Simpler Australian domain names than ever before have recently become available through .au direct! The shorter the domain, the easier it is for your customers to reach your website.
With the release of .au direct in March 2022, you no longer need to have extensions like .com before the .au in your website address (commonly referred to as your domain name).
For example, if you own the domain name “yourbusiness.com.au”, you can now register to use “yourbusiness.au” and simplify the address where your customers reach you.
Now it’s not as simple as just typing in “yourbusiness.au” and immediately being taken to your website, but don’t worry the process of setting it up is very easy!
If you already have your domain registered with GoHosting, jump straight to step 3 and we’ll sort the rest out for you!
If you have an existing domain name ending in .au (like .com.au, .net.au, .org.au, etc.), let’s try and lock in your matching .au domain name. First we’ll check if there are others who are eligible to apply for the same domain and if any of them already have applied. To do this head to auDA’s Priority Status Tool and type in your existing web address in the text box provided.
On the following screen you’ll see other domains who can apply for the same name with priority. If none of them have an applied status, progress to step 2. Sometimes you will find others do have applied status, you can still apply to keep yourself in the running but you’ll need to check auDA’s .au terms and conditions to find out the best way to move forward.
If you don’t have an existing domain name ending in .au (like .com.au, .net.au, .org.au, etc.), read through the eligibility section of this article; provided you’re eligible, jump to Step 3.
Now we’ll need to grab a Priority Token ID. For this head to auDA’s Priority Token form and fill in your details. After submitting, a verification email will be sent to the email address associated with your existing domain registration. If this isn’t you, you might need to get in touch with someone who has access to the associated email address. Follow the prompts of that email and retrieve the Priority Token ID and the Priority Contact ID.
To apply for priority status or register a new .au direct domain, head to GoHosting.au and type in the name of the domain you want. Our tool will tell you if you can register for that domain right away or if you will have to apply for priority status. After following the prompts, if you’re an existing customer, simply login and the process will be sorted out for you. If you’re new to GoHosting, click “complete new order” and fill in the form provided. Note that if you are registering a new .au domain, you don’t need to fill in the priority contact or token details.
Now you’re done!
If you’d like some assistance going through the set up process, get in touch with our friendly Aussie staff who can help walk you through the steps.
.au direct domain names – like yourbusiness.au – are obtainable as a new option for Australian internet users. They’re open to anyone with a verified connection to Australia who wants to create or manage an online presence for themselves or their organisation.
We’re currently in a period known as the “Priority Application Period”. This means if you have an existing domain name ending in .au (like .com.au, .net.au, .org.au, etc.), then you can apply and obtain the .au direct exact match before it’s publicly available. To register the .au direct match of your existing domain name, you will need to apply for Priority Status before 21 September.
To check your priority category or see if there are other registrants eligible for the .au direct name as you, use auDA’s Priority Status Tool.
If you don’t currently have an existing domain, you’re still able to register for names that aren’t exact matches of existing websites. As of 4 October, you’ll be able to apply for any .au domain you like regardless of the other .com.au domains.
Don’t worry! Your existing .com.au domain name and all other similar namespaces (.org.au, .net.au, etc.) aren’t going anywhere. This release is just to provide a simpler alternative for all Australians. If you register a .au direct domain, your visitors that still remember your .com.au address can still reach the same location through both addresses.
Get in touch with us to guarantee your .au direct domain today!
For information on eligibility and priority terms & conditions visit auDA’s website
WordPress websites can load in a blink of an eye! Sadly most WordPress sites don’t get close to this. In this article we will talk about WordPress and how we can use the popular CMS to build a website without taking a performance hit.
We will be using the examples in this article with our friends at Soldier On. Check out their website at https://soldieron.org.au and find out how they support the community.
Firstly, let’s talk about what makes websites slow? This is a very open-ended pie in the sky question, as there are so many variables.
What constitutes a slow website? Everyone has a different idea, I have heard suggestions it is the TTFB or Time To First Byte, or the complete load time of the whole page. Personally, I think if you browse around a site and your happy with how fast everything is loading, it’s probably fine. Too slow would be at the point where visitors find the site unbearable so they leave and don’t purchase anything. Obviously the faster the better, the more enjoyable it will be for users and the more chance they will buy something from your website.
Now let’s look at the variables that affect speed. The total load time of the page, is from when the browser makes the request until the page is completely rendered in the browser. The process behind this includes:
You can use many tools to see how your page loads and what takes the longest time to load. Developer tools in Google Chrome is a great way to identify this however my favorite is a neat website called GtMetrix. You can find the website here: https://gtmetrix.com
We’ll be using GtMetrix and it’s scores as a case study for this article.
I’ve done a test on the Soldier On website and as we can see the website loads in 4.5s which is better than most websites however we can definitely makes some improvements.
You can find the full analysis break down of the website HERE
We will look at the top 5 priority issues and see if we can get these ratings up.
There are a few images on the website that are blown up absolutely huge and then re-scaled down to a normal size for a website. Instead of getting the website to re-scale these images every time the website loads, we can resize the images and load them that way.
Let’s take a look at our results after re-scaling the images:
Although we haven’t made much impact on the fully loaded time of the website, we have reduced the page size which will make a big difference when there is a lot of traffic to the website.
EDIT – The load time had gone up on this test because used http:// in the URL rather than https://. If we had tested with Https:// the load times would have been lower.
We can do this by enabling it within .htaccess of the website. The following code will tell visitors browsers what to cache and how long for. We’re going to add this to the top of your .htaccess file which is usually located in your public_html folder:
EXPIRES CACHING ## <IfModule mod_expires.c> ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year" ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year" ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year" ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year" ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month" ExpiresByType text/html "access 1 month" ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month" ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month" ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month" ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year" ExpiresDefault "access 1 month" </IfModule> ## EXPIRES CACHING ##
Let’s take a look at our score after leveraging browser caching: 
Now we’re getting somewhere! Let’s see how much more we can do.
We looked at browser caching however now we will look at server side caching. When you load a dynamic web page such as WordPress, the web server needs to generate the webpage and load all of the content on the fly. We can enable caching so that it does all of this processing initially and then stores it in a cache for a visitor to view.
Fortunately WordPress has many plugins that can help do this for you. We’re going to look at WP Super Cache in this example.
We’ve just enabled the default and recommended settings within WP Super cache and then pre-loaded the cache so it’s all ready to go. Let’s have a look at our results.
From the GTMetrix page:
“In order to load a page, the browser must parse the contents of all <script> tags, which adds additional time to the page load. By minimizing the amount of JavaScript needed to render the page, and deferring parsing of unneeded JavaScript until it needs to be executed, you can reduce the initial load time of your page.”
What this means is that every time the website loads it must run certain scripts which load certain parts of the webpage page. An example of this may be a embedded Youtube video.
What we can do is force all of these scripts to load at the end so that all of the static parts of the website can load first. In turn this makes the user experience of the site a lot better because the images and CSS of the website will load first making the website seem to load faster and all of the heavy duty scripts will load at the end.
Because of the complexity of this we will use a WordPress plugin to help us. I am using one called Async Javascipt which nicely ties in with GTMetrix and does all the work for us.
Unfortunately because setting up ASync and defer broke part of the website we weren’t able to enable it on the website. I would still recommend enabling it for your own website as we were looking at a fully loaded time in the 2 second mark.
To finish off the optimization i’ve enabled the auto optimize plugin which will tidy up bits of code and hopefully squeeze out any last performance we may be able to get out of the website.
Let’s take a look at our final result:
We would not have the same results if this website wasn’t hosted on a hosting solution that was not only fast but also reliable. The server this site is hosted on was built and run on the GoHosting network. We take pride in providing a great solution and work closely with our clients in bringing out the best of their website.
If you are interested in working with GoHosting to launch your new website or bring it up to scratch, contact us today!
The Hosts File is a system file that is part of the standard process that Windows uses to work out what IP address a FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) points to.
Before performing a DNS lookup (See this article for more information about how DNS works), Windows will check to see if there have been any entries added to the Hosts File. This allows us to do things like viewing a new version of a website before it has ‘Gone Live’ for the rest of the world.
To edit your Hosts file, you will need to run Notepad (Or any Text editor if you prefer). The Hosts file is a ‘System File’, which means that you need to run the application as an administrator to make changes.
Open Notepad. Open the Start menu (Hit the “Windows Key”), start typing Notepad, right-click on the icon and select ‘Run as Administrator’
Open the Hosts File. In Notepad, select Open, under the File Menu at the top-left of the window. Go to the following folder:
c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\
In the drop down menu on above the ‘Open/Select’ button choose “All Files”. Select ‘hosts’ and click ‘Open’
Add the new Entry. On a new line at the end of the page enter the IP Address that you want to load a website from, then the domain name(s) of the website. If you have multiple URLs (For instance, example.site and www.example.site), add them on the same line, separated by a space.
Save the file. Under the File Menu, select ‘Save’. Be Careful, Notepad might try to save the file as ‘hosts.txt’ instead of just ‘hosts’. When saving the file, make sure you select ‘All Files’ from the ‘Save as type’ drop down below the file name.
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