, anytime you want to make upgrades to your hosting environment, they can analyse your traffic and identify the best time and date to do that with minimal disruption. 

This is all part of collaborating with your agency and hosting provider, so they understand your unique business and tailor your hosting services. This is all done based on the conventions of your target audience and your specific requirements to deliver the best possible service. 

In terms of support, private hosting providers will have powerful automation tools to proactively, continuously monitor your environment. That allows them to resolve the majority of issues before they’re able to have an impact on your site. 

This can also involve 24/7 custom alerting systems, as well as a fully customisable monitoring portal, and multi-channel systems to alert engineers rapidly in the event of any problems. 

In terms of your overall service with an enterprise-grade private hosting provider, you should also expect to gain: 

• A fully-managed service provided by a team with decades of experience 
• Round-the-clock, hands-on assistance, 365 days per year 
• Deep technical understanding and expertise 
• Proactive support from dedicated engineering teams and account managers 
• High-level consultancy, including advice on new projects and technologies. 

Sustainability 

If your business has sustainability as a priority or core cultural value, then this is another reason to opt for a private hosting service. While it’s not impossible to find shared hosting services with carbon-neutral data centres, it’s much less common. 

Sustainability is also a key focus for us here at SoBold as an agency. As a result, we’ve worked hard to ensure we have an environmentally-conscious, carbon-neutral service offering.

The Verdict?

Having a fully dedicated, bespoke private server is usually the preferred choice of web hosting services. This is due to the unmatched levels of security, scalability, and performance that come with private hosting providers. 

Of course, it’s important to note that this does also come with a higher cost than other options. However, the benefits and trust gained through their strengths in these key areas ensure strong ROI. 

Not only do their flexibility and optimisation provide you with a high-performance website set up for success, but enterprise-grade security and resilience will also minimise your risk and save you significant costs in the long-term. 

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When looking at content management systems (CMS), scalability refers to the ability to expand and grow your site with more content, capabilities, features, and functionality.

Your CMS is a long-term investment, and its scalability will have a strong influence on whether or not that investment is successful.

“When sustainable business growth is a top strategic objective, you need full confidence that your web presence can seamlessly scale and evolve to support that growth.”

This requires a platform that allows you to quickly and easily create new features and functionality. Ideally, you should be able to do this without having to invest significant time and resources into additional costly development work.

WordPress is One of the Most Scalable Platforms Around

Evidence of WordPress’s great scalability can be found in the fact that almost 45% of the world’s websites are built on the platform. That includes global enterprises such as investment firm Blackstone, research and advisory leader Forrester, the NHS England, and leading pharmaceutical company Hutch Med.

This is because WordPress websites can seamlessly scale as your needs change and your business grows. You can easily add a high volume of new content to your site at speed without compromising on quality. 

WordPress is also renowned for how easily you, or your development partner, can build bespoke features and functionality, so your site can keep evolving with new capabilities to support more advanced requirements. 

“No matter the size or complexity of your site, WordPress can provide fast, intuitive development capabilities with ongoing growth acting as a natural outcome.”

Using WordPress at Scale 

Developing, managing, and maintaining a high-performance website at scale is a complex challenge. For that reason, it’s important to work with an experienced web design and development agency who can enable continual growth and support you through it.

Part of your agency’s services will include configuring your platform, and building your site in the back-end, in a way that encourages long-term scalability. We’ll explain our own approach to this in more detail in the next section. But first, let’s look at some of the fundamental ways to use WordPress at scale: 

Bespoke Features and Functionality

If you want to build out your website with new capabilities, WordPress stands above all its competitors thanks to its ability to develop bespoke features that are unique to your site. 

WordPress is built on PHP, which is the most popular development language around, as it’s currently used by over three quarters (77.5%) of all websites with a known server-side programming language. With PHP, WordPress has a significant advantage over other CMSs, because it allows you to create virtually anything and integrate it with the platform.

Selecting an agency partner with WordPress-specific skills provides you with the opportunity to leverage the platform for almost limitless scalability, among other benefits. 

WordPress Plugins 

WordPress also comes with a vast range of plugins, which can help with adding to, and enhancing, the existing functionality of your site. Plugins are an essential aspect of WordPress development, but it’s crucial that you only choose the most reputable, tested, and proven plugins. 

Your agency partner should be experienced in this plugin selection and use their past experience to recommend the best ones to use for your specific requirements. Your agency partner should also be able to advise you on how plugins will scale with increases in website size or traffic volume to help preserve your site’s performance.

Using plugins that are not regularly updated, or that come from unknown development owners, could harm your site by making it heavier, slowing down your page loading times, and possibly even creating security vulnerabilities. 

Using a particularly large number of plugins is another situation that could result in slower loading speeds or other performance issues. Be mindful that use of plugins can reduce the bespoke development time needed to build your site, and the use of too many plugins could cause performance issues. If you find yourself in this situation, it could be an indication that your development partner might actually be taking shortcuts.

The Importance of a Trusted Partner 

Whether you’re using plugins or building new bespoke features, your agency will be able to take care of all of these crucial aspects of your development for you. Their support and guidance will ensure you can expand your site freely without running into any technical issues. 

Once you have everything you need in place, your agency will then be able to accelerate the speed at which you can scale moving forward. A great agency partner will also provide you with ongoing education and support, allowing you and your team to build your site out easily and efficiently by yourself too, whenever you want or need to.

Taking a More Scalable Approach – Building with Blocks 

While many agencies still use a more traditional method of developing sites with WordPress, taking a block-based approach provides even greater opportunities for dynamic scalability. 

As an alternative to the time-consuming practice of inputting text and images into a rich text editor in your CMS, the block-based approach allows you to create each page on your site more easily with a set of pre-built components. 

Components are blocks of code with pre-defined style and input types. You can use and re-use these components across multiple pages of your site to scale it at a much faster pace. Any time you want to create a high volume of new content, you simply pick your already-built components and place them in the correct positions. 

This is an approach that enables virtually limitless growth of your website at speed with a high level of quality and accuracy. Building components that can be reused across your site will also deliver added benefits like increased efficiency and reduced costs. This in turn provides you with more time to focus on developing better services and experiences for your site visitors. 

The block-based approach to building websites is another way to make your WordPress platform leaner for better performance as well, because it removes the need for a bloated library of unnecessary plugins and features. 

You can read a more in-depth explanation of how to use this block-based approach for your own benefit in our related article here. 

An Enterprise-Grade CMS 

Scalability should be a key aspect of your criteria when selecting a CMS to build a website. Rapid growth and flexibility are crucial for your platform of choice.

Despite some still mistakenly thinking it might not be up to the task, you can use WordPress to build large, robust, high-performance sites at speed, and easily adapt them as your requirements change. 

This arguably makes WordPress one of – if not the – best CMS options available today. When you look at some of the world’s leading businesses currently using the platform to great success, that argument becomes much easier to appreciate.

Like with any CMS, though, the key to successful scalability is having the support of an experienced, trusted agency partner behind you, ensuring you’re leveraging the platform to its full potential. 

If you’d like more support in selecting the right CMS for your business, read our in-depth guide to understanding and evaluating the enterprise options for bespoke development.

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The moment Marti joined us at SoBold, we were excited and eager to see how she would translate her enthusiasm and energy towards development towards real life projects. We were not let down and she hit the ground running.

2 years later, largely hampered by COVID, we now are getting the absolute best out of Marti. She is incredibly reliable, diligent and talented and she is involved in all of our biggest projects.

Marti has never been one to code for the sake of coding, and she always makes sure she understands the bigger picture before diving into a project. 

⅓ of the Italian SoBold Office crew, we are very fortunate to have Marti and we truly can’t wait to watch her skillset improve and see her continue to work on the biggest and best projects!

We caught up with Marti to find out more about what she gets up to in her day to day life.

At what point in your life did you decide to become a developer?

Having studied Foreign Languages and Literatures, since uni I had a dream to become a successful translator. I came to London to fulfil this dream but I wasn’t sure which field to specialise in yet. So I started working at a restaurant, and in my spare time, I would translate articles for online media sites and magazines, and also produce subtitles for tv series.

Later on, I started a course in software localisation, and this opened up the dev world to me as I had to put my hands on the software source code. When it was time to search for a job, reality had a massive hit: competition was high, work was difficult to find, it was clear I had to invest more time and specialise furthermore.

I felt stuck and didn’t really know what to do with my life. So I went backpacking around the world for a few months, and I decided to dive more into that dev world that I found so interesting. Time wasn’t really a problem while travelling, so I read a lot about web development and took a lot of online courses. I devoured so many online resources, I just couldn’t believe they were all a click away! Since my first “Hello World” project, I’ve found the process of coding and building a website from scratch a beautiful mix of creative problem solving that never disappoints. Long story short, that’s when I knew I wanted to become a developer.

Describe your typical day

I wake up at 6:30am, I feed Coco and Lucy (my cats), I put some tunes on while having breakfast, quick shower. Then it’s checking the weather time: if it looks cloudy and rainy I’ll take the tube, otherwise, I’ll most probably board my Brompton and off we go to the office! Ideally, I like to conclude the evening by doing some form of exercise, usually rollerskating or a walk/run.

What’s your favourite project to date

I really enjoyed working on the new SoBold website, it’s been a huge team effort and the result it’s simply amazing!

What is the best advice you have ever heard?

I once read this quote: “If we all threw our problems in a pile, we’d grab ours back.”

I think it’s a beautiful sentence, it makes me appreciate life every day and makes me very grateful for all I have.

If you had to change careers what would you do instead?

Not sure what but surely something related to sport.

What was your most recent challenge and how did you overcome It?

When you’re a developer, every day there’s a new challenge. You just have to learn how to tackle them. In general, I think talking with a colleague helps a lot. Also “rubber ducking” can be a useful method for debugging code. In both cases, they’re powerful methods that consist in taking a break and articulating the problem in plain language.

What’s your favourite thing to do outside of work?

I’m a big ramp skate fanatic. https://www.instagram.com/martymcroll/

What 3 items would you bring to a desert island?

🇨🇭 🔪  🎸 and  🛌🏽

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