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WordPress SEO Checklist

SEO is – undoubtedly – extremely important for your website and thus for your business. Yet, it is an enigma to most of us. Read this ‘SEO-Checklist’ which sheds some light on this topic and offers tips and tricks for best results:

Click here to read the article (opens in a new window)

At artKenya, we only use premium WordPress themes which are SEO optimised and we install the Yoast SEO plugin, mentioned in this article, as a standard feature and take great care to get the header hierarchy (H1, H2, H3, etc), right.

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WordPress Now Runs 30% Of All Websites

By Michael Rojek, Founder at Husaria Marketing

According to a survey of the most popular content management systems by W3Techs, since February of 2018 WordPress is being used on 30% of all websites on the net, up from 25% in 2015. Its market share of the content management industry is over 60% as a result. WordPress is the market leader and also the fastest-growing CMS, beating SquareSpace and Wix combined by threefold in new website statistics. W3Techs bases their statistics off of data collected from the top 10 million websites ranked by Alexa, averaged over a three month span.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a free and open-source content management system developed by the WordPress Foundation. It makes publishing content online simpler through an easy-to-use and customizable GUI, and a wide range of themes and plugins that give nearly endless possibilities to developers.

WordPress Themes

WordPress websites employ themes, which let you change the look of a website without having to do any changes to the code. WordPress requires at least one theme to be active, but you can keep as many as you like on reserve, and shuffle through them to decide which is the best fit for you.

WordPress Plugins

WordPress is approaching 55,000 officially recognized plugins. Plugins let users further extend the capabilities of the WordPress CMS, and have dedicated developers around the world. Plugins let you do everything from creating a temporary pop-up notification, to integrations with other business systems you use like MailChimp, and can support an agile and flexible e-commerce storefront.

WordPress makes content management systems more accessible

What Are My Options?

WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS for a good reason: it’s free, open-source, and highly flexible. You can build complex sites in minutes, and have nearly endless opportunities for how you want your website to look and feel.

Here at Husaria Marketing we build our website in WordPress, as well as those for numerous clients. We offer our clients the flexibility and reliability of Divi, the most popular premium theme and visual page builder. Among other useful plugins offered alongside it is Bloom, which is responsible for the e-mail signup popup that showed up on the bottom right (at the time of writing this of course).

Additional plugins to consider for your WordPress installation, and those we install for our clients are the WooCommerce ecommerce platform built for WordPress, AIOSEO Pro for making SEO optimization a breeze, WordPress MultiLingual (WPML) for multi-language sites, as well as more niche options for delivering PDF invoices, handling e-mail signups, and map integrations.

 

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Is it necessary for a new WordPress blog to use SSL?

By Sandra Jocic, Digital Marketing Manager at theiuvo.com

Google’s intention to debunk and penalize potentially unsafe websites is going further.

The recent Chrome 56 browser release introduced a novelty, making sure that non-techie users understand that the green padlock hanging in the left-hand corner of the address bar is not a mere gimcrack, as many users perceived it so far.

Google announced the change last fall, and there it is.

 

There’s hardly a possibility to ignore or misinterpret the “Not secure” label that now hangs on the websites without the safe protocol. A few visitors to a flagged website might understand that this means it simply lacks the SSL certificate – but if they weren’t about to enter any confidential info, it would still be OK for them to hang there. However, a great majority will probably take it for an alarm and just make a U-turn from the website, not willing to take any risk.

HTTPS became a ranking signal on Google as early as 2014, but these days the new Chrome version showed us that they are serious about boosting the “HTTPS everywhere” campaign. They started penalizing all non-secure websites, rather than just rewarding the secure ones, as before. By some estimations, this means that up to two thirds of all the websites on the Internet will suffer the consequences.

Which is fair enough. If you are ignoring your website’s and its visitors’ security, the search engines (and therefore, the users) will be encouraged to start ignoring you. Therefore, users’ confidential information won’t be jeopardized in any way, but it will be your SEO which will take the shot. It seems that the only way to persuade people to raise the safety level is to strike them where it hurts most – on the profit side.

So, let’s wrap it up. What does the SSL certificate that Google so strongly recommends you to obtain actually mean?

Opening any website is done by establishing a communication with servers. Just like any other communication, this kind can also be intercepted by potential attackers (who may be human, but in most cases they are actually human-operated programs), who try to steal any valuable or confidential information either by eavesdropping or redirecting you to their own website that is identical as yours.

Now, if you have enabled the HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure), instead of the traditional HTTP, this means the communication is being encrypted in a way that is decodable only by the computer that is sending the request and the server that’s receiving it. Anyone else would only get an unintelligible code that they can’t put to any use.

The process of obtaining the SSL certificate should be quite easy. You don’t have to enter the mishmash by yourself – the first thing you should do is contact your hosting provider. Some of them even offer SSL for free. Even if you have to pay additional fees (typically ranging from about $100 up to as much as $1.500 per year), just think about the potential damage you’re avoiding, which will soon be measured by decreasing numbers of visits because people got averted from your website.

So, if you care about your online business, the first thing you should have in mind is protecting it by raising its security.

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What is the future of WordPress?

By Nikoletta Triantafyllopoulou, Digital & Social Media Manager, Linguist

There are many changes that are coming to WordPress.

  • The WordPress Gutenberg Editor

2018 is all about the Gutenberg Editor-with its upcoming official release and all the fascinating (yet scary at times) changes stirring up many emotions. The release of the Gutenberg Editor with the WordPress 5.0 update will constitute a massive change in the way users go about altering and creating their websites.

Catching up with what was only delivered by website page builders and following suit, WordPress made a massive decision to shift the way editing, designing and developing a page works.

With WordPress Gutenberg everything you bring into a page is a block. And you can even create a custom block. The whole experience changes as the menus for instance, appear intuitively while you are working on a relevant block. Allowing you to work without distractions and also to dynamically improve your experience as a user.

You can change the content of the blocks and then rearrange them as you wish, altering thus, your website’s layout smoothly. Drag and drop the blocks around the page and Feel free to rearrange them creatively!

To sum up: No one can really predict the massive impact and the potential of the new Editor but I do believe that it will be not only fascinating to see how it will evolve but also to experience all the new possibilities being unveiled.

Once the release is out and for the months following, the WordPress Ecosystem will be taken over by the Gutenberg Editor and the buzz around it.

The changes and the possibilities, the creative ways to leverage the capacities of the new Editor will be in the minds of the WordPress users for a long time.

For more information about some useful tutorials, tools and examples related to the Gutenberg Editor you can read: WordPress Gutenberg — Everything you need to get started.

  • Reactjs

The Open Source JavaScript Library used for creating UIs will increase its popularity. Adding to this is the release of The Gutenberg Editor as developing will require strong knowledge of Reactjs.

  • The Tide

With the number of active plugins and themes available in the WordPress Ecosystem continuously growing, there came the need for those to be tested and categorised. Thus, along came the Tide.

A directory with important information extracted from a series of automated tests run on all plugins and themes. Its primary aim is to provide the developers and all the WordPress users with the knowledge with which they can make more informed decisions concerning the plugins and themes they wish to use.

This process will undoubtedly be a long one but the benefits will be numerous and extensive. This project will in fact improve not only the code used by the WordPress Community but it will contribute to a better Web too.

Find out more about the Tide, Tide: A path to better code across the WordPress ecosystem ~ XWP.

For more information on what to expect fro WordPress in 2018 check out, Two Camps, One Word.

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