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security

Weekly Links Roundup – Podcasting Mics, WordPress Updates, Social Media Marketing

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The top website and online marketing links of the week.

Thinking about starting a podcast? Or already doing one, but need to upgrade your gear? Here’s a review of the top 10 podcast microphones and some reasons to justify getting one!

Do you keep your WordPress website up to date? A recent study showed that only 36% of WordPress users have the latest version of the core software installed. That’s a big security problem. Did you know that the WordPress folks publish the details about the reasons for each update they publish in their changelog? That makes it easy for everyone (including hackers) to learn about the vulnerabilities in old versions of the software. Here’s an example of that from May 2019. So if you’re not up to date, hackers have a roadmap to exploiting your website.

(If you need help with updates (as well as backups, security, high-quality hosting and much more) sign up for one of our WordPress Care Plans and get 10% off any monthly plan when you sign up in March with coupon code O1485GNVFH.)

If you’re thinking about getting started with social media marketing, you may be feeling a bit overwhelmed. Where do you begin? That’s a great question and here’s a post that tries to answer it. Start with a clear goal (get people to see your products; share promotions; show how customers love your services) and then think about the content types you want to share. The social media platform(s) you choose to concentrate on must fit with your brand, what you want to publish, and what your customers are using. This is a great article for starting out!

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – WordPress Resources for Beginners

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The top website and online marketing links of the week.

Are you brand new to WordPress? Or considering moving to WordPress but not sure if you’ll be able to get the hang of using it? Don’t worry! Today’s post is all about resources for WordPress newbies.

First is the user manual – WordPress doesn’t come with one, but there’s a great alternative in Easy WP Guide. It’s free, it gets updated frequently (unlike a real book) and is easy to read and use. Just don’t print it – it’s big and it updates too often to make that worth your while.

Next is a post about common mistakes made by WordPress beginners (and plenty of experienced users too). The biggest two: forgetting to update, which opens your site up to all kinds of security and functionality problems, and not using a child theme. If you ever decide to edit the theme, always always always make a child theme. Never make changes to an original theme.

Just because your new site may be starting small doesn’t mean it won’t be a target for hackers and other malicious threats. Adding a security plugin is a smart (and necessary) move to help keep your site safe. Here’s a review of some of the top WordPress security plugins out there right now. I’m currently using iThemes Security Pro on my clients’ sites, but other good choices are Sucuri and Wordfence. I would stay away from the SiteLock service from painful personal experience.

If yours is a business website, you will most likely be doing SEO (search engine optimization) for it. I recommend using the extremely popular and useful Yoast SEO plugin and referring to this thorough guide to WordPress SEO.

Last but not least, if you want your site to grow and become more easily findable in search, you’ll want to start a blog. That can be a big undertaking. Fortunately, the excellent website ProBlogger has a handy collection of many tips on how to blog that can be a great resource for bloggers (at any level).

That concludes our collection of resources for WordPress beginners. As always, please feel free to contact me about any of these topics if you need help, or just post a comment below.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Site Speed, Product Pages, Contact Pages, WordPress Security Myths

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The top website and online marketing links of the week.

You know your website is slow. It’s always been like that. But do you really understand what that slow site could be costing you in terms of customers and conversions? A recent report shows that 70% of buyers are influence by a site’s page loading time. The average site loads in about 15 seconds – but a number of studies show that the majority of online shoppers will leave a site if they have to wait more than 3 seconds. If you need help making your site faster, check out our Performance Optimization service or get in touch with questions.

Learn how to take your product pages to the next level with this great post on design elements to make product pages soar. Start with inviting, high-quality photography – this is really critical – and then polish your text descriptions to make your product seem irresistable. Be sure to have a clear call-to-action (Add to Cart) and don’t pack the page with too much information. Never get in the customer’s way!

Here are tips for making an effective contact page – including having a contact form (form submissions are something you can measure in Analytics). But don’t make your form too long – studies show that the more questions you ask, the less likely people will fill it out (that’s really true for general contact forms, and doesn’t necessarily apply to all types of forms).

Finally… it’s always fun to debunk WordPress security risks, and here are the top 5 for this week. WordPress is no more or less secure than other online platforms. The biggest security problem for a WordPress site is the negligent site owner who fails to keep plugins, themes and WordPress updated, making their site a prime target for hackers. Don’t be that person! Be better and keep your site safe.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – CRO, Hosting Matters, Online Security

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The top website and marketing links of the week.

Here’s a great case study showing how UX design and visual hierarchy can improve conversion rates of a web page. Simple changes can bring you noticeable results! If your site is not converting as well as it could be, a brand new year is a great time to improve. Get in touch, Red Kite can help.

Where you host matters. Why would you relegate your business website, which hopefully is helping you earn a living, to a $1.99 hosting account? Here’s the latest big outage news from EIG, who bought up dozens of small hosts like HostGator, BlueHost, HostMonster and many more. I was with HostGator for about 7 years after I started Red Kite and loved them to death. Their support fell through the floor when they sold to EIG, with many unacceptable outages and far too much downtime. I left them shortly after for Knownhost (an awesome dedicated and VPS host) and now am with WP Engine (best host I’ve ever used). When you pay nothing, that’s pretty much what you can plan on receiving in return. Do yourself and your business a favor and get a better host if you’re with one of the EIG providers listed in that article.

There’s so much Internet security noise out there, it’s hard to know what to do! Here’s a short but useful list of 8 things you can do to improve online security for your business.

Finally… we lost our 15-year-old dog 2 days after Christmas. I saw this quote yesterday and it made me smile and think of her:

the best thing about dogs is you can act like something really good just happened and they’ll instantly start celebrating too and they have no idea what the context is they’re just always ready to party no matter what

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Security, Let’s Encrypt, Competitor Analysis, Selling

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The top website and marketing links of the week.

Looking to improve security on your site – WordPress or otherwise? This post (not for the tech-averse!) is an overview of 5 technologies you should consider, including Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates. Warning: this is a tech-heavy post and assumes you have advanced knowledge relating to your host server, etc. If you’re looking for a more straightforward introduction to Let’s Encrypt for normal people, try this one.

Here’s a list of hosting companies offering free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates – mine does (WP Engine). Last updated 8/16/17.

If you need help with SSL certificates and getting your site converted to HTTPS, please feel free to contact me. I typically do this type of project several times per month.

Learn how to do your own competitor analysis for SEO, especially useful in the beginning stages of planning a new website or a redesign.

Finally… do you hate ‘selling’ people on your services? Does it make you cringe a bit to think about it? Here are some ideas for getting over that feeling mostly by learning to listen to the other person, and concentrating on how you can help them. Make it a conversation, not a pitch.

 

Will Switching to HTTPS Hurt My SEO?

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Earlier this week, a client expressed concern about losing search engine result rankings if they made the switch from HTTP to HTTPS. They’d been told that making this move can result in big rankings losses for 6-7 months, and I was pretty sure that was not the case.

But it really depends – making this move (which is a great thing to do, highly recommended both for site and user security and for SEO too) can cause major problems with rankings if it’s not done right. It’s the equivalent of changing domains which can have a big impact on rankings, potentially very damaging.

Fortunately, I’ve done about 15 of these moves (including two of my own sites) and do know how to do it right. It involves 301 redirects, updates and changes to Google Analytics and Google Search Console, canonical tag updates, and updating internal links, among 20 or so related tasks. I follow a checklist to ensure everything gets done.

The information I gathered for my hesitant client indicated that if done correctly, you can expect a 10-15% drop in search rankings for 2-4 months (faster if you have a smaller website, slower if your site is huge). Then the site should recover to previous levels.

So why move to HTTPS?

Because:

  1. HTTPS is a ranking factor for Google Search. Not a big one, but it is a factor.
  2. Security is important! Google takes it seriously and so should you.
  3. Your site users will generally feel more comfortable seeing that padlock in the browser address bar rather than a “this site is insecure” warning.
  4. Do people buy things on your site with credit cards? HTTPS is essential. Not even a question. If you don’t have it, people shouldn’t buy from you because you put them at unnecessary risk.
  5. Are you at a coffee shop right now? Are you logged in to their public wifi? That’s a big reason to switch.
  6. You should get a bit of a speed boost after switching. Modern browsers support HTTP/2, a major revision of the HTTP protocol that brings many performance improvements, but only when using HTTPS.

If you want to make the switch to HTTPS and need help getting it right, please get in touch.