The following plugins are a few that you may not have considered for your website, but they might prove critical in improving your website’s visibility, user experience, data collection capability and other factors.

Sucuri

So many of us take the time to download anti-virus and anti-spyware software for our computer but fail to realize that we should also secure our website. Sucuri is a handy little plugin that prevents malware or other attacks on your website. It works by driving all incoming web traffic through their server where any malicious requests are filtered out.

This method of protecting your website has the effect of improving your website’s performance. In addition to this type of protection, Sucuri has a built-in anti-virus program that checks your website every 4 hours to ensure it’s devoid of malware or other similar problems.

Show Plugin Menu Items on Activation

This WordPress plugin may seem unimportant upon first examination, but it will probably save you plenty of time if you install and use many plugins. It’s basically a plugin that makes other plugins easier to use.

If you’ve had the experience of installing a plugin and then having to hunt around for the new menu items that enable you to access its functionality, then Show Plugin Menu Items on Activation is for you.

It does just that by incorporating pointers next to the new menu items that have to do with the plugin you just installed, so you’re quickly able to access its features.

OptinMonster

Whether you want subscribers for your newsletter or leads to send marketing emails to, you’ll need a simple and enticing way for visitors to your site to opt-in to your email list. The professional, eye-catching templates that come with OptinMonster are excellent at converting visitors into leads, which is the critical first step before converting them into customers.

Sophisticated market targeting and segmentation tools enable visitors to receive customized messages that can be based on their geographic location, the site that referred them to your website, the page of your site that they landed on or other criteria.

UpdraftPlus

We all know that it’s important to regularly backup files on our computer in order to avoid data loss, but it’s also critical to do this for your WordPress website. The free version of UpdraftPlus enables you to schedule backups regularly, so your website is being protected from loss over time without you even having to give it any more thought.

You’ll be happy to know it incorporates popular cloud storage options such as Dropbox, Google Drive and Amazon S3. With this plugin, you don’t need to be an expert to easily backup and restore your website, and it will bring you peace of mind.

MonsterInsights

You may be content to only have the capabilities on your WordPress website that make it minimally functional, but this can be shortsighted. If you want your website to grow, this requires getting information, so you know how to change it to appeal to potential visitors and the search engines.

MonsterInsights is a Google analytics plugin that keeps track of things such as downloads from your site, e-commerce transactions, form submissions and basically every other way a visitor interacts with your website. This plugin simplifies and automates a lot of the collection of this type of data that is critical to better understanding your website’s audience and helping you optimize the way you appeal to it.

WooCommerce

Perhaps you are running an e-commerce website with WordPress, or maybe you wish to add the capability to sell some merchandise to people who read your blog. WooCommerce is such a simple and powerful way to do this that it has become the most popular e-commerce plugin on the WordPress platform.

You can sell physical goods or digital products such as e-books, and it even has hundreds of its own free and paid extensions, so you can customize it for your exact needs. Setting up your online store is made easy with simple documentation, and there is online support for any questions you may have.

Thirsty Affiliates

Affiliate marketing is a way for you to monetize your blog or other types of websites by offering people a variety of products that are related to the subject matter of your site. Thirsty Affiliates makes adding and changing links to affiliate sites a breeze.

It comes with click statistics and reports, so you’ll know how many visitors are clicking on your affiliate links. If your blog or website gets a decent amount of traffic and you’re not currently utilizing affiliate marketing to earn more from your site, Thirsty Affiliates can get you started quickly and easily.

Yoast SEO

Search engine optimization can be a tedious task, but neglecting it means your blog or website will be buried under the competition and not found by anyone. Yoast SEO supercharges SEO for your WordPress site and makes optimizing it for the search engines far simpler than trying to manually tweak it for this purpose.

Related article: 15 TACTICS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE FOR HIGHER SEO RANKINGS FOR 2019

If you don’t have the money to hire a digital marketing agency or the time to manually handle the technical aspects of SEO on your own, Yoast SEO will come to the rescue by handling elements of SEO such as XML sitemaps, meta tag editing and so much more.

EWWW Image Optimizer

You probably already know you need some kind of gallery for organizing the images on your website. What some people don’t realize, however, is that images are a big reason for slow loading of websites.

With EWWW Image Optimizer, images you upload will automatically be compressed using its advanced compression algorithm without sacrificing quality. Page load speed is an important factor in search engine optimization and user experience, so make sure your images aren’t holding you back with this simple but useful plugin.

Broken Link Checker

Making sure your website is free of broken links will improve your search engine optimization while also saving frustration on the part of visitors to your site. There are fewer things more annoying when surfing the web than coming across an interesting sounding link on a site and then getting taken to an error page after clicking on it.

This makes your website look unprofessional and will cause many visitors to go elsewhere. Fortunately, Broken Link Checker will monitor your site for broken links, and it notifies you via email or the WordPress dashboard, so you can fix them promptly, and keep the search engines and visitors happy.

If you have any questions regarding WordPress or web design services. Contact Designatude today!

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The intention for publishing this article is to inform WordPress users that are not super technical savvy, on a quick and easy method of speeding up your WordPress site. There are plenty of options out there, some free and some paid, and I will go into a few of those.

I look at this method as being a good temporary upgrade, while giving you time to decide on other alternatives that will give your website near perfect scores for loading speed optimization.

Why is your website speed so important?

Well, first of all, nobody likes a website that takes forever to load. Most visitors, and myself included, will bounce off a website that is taking more than 3 seconds to load. Call me a speed snob, but reality is, that a slow loading site is in big trouble from a visitor and traffic stand point.

Second, as I write this article, Google has officially made website speed a Ranking Signal to become effective for the upcoming months. So from a visitor experience and top Search Engine Optimization results, having a quick loading website is essential for surviving and ranking well in the SERPs.

Related article: 15 TACTICS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE FOR HIGHER SEO RANKINGS FOR 2019

Some Methods for Checking Your Website Speed

There are several free tools out there for checking your website speed. Most of these give you a grade based on several of the factors involved for better speed optimization. For the method I am using and suggesting, I used these 2 tools:

Google Page Speed Insights
Pingdom Website Speed Test

My results after applying my free 5 minute method:

Unfortunately Google did not give me my speed grade, as they are now testing their Beta version of Insights, which I haven’t upgraded to yet. I will update the results for that as soon as I test on the Beta version.

Okay, so these scores are not perfect, but still better than many of the websites out there. I want to emphasize that this is the Free Upgrade. I used 2 WordPress plugins and the task was done in less than 5 minutes.

Image compression, website cache, and combining/minimizing files.

I have found these to be 3 of the most effective methods for greatly increasing website speed. Although there are several variables that come to play for website speed optimization, image compression, site cache, and combining/minimizing files, is a great start. I will be getting into a more in depth look at all the factors that affect your website speed, in my next article.

2 easy to install WordPress plugins.

First off, I installed the very popular cache plugin WP Fastest Cache. It has been downloaded and used by over a 1/2 million WordPress users!

So just download or easily install this through your WordPress dashboard. I checked off the following available free options:

This is the free version! For being free, this plugin does a fantastic job right out of the box. The web designers offer a paid version for just $39.99 that includes image compression and other great functions for increasing your site speed. For the low price, I highly recommend considering the premium version.

The second plugin I installed is the EWWW Image Optimizer plugin. Also, downloaded and used by over a 1/2 million WordPress users!

For this plugin, you can use the basic default settings, and it works just fine. They offer an inexpensive premium option as well.

Simple, quick and effective!

Well, there you have it. 2 very easy to install and use plugins. Both of these free, and very popular for a reason. They both offer inexpensive premium options as well.

Just by taking 5 minutes and using the free versions of the plugins above, my website became faster than over 90% of my competitors!

***I have tried several cache plugins that were tasking to set up, some did wonky things to my site, and were not as effective as the free version of WP Fastest Cache plugin.

These developers did an excellent job making this plugin very effective, and super easy for WordPress users to employ

For any questions on WordPress Web Design, get in contact with Designatude today!

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In this time and era of the World Wide Web, eCommerce and News feeds, you can find literally everything online. All it takes is opening your smartphone or tablet and you have instant access to the Internet and an entire world of searching and shopping at your fingertips.

Lately, during your mobile searches, you might have noticed the lightning bolt on the left of some of the websites appearing in your search. This would identify that the website is using Accelerated Mobile Pages, or (AMP).

1.) Exactly what is Google (AMP)?

Basically, this is a combined project from Google and Twitter to try and serve up quicker loading mobile web pages.  At its core, it basically is a stripped down, no-nonsense version of HTML that is very lightweight with fewer bells and whistles.

In the minds of Google, this project came in response to something that is currently happening with Facebook, the social media giant. Heard of Facebook Instant Articles? It’s a joint project between Facebook and Apple News. Google wanted to create something similar, but with ability for all website niches to create faster loading mobile pages.

“We want webpages with rich content like video, animations and graphics to work alongside smart ads, and to load instantaneously.”

David Besbris, Google Vice President Engineering

2.) How do Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages work?

Accelerated Mobile Pages, AMP for short, uses HTML5 and a page cache system as it’s core function. The cache system works similar to a CDN (content deivery network). When a request is made to the server by the user, a cached version of the web page is sent for the user. This also then stays stored on the server and will quickly load for the next user.

AMP pages are different from the typical mobile site.

“Assuming your site has a desktop version, a mobile version and an AMP version, the desktop version will be the canonical (preferred version), and the mobile and AMP versions will each be annotated separately as alternates.”

Jim Robinson CEO of Quickseed

The basic point of AMP is readability and speed. Having the pages load faster and making it easier for people to have quicker access for mobile content. Leave everything else aside, like fancy images, moving graphics and the like, for the people who are accessing the Internet via desktop computers. Ads can still be used, but with restrictions on their size and placement.

There have been nearly 6000 developers in over 30 countries that have signed on to the project since it’s inception, with literally thousands of mobile websites already using this. This is an open source project, making it more acceptable and relative for all interested developers – for free.

Are you going to be next on the list?

3.) Which type of websites are currently using AMP?

In the beginning, most of the sites using AMP were News Publisher websites. But now, there are currently over 700,000 websites publishing their content with AMP. Many website niches out there are developing and taking advantage of Accelerated Mobile Pages.

Forbes, Washington Post, Gizmodo, and Wired are just a few of the bigger sites that have decided to use AMP. Ebay has taken advantage of AMP and created over 8 million AMP-based “browse nodes” for their listing products. AMP is really catching on for eCommerce websites and their product pages.

Sales and conversions are highly dependent on quick loading websites. Product pages can become more simplified and yet still be effective. So, AMP has been a very enticing option for eCommerce owners. Keeping a low bounce rate and high conversion rate is the name of the game when selling online!

4.) Google’s Reason for creating AMP.

Google wants their users to experience higher loading speed when using their search engine and clicking on websites. Although Google dominates the search market share, there is still competition to be had. Quicker loading websites, especially on mobile devices, should and will attract more users to their search engine.

With over 50% and (increasing rapidly) of people using the Internet on their mobile device, it is not surprising that Google has made this jump to the next stage. First it was responsive websites coming to age, and now we are seeing the importance of speed, especially on our cell phones. Google would like to keep their users on mobile, as they have 5 of the 9 most installed mobile apps.

5.) What do Accelerated Mobile Pages mean for SEO?

We already know that AMP pages were designed for quicker speed and loading for the mobile web. Website speed optimization is one of the bigger factors for visitor retention and soon to be a ranking signal for Google. With lighter coded Accelerated Mobile Pages using a cache system, these pages load quickly on the mobile device.

This gives a slight edge to the organic SEO search results. It has been said by Google that AMP websites wont get a massive boost in the SERPS, but by having AMP, the user experience will be quicker and better.

Also, AMP search results are appearing on top in News carousels as seen below:

There are several ways to optimize your mobile web site for speed, so as of now, there should not be any panic to create new AMP pages. This project is still in the early stages, and more will be revealed on the effects of SEO.

6.) What are some of the potential downsides of Google AMP?

There are limitations on the code you can use when creating and integrating AMP into your web site. A specific javacript library has to be adhered to. Ads and images will be scaled down. And AMP will present a more basic form and non flashy and less dynamic web page. This would be the cost for quicker loading web pages.

There is a learning curve for developing AMP for web site platforms. WordPress has come out with some very useful plugins and is off to a good start for integrating AMP. But, unless you are a web developer or don’t have a lot of experience with these type of plugins, you may have to hire a developer to create AMP for your website.

Also, when a reader wants to share a link to an AMP website’s content while searching through Google, the link will point to Google.com’s URLs. So this would play a big role in sharing content, content marketing and content strategy. I am guessing this will be resolved in the near future, as inbound linking and sharing content is certainly on the rise.

7.) Does AMP have a solid future for the Mobile Web?

Seeing as how less propriety AMP is compared to Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News, this bodes well for the community of developers and users that want to take advantage of lightning fast mobile pages. All source code is readily available, and creating AMP is becoming much easier and accessible. This sets a bright tone for the future development of AMP and it’s users.

Not everything Google comes out with, succeeds. The Authorship Markup project did not quite succeed as Google had intended. Publishers having to deal with code modifications that would require their writers to set up Google Plus accounts, didn’t bode very well. So time will reveal how AMP continues to catch on and grow…or not.

What is the Bottom Line?

The bottom line is that overall this is going to make a much nicer, much faster loading experience for your mobile users. And when the mobile users can access your site more readily, they will stay longer. This is going to ultimately lead to ranking higher in search engines.

Additionally, sites that have implemented AMP have had higher click-through rates (CTR) and they have seen much higher revenue generated in just the short amount of time since this system has rolled out.

It is also going to potentially lead to more sales if you are an eCommerce site. The more time someone spends on your website, the more likely they are to buy. Get in touch with us today for any questions on the SEO Services that we provide.

Related article: 15 TACTICS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE FOR HIGHER SEO RANKINGS FOR 2019

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As more and more businesses move online, security becomes an even greater concern for a larger majority of the general population. Where once upon a time, cyber-attacks, computer viruses, and malware were something that only existed in science fiction novels, now they are front-page headlines and top-billed stories on the evening news.

And the language of the internet has changed so much that it is hard to navigate. But hopefully, this guide will help you on your way.

What’s the Difference between HTTP and HTTPS?
(And Why Does It Matter?)

HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. HTTPS, which is Secured Hypertext Transfer Protocol, is what you are seeing more of lately. Why is that? Well, for starters, it provides better website security.

For another, it provides better SEO, because now it’s one of Google’s SERP signals. What this means in plain English is that an HTTPS site gains the trust of Google. This should and will help your website rank higher than an HTTP site.

But initially, when making the switch, your page ranking might dip. Overall, though, this is going to be better for your users. It is going to provide them a safer, and more secure experience.

Why do I even need to worry about my website security?

Do you run an eCommerce website? Do you use PayPal or a similar payment processor or payment aggregator to handle transactions on your site? If so, then you do realize that you are collecting a lot of data from your users, right?

What this means is that if your site were to be hacked, your online customers are being opened up to identity theft. Is this a risk you want to take? You can be sure your customers don’t. Take the necessary steps now to protect them from any problems in the future.

One of the main things to remember is that eCommerce sites are one of the biggest targets out there. Hackers and those who wish to commit fraud are going to target them because they are rich in customer information. They have what hackers want: people’s identities.

Make sure you are using SSL certificates.

This simple step will ensure that your users’ information is protected just that little bit more. As will ensuring PCI (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliance. All of this ensures that the communication between the end user, your customer, and your server, is as secure as possible. You are making it that much harder for a hacker to get to the information they crave.

Don’t save customer information

I know, I know. Those sites that save payment information for future purchases sure are convenient. But really, they are just opening themselves up for trouble in the long run. It’s like hanging up a sign that says “Hey hackers, do you see me over here? Come and get it!”

Never assume that a single security measure is enough

Have multiple layers of security. And have a backup. And a backup for your backup. There is no such thing as too secure when it comes to people’s personal information. You can trust that.

Use cloud-based services to ensure DDoS protection

Distributed Denial of Service. The dreaded DDoS attacks. Yes, those are still a thing. And they happen every day. And they are happening more and more often. So, what can web developers do to prevent it? Enter cloud computing and cloud-based servers and services. If hackers cannot locate the server, it makes it harder to attack it.

Install patches and updates on a regular basis

Make sure that your software, CMS, and plugins are all up to date. If you have managed hosting, some of this is done for you. But make sure that everything is up to date. Harass your web development team if you must. This is probably the most crucial step you can take. And it is the most commonly overlooked step.

It is amazing how simple it can be to prevent an attack, and yet how often people do not take the steps in the web development phase or beyond. Or worse, they take the necessary steps in the web development stage to ensure web security, but then they do not follow through and continue on consistently.

Sometimes it is necessary to get inside the mind of the hacker if you will. If your web developers can think like a hacker, they can anticipate what may be coming. And this is the key to preventing it. It really can be that simple.

Hopefully, these tips can help you to understand why web security is so important and will help you to work with your web development team to improve the way you operate and keep all your web information safe.

Related article: 15 TACTICS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE FOR HIGHER SEO RANKINGS FOR 2019

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