Helpful Posts Most popular how-to and site success tips
Helpful Posts
Yesterday, Google officially announced that sites with SSL (https) would get a bump in rankings. Multiple news sites ran it like it had to be done tomorrow. All manner of developer forums lit up with folks asking how to do it. And a few of us, said “not so fast!” The media circus on this will be going for at least another year. Here’s a follow up on yesterday’s post with more info and things to consider before you make this move to HTTPS.
We all want secure sites. A big part of my business is helping folks do that. But, the new SSL ranking factor is NOT something you want to jump into lightly. In fact, you need to seriously consider the bigger picture before you make any changes this drastic to your site. Read on for what you need to know before you do anything.
DDoS, Brute Force, botnet, hacked – these are just a few of the words that have become common place for site owners this year. None of us wanted thoughts of site security to consume our day. We’ve got important things to do! But here we are, in the midst of the highest sustained bot attack in history.
Why is this happening? What can we do about it? The one thing you can’t do is ignore it, whether you’re a site owner or not.
If you own any smart device hooked to the Internet, you’re involved, and affected, and it’s going to take all of us to shut the cyber-attacks down. See how you can be part of the solution.
Social share buttons can be both a performance and security issue. But not this one. The Simple Share Buttons Adder plugin is my top performance pick and has enough options to suit just about every site.
I tested 12 of the most popular social share button plugins and this one was the clear winner.
See Social Share Buttons – Site Performance and Security Killers test results.
In this video, I take you on a tour of all the options and settings. You’ll be amazed at all this lightweight plugin can do.
Earlier in the week I posted that you should get XML-RPC turned off on your site. Sucuri just released confirmation that is one of the new attack strategies of the recent bad bot attack. This is different from the XML-RPC exploit to use your site in a DDoS attack. This one is to use XML-RPC to get your login credentials and do a Brute Force attack. In other words, the bots want to break down the front door to gain entry to your site.
Hello Happy Site Owners! This week’s tips include severely high bot attacks, completely disabling the XML-RPC function on your site, celebrating the return of a fun function in WordPress 4.0, how much a site should cost, the new robots.txt file tester, a super example of how to repurpose content, how wearable tech will change your marketing strategy, hiding your login username, the end of the free ride for Outlook users, how to value your time and set boundaries, putting street view back into embedded Google Maps on your site, working from home with distractions, and for dessert, a super Hangout on Air treat with one of my fave folks. So let’s dive in. Listen to the podcast.
The WordPress SEO plugin has 5 settings that make it super easy to keep special site pages out of search. for example, special sales pages or membership pages. They can be hidden from both your HTML and XML sitemaps. See how to do it in this quick video tutorial.
Ever wonder how WordPress performs right out the box? I put a new installation through every major online testing service. Included are notes and full screenshots with summaries, waterfalls, performance scores, and request details. Testing tools include Pingdom, GTMetrix, WebPageTest, and WebSitePulse. Feel free to use it as a baseline to compare your site performance scores.
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