Website

Looking to speed up your site? Well, you should be!

It’s no secret that load time effects your ranking among search engines. As Google keeps tinkering with their search algorithm, user experience is increasingly weighted.

Luckily, there are things you can do to speed up your WordPress website.

Before we address increasing load time, it’s important to have a baseline number for benchmarking. To speed up your site you must identify how long it currently takes to load.

To do this, use a free speed-testing tool such as Pingdom, GTmetrix, WebPageTest, or Google Page Insight.

The aforementioned tools will give you your current load time, as well as specific areas of concern. If your website is taking three or more seconds to load, changes need to be made.

While the tools listed above are helpful, the analysis they provide may be more in-depth than most SMB owners have time for.

If you want to speed up your site, start by implementing these four tips.

Keep plugins up-to-date

One of the best things about using WordPress to build your website is the number of helpful plugins available. If you’re not a web developer these plugins are your way to a more productive website.

I’m a marketer specializing in SEO, but thanks to WordPress I was able to build the Write Hook website completely in-house. While this is a wonderful way to save costs, the work doesn’t end once your site is live.

If you want to keep up with the competition you must keep your website and plugins up-to-date. Available updates will be visible on your dashboard and can be updated with just a click or two. Just don’t forget to backup your site first!

Select a reputable host

For all the work that goes into building your website, choosing where it will be hosted is of paramount importance.

Website speed and uptime vary widely from one host to the next. Budgeting is crucial for SMB owners, but this is not an area to be frugal in. A low-cost host is cheap for a reason. Be diligent and research thoroughly before choosing.

Existing options

Your initial impulse may be to choose a shared hosting package because of its low cost. Just be aware that this is also going to be the slowest option. Shared hosting means that you have many websites all relying on the same server for bandwidth.

The ideal option is a dedicated server. However, this isn’t a realistic option for many SMBs as it can get quite expensive.

The happy medium here is a VPS (Virtual Private Server), which is middle-of-the-road in pricing and performance.

When it comes to functionality a VPS acts like a dedicated server, despite it technically being shared. This option is cost-effective and it faster than a shared hosting package.

BlueHost offers a variety of options and is my personal choice for hosting. They are well-reviewed and offer easy WordPress installation options.

Trim the fat

It’s important to keep your website lean if you want it to be operating at peak performance. To avoid creating a site that’s destined for sloth-like speeds, consider these three areas:

Theme

Believe me, I get it. You see a theme on Themeforest or Mojo Themes that offers tons of design options. Before you allow your creative juices to takeover, be cognizant of speed.

A template offering tons of animated features and similar design functions requires a lot of coding. Not only can too much code slow down your website, it can also hurt your SEO (low text/html ratio).

One thing you can do to test a theme before purchasing is viewing the demo. Does it take a while to load? If so, avoid it and choose another, leaner theme.

Plugins

I covered the importance of keeping plugins up-to-date and how convenient they can be. However, before going plugin-crazy and downloading dozens, keep in mind that some are faster than others.

Furthermore, too many plugins slow down your site. How can you discover which plugins are hurting your website? I’m aware that this is oxymoronic, but there’s a plugin for that too.

The P3 Plugin Profiler will reveal the impact a plugin has on your your site’s load time. Since I’m already semi-contradicting myself, WP Super Cacheis a plugin that can then help speed your site up.

Images

Images are important for SEO, but large images can hurt your website speed. I’m not suggesting you don’t use photos. Just keep in mind that many images in raw format are in the neighborhood or 3k-4k pixels wide.

Featured images are usually in the 600-800 range. So a simple way to speed up your site is resizing images. Make them the same size as they will appear on a users screen.

Go easy on the redirects

It happens. A time will come where you need to redirect a page elsewhere. To do this you’ll need to use a 301 redirect. Just use them sparingly as they can slow down your site.

There are tools you can find that can help identify any redirects you may not know about. If you are already paying for an SEO tool such as SEMrush, it can also help you discover redirects.

Into Action

There’s a plethora of tools dedicated to helping you speed up your website. Yet many of them require a technical foundation to take advantage of.

And remember that the tips mentioned above are not the magic pill of speed optimization. Those are intended for people who do not have a deep knowledge about technical SEO.

However, once implemented properly, it will help you to have a good two or three steps ahead of the competition.

On the other hand, the above listed suggestions are easy to apply. Use these tips to speed up your website’s load time. Not only will it optimize your place among SERPs, but it will also provide potential customers a user-friendly experience.

The landing page is a kind of online flyer that focuses on a specific topic. One page, one topic, full attention. No company portrait, no presentation of the team, no online shop, as is usual with a professional company website. In this blog post, I show a total of 5 differences between a landing page and a classic company homepage.

Construction: easy vs. complex

The landing page is the digital flyer on the net that focuses not on paper, but on the Internet a special sales theme and a special offer.

In order to establish contact, the transfer to a call-to-action button must be made quickly (“order now!”, “Arrange consultation appointment!”, “Register now!” Etc.).

The contact then comes about a form, a linked e-mail address or a telephone and fax number. If we compare the landing page with a flyer, the company website equate to a longer brochure or a detailed catalog, so to speak.

Here you can browse and browse, get detailed information about the company, its history and the entire portfolio. Of course, this information has a very different scope than an avowed sales-oriented landing page.

Scope: one-sided vs. multilaterally

A landing page consists of a single page. This has no distracting navigation and menu levels and waives further links or topics for which the searcher just does not care and should not be interested.

This keeps the user focused and interested. He does not lose sight of the reason for his visit, but at best comes quickly to the desired conclusion.

This is on a multi-page website with extensive bases already more difficult. Here, the visitor who visits the site for the first time must first gain an overview of the navigation with many clicks through the main and sub-pages.

Contact vs Information

A landing page must answer the questions in 5 seconds as a digital flyer on the web “What is advertised here? Why do I need this?

How can I immediately contact the provider? “If these question marks from the landing page can not be transformed in seconds into clarifying answers, threatens the direct loss of the reader – in the worst case to the competition.

The result is an unwanted high bounce rate . The company website is different because it is based on a completely different intention.

Here is the holistic presentation with a high density of information in the center: the company philosophy, the history of the company, the presentation of the team, photos of premises and products.

Time spent: by the way vs. intensive

Basically, one can bring the dimension of the time required for the maintenance of an online presence on a simple denominator: The more content, ie content to be displayed, the more complex and extensive, of course, is the maintenance of such content such as images, texts, documents, etc.

Here differ Landing page and company website, of course, huge. Because a one-page landing page with accurate information to the point is of course faster to update than a website with many menu items and sub-pages.

If you can still do updates yourself on a landing page, then in most cases the time required for a professional website maintenance exceeds the time budget of a small business owner. After all, he wants to concentrate on his daily business.

Cost: inexpensive vs. expensive

A simple landing page can be had from 250 euros. If you order your landing page from a supplier such as 11880.com , then only a net cost of 14.90 euros per month will be payable on a 24-month contract.

A cheap website with up to 10 subpages is already considerably more expensive: The development costs for such an appearance including design are usually around 1,000 to 2,000 euros.

Savings can be made here if – at the expense of individuality – ready-made designs (templates) are used, in which only colors, the logo and contents are adapted to one’s own needs.

If you are surprised that your website is being visited less often, and your phone or checkout does not ring, then this can be for a simple reason: your website just does not work on phones and tablets, it does not display properly, and the usability leaves much to be desired , If your website is not mobile optimized, Google and potential new customers punish it coldly. In this blog article you will learn why a mobile optimized website is worthwhile.

More and more users go mobile to the Internet. Nearly 80% of mobile local searches result in a purchase in the store. A profit-oriented company must adapt to the changing search and usage behavior of its customers if it does not want to lose valuable new customers.

If websites are not displayed properly on mobile devices, then the user torments, jumps off and will not visit the site again.

The main reason for this is that important information and functions are difficult or impossible to call. If a person interested in their smartphone does not find the contact form quickly, the likelihood that they send you a message will be reduced.

So fast is a potential new customer lost. Google has also recognized this and downgrades user-friendly websites that are not optimized with the so-called “Responsive Design” in the mobile search results ( more ).

It’s that simple: If you are not contacted, you can not sell anything. That’s why mobile optimization is so important!

What exactly is a responsive design or a mobile optimization?

A responsive design, often referred to as mobile optimization, is designed to automatically adapt the content to the screen resolution and size used.

Important elements such as texts, images and navigation should be easily accessible at all times. For this purpose, the properties of the terminal are determined and arranged the contents accordingly.

Mobile and Desktop: Are these two different websites?

No. Both are two different views of the same website. In the mobile view, the content is adapted to a small monitor, in the desktop view to a large monitor. You do not need two websites and consequently you do not have to pay double the costs.

These are the 7 advantages of a mobile optimized website:

• Important contact elements are visible on the screen and easy to find
• Interaction elements, such as buttons and input fields, are user-friendly
• Navigation is always easy and can be reached without searching
• A larger font ensures better readability
• Contact details, such as telephone numbers, can be used immediately
• Short load times allow a call to the website even if the connection is bad
• A mobile optimized website is better rated by Google and users

How do I know if my website is mobile optimized?

You can access your website with different smartphones, tablets, PCs and other devices (using all common browsers) and check if all content is displayed correctly and completely everywhere and all functions are working properly. Alternatively, you can take Google’s mobile optimization test.

Can I subsequently optimize a website for mobile use?

Technically, a website can subsequently be optimized for mobile use. However, this measure is not always the appropriate solution, since often also the information structure and the design have to be elaborately revised.

This can be so expensive that you should better think about a complete restart, in which your website is sensibly updated to the latest – and definitely mobile optimized.

Do you have questions about this topic? Then you are welcome to use the comment field. You will receive an answer to your question immediately.

Wordpress is the most popular content management system in the world today. According a study, there are approximately 19 million websites around the world that use WordPress, and it’s actually 12 times more popular than Drupal.

Despite of this, the sad truth is that WordPress websites in a default setting and security are very prone to hacking. According to a 2017 study, there are approximately 40,000+ WordPress Websites in Alexa Top 1 Million, more than 70% of WordPress installations are vulnerable to hacker attacks.

81% of attacks are based on insecure or stolen passwords, being the main tactic used as stated by Panda Security.

And that number could be even higher now.

Why Hackers Hack

You may be wondering why people even bother to go through the trouble of hacking WordPress blogs, especially a smaller blog that doesn’t have a lot of traffic. There are a number of different reasons why hackers do what they do.

Here are a few:

Many hackers do it out of curiosity, boredom, or bragging rights. They aren’t malicious.

They just want to practice their skills or brag to their friends they got in. The worst this type of hacker is likely to do is deface your site with a calling card to prove to their friends they did it.

Some do it to be mean, often because they think it’s funny. These hackers have one purpose, and that is to harm you or piss you off.

They are likely to delete content, lock you out by changing your password, redirect to pornographic websites to hurt your reputation, or something similar.

Some do it for financial gain. They may redirect your blog to an affiliate link, to their own website, or they may steal financial information you may have stored on your blog.

This type of hacker is likely to take sensitive information and use or sell it, or to install malicious software that installs on visitors computers and infects their system with adware.

You may even be targeted by competitors who hack you in an attempt to make you lose your search engine rankings, lose traffic, or hurt your reputation.

There are many other reasons someone might want to hack a WordPress blog, but these are some of the most common.

Basic WordPress Security

This section is going to focus on some very basic WordPress security things you can do to secure your website installations. You should be taking these steps on every single blog you set up, and you should be doing it without fail!

Update WordPress

The easiest thing you can do to protect your blog from hackers is to update your WordPress installation often. WordPress issues critical security updates from time-to-time, so don’t become complacent and think all updates are purely cosmetic or offering new functionality.

Those security updates are absolutely vital, and they can stop some really nasty stuff dead in its tracks!

Choose a Good Username

Be careful not to choose an easy username for logging into your WordPress admin area.

Make sure it is not easy to guess, and whatever you do, do not use the username admin! Nearly everyone uses it, because it’s default upon install, so avoid it like the plague!

Also, don’t use your name or any variation of it. Don’t use anything having to do with your blog’s name or niche. Don’t use any variation of your email address or any other usernames you may have.

Use a Strong Password

A strong password is absolutely critical, yet most people choose something easy to remember thinking they’ll never get hacked.

This could be a big mistake! Your password should contain, at the very least, both numbers and letters (both capital and lowercase) and consist of at least 8 characters minimum.

Never use any variation on your username, name, email, birthday, anniversary, phone number or any other information a hacker may have access to. And never use common passwords or even include them in yours.

Some of the most common passwords include:

• Password
• Love
• Sex
• Money
• God
• 12345678
• Abc123
• Qwerty
• Letmein
• Iloveyou
• Trustno1

Avoid using anything even close to these passwords! In fact, you may want to use a password generator and then keep your password secure using a password manager.

There are many of these on the market, and will keep your password secure without allowing you to forget it.

Vary Login Information Across Multiple Blogs

Another WordPress security mistake people commonly make is using the same login information for multiple blogs.

If you have several different blogs, be sure to use different usernames and passwords for each so if one is compromised, your others can’t easily be attacked.

Remember, there are websites that will allow someone to see all of the other domains hosted on your server, so if your WordPress installations all reside on the same hosting account, it’s easy for hackers to find your other blogs in order to target them.

Don’t Use Usernames or Passwords from Other Sites

If you are a member of a forum, social network, etc., never, ever use one of those usernames or passwords as your blog username or password!

If the forum or website gets hacked and user data stolen, your blog could be compromised! Use something different for every site you register with, including your own!

Limit Login Attempts

One very simple thing you can do to thwart brute force attacks is to limit login attempts. There are plugins available on the WordPress website that will let you limit login attempts.

Additionally, you can get the Whitelist IP plugin that will let you add your own IP addresses to a whitelist to ensure you don’t accidentally lock yourself out.

You may experience some minor frustration if you accidentally lock yourself out if you forget your password, but the extra security is worth the potential of frustration!

If you use the whitelist plugin and add any IP addresses you might log in from, this isn’t likely to happen.

Two Factor Authentication

If you want to make sure your site is extra secure, you can use a two-step authorization that sends a secret verification code that cannot be guessed to your mobile phone. You must then enter this code onto your blog.

There are also other types of two factor authentication such as Google Authenticator and barcode authentication.

You can read more about two factor authentication here:

>> http://en.support.wordpress.com/security/two-step-authentication/

You can get plugins for your own hosted WordPress installations that will let you use two step authentication.

Password Protect wp-login.php

One easy way to make it harder to brute force attacks to get through is to password protect the file wp-login.php. This is the file that shows you the form to log into your blog.

It’s relatively simple to password protect this file. Hostgator has a simple tutorial you can follow, although this may or may not work on other hosting accounts:

>> http://support.hostgator.com/articles/specialized-help/technical/wordpress/wordpress-login-brute-force-attack

CAPTCHA

A final method for securing your WordPress site is through the use of a CAPTCHA form on the login page. There are plugins that will allow you to do this.

One such plugin is known as “Captcha on Login”. This plugin will also allow you to change the default “admin” username to something more secure if you already have blogs that use it.

Using CAPTCHA on your login page will help prevent brute force attacks, because it adds an extra layer of protection.

Hackers will have to spend time entering the CAPTCHA, or paying someone to do so, for every login attempt. Most hackers will not be willing to do this unless your blog is a prime target for some reason.

Additionally, the “Captcha on Login” plugin will block IPs after a specific number of failed attempts, which you can configure. So if you’re not already using another plugin to do this, it will add that additional layer of protection.

Final Words on WordPress Security

Hopefully you now fully understand the gravity of the situation. Hackers may hack your blog for a variety of different reasons, and many of those reasons could end up causing you serious harm.

Fortunately, securing your blog isn’t difficult. You can take a few of these simple steps right now, and they’ll only take you a few minutes to put into place.

If you found this information helpful please leave a comment and share.

This is a beginner’s tutorial to using Cpanel to manage your web hosting account. We can’t cover every single thing that Cpanel can do, because it’s just too complex. It’s so complex that many people are afraid to even use it.

It can certainly be a bit scary for anyone who hasn’t used it before. Technical people pick it up pretty quickly, but non-technical people usually stick to using only the most basic features to avoid confusing themselves.

Let’s go over some of the most common things you may need to use it for. First, you can add a domain to your hosting account. After you log into Cpanel, click “Addon Domains.” Where it says “New Domain Name,” enter your domain name with the format yourdomainname.com.

Then add the name of the subdirectory and username you want to use as your FTP login. This will be the directory where your website is stored on the server, and also your FTP username. Use something easy to remember, but not “yourdomainname.”

You don’t want to make it easy for hackers to find out your username. Then simply enter the password you wish to use for FTP and click the button that says “Add Domain!” Now you’ll be able to log in to the FTP account using the username and password you just set up.

Just remember, the domain name won’t resolve until you change the name servers in your domain account to point to the correct name servers. You’ll have to do that by logging in wherever you purchased the domain and finding the name server section for that domain.

The next thing you need to learn how to do is set up a MySQL database. From within Cpanel, click on the button that reads “MySQL Databases.” Enter the name of the database you want to create. If you’re creating a database for WordPress on a domain called LittleBlueCookie.com, you might call it “wplbc.” Then click on the button that reads, “Add Db.”

After the database is created, you have to set up the username and password. It will automatically take you back to the page where you can do this, so enter a username and password in the fields and submit it. Do NOT name your username the same thing as your database. That’s just making it easier for hackers to get into your database.

Make sure to add the user to the database. So many people forget to do this, and then they wonder why their scripts don’t work. You MUST add the user to the database. Use the dropdown boxes to select the username, then the database name. Tick the box to add all privileges for the user. Then click the button that says, “Add User to Db.”

Finally, you’ll probably want to set up an email address for your domain. To do this, click “Mail.” Then click the small link at the bottom that says, “Add Account.” Enter the name you wish to use, and then use the dropdown menu to select the domain you wish that email address to be set up for.

If you want the email address johndoe@yourdomainnname.com, enter johndoe in the name area, and select the proper domain. Next, enter a password that’s hard to guess, but make sure you write it down.

Leave the quota blank if you want the amount of space the email can take up to be limited only by your web space. That’s it! Your new email is ready to use. As you get comfortable with one feature of cpanel, see what the others have to offer.

There are many exciting elements, like being able to add a blog, add a forum, and check your web page statistics, to name a few. None of them are difficult to manage once you know the step-by-step details to follow.

When smartphones and tablets were introduced in the market, mobile usage has undeniably skyrocketed, overtaking desktop computer usage particularly in Malaysia. Companies and brands capitalizing on online marketing have been experiencing increased visits to their website from mobile devices. According to BrightEdge, an enterprise SEO platform development company, global website traffic coming from mobile devices is 125 percent higher compared to 2012 while desktop traffic growth is only 12 percent. This can be accounted for the increase of smartphone sales around the world as it has already outsold feature phones.

According to Gartner, a technology research company, global smartphone sales jumped to 51.8 percent in the first half of 2013 – tipping the scale on user’s go-to choice when buying a new mobile phone. Many companies are aware of this rising trend so they started optimizing their website to fit the mobile device screens. However, when talking about conversions, smartphone users do not convert at the same rate as desktop computer users.

Why leads don’t convert?

Brad Mattick, BrightEdge’s Vice President of Marketing, said that marketers have “understood for a few years that they need mobile sites to take advantage of the explosion in mobile traffic, but many have existing sites that were not built for a smaller screen and do not take into account the user experience on mobile versus desktop versus tablet.”

One of the reasons why conversion rate on mobile devices are lower than desktop computers is the user experience. It is challenging for a web designer or web developer to squeeze the whole website to small screens and still maintain optimal user experience. It is important for marketers to address the user experience issue on smartphones by paying close attention to common mistakes like smartphone-only 404s and featuring app download messages that disrupts user experience.

Good user experience promotes conversion

Many companies have already shifted to the use of responsive websites with user interaction and engagement in mind. In order to maximize the potentials of a website, it should be viewable no matter what browsing platforms consumers use. What triggers consumers to fill out the forms in the mobile browser or apps is the online experience they get when they are visiting your site. Drop off rate is high when there are lots of spammy texts, when forms do not work or if there are too many items to fill out, and the list goes on. It is recommended to follow the best practices for mobile optimization found on Google’s guidelines for mobile.

Forward Solutions provides web design and web development services in Malaysia as well as to clients located anywhere across the globe. We ensure that the websites we do for clients are optimized for any browsing platform to boost user experience and reach the marketing goals.