As a website owner you’ve probably heard the words “SSL certificate” getting thrown around a lot. When you’re first getting your website built all of this technical jargon can seem like you’re trying to learn another language.

However, if you plan on having your customers input their private information online, then you need to utilize the additional security measures provided by an SSL certificate. Below we highlight what an SSL certificate is, how they work, and what situations it would be smart to encrypt your website with SSL.

What is an SSL Certificate?

Confidence is so important on the Internet. Any site that acquires a reputation for unreliability, insecurity or dishonesty can expect to see traffic dwindle to zero. On the other hand, a site that can prove it takes security seriously can attract more visitors. And that can be good, whether your hosted web site is for a community, a membership service, or e-commerce. Surfers and online shoppers also increasingly recognize the on-screen presence of a small padlock icon or a website address that begins with “https://…” as signs that they can trust the site they’re connecting to. That’s SSL or ‘secure sockets layer’ in action.

The biggest reason websites use SSL is to protect sensitive information that’s sent between computers and servers. If information like credit card numbers, passwords, and other personal information isn’t encrypted this leaves it open for hackers to easily step in and steal the information.

With the SSL certificate. your information is unreadable to anyone who attempts to steal it. The only people able to decipher it are the intended recipients at the other end of the connection.

With an SSL certificate, your customers can do business with you knowing that their information is going to be safe from identity thieves and potential hackers.

Read this article why Google punishes websites which are not secure.

How Does an SSL Certificate Work?

SSL operates between a visitor’s browser and your site or application. It’s an industry-standard mechanism that ensures the encryption of data being passed backwards and forwards, so that no unauthorized person can spy on the information and hack it. It also prevents cyber criminals from diverting visitor traffic to their own site using their own encryption, and gaining access to your data that way. All major web browsers have SSL capability built in.

SSL certificates add an additional level of security between your website and the information visitors are sharing. They protect your website in two main ways:

1. Enabling Encryption

It can be scary to share your personal and financial information online. A lot of people prefer to use large-scale eCommerce sites like Amazon, because they feel much safer and protected. With an SSL certificate sensitive data will remain encrypted and secure, thus providing your customers with a sense of relief.

2. Verifying the Identity of the Site Owner

The SSL credential identifies the owner of the website, and create an additional layer of trust. Put simply, your customers will know with whom exactly they’re doing business.

Before the certificate can even be issued the identity of the website owner has to be verified through multiple methods. With digital communication it’s often difficult to determine the person on the other side of the connection, but with an SSL certificate you can be sure you’re doing business with your intended recipient, and vice versa.

Do I Need an SSL Certificate for My Site?

An SSL certificate can help to build trust between your visitor and your website. Building trust online is all about giving subtle cues to your visitor that you can be trusted.

By having the little green lock on the browser bar, you’re guaranteeing to your customer that your site can be trusted.

If your website requires the exchange of any personal information, then you might want to consider getting an SSL certificate. If your user is required to enter their credit card information, then an SSL certificate is almost mandatory.

However, you don’t always need a sitewide SSL certificate. Since going through multiple levels of encryption can slow down your website it may be disadvantageous to have certain pages of your site encrypted. There’s also a decent cost involved in order to get your site verified and operating effectively, so this also has to be considered.

If you’re doing business online and are exchanging sensitive information with your visitors, then an SSL certificate will provide an additional layer of security, while increasing your trustworthiness.

Artkenya includes SSL certificates with our ‘Managed Web Hosting’ plans. Whether you need SSL encryption for your eCommerce site or something else, you can secure your site today.

WordPress powers one in every four websites you visit online. Huge, right? It’s safe to say WordPress is no longer just a blogging tool – it’s by far the most popular content management system online and we’ve got the numbers to back it up.

If you’ve ever had trouble convincing clients WordPress isn’t just for bloggers, here are 13 facts that proves its dominance – and are worth sharing at your next client meeting.

1. WordPress Powers 25.5% of the Web

WordPress’ remarkable growth isn’t slowing down any time soon. WordPress hit 20% usage just two years ago and if that trend is set to continue, we could see WordPress reach its next milestone, 30%, in 2017.

In October, 29.7% of all new sites used WordPress.

2. WordPress Powers 30.3% of the Top 1000 Websites

If you don’t think that figure is impressive, consider this: using a standard CMS is not very common among the top 1000 sites, and more than 90% of them are using custom solutions. That 30.3% has some weight behind it now, huh?

Drupal comes in second with 19.7% and Adobe Experience Manager this with 11.8%.

There's no questioning WordPress' dominance.
There’s no questioning WordPress’ dominance.

3. WordPress is the Most Popular CMS

Among the 300+ content management systems that web technology survey service W3Techs routinely monitors, WordPress dominates with a whopping 58.7% market share.

It’s worth noting that 57% of websites don’t use any identifiable CMS, so there’s still a lot of room for WordPress to further make its mark.

4. WordPress is the Fastest Growing CMS

Every 74 seconds a site within the top 10 million starts using WordPress. Compare this with Shopify, the second-fastest growing CMS, which gains a new site every 22 minutes.

5. WordPress Powers Some of the World’s Biggest Brands and Names

These include Sony, Microsoft, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Time Magazine, The New Yorker, Mashable, TechCrunch, Coca Cola, Mercedes Benz, Samsung, Star Wars, PlayStation, General Motors, NFL, Bloomberg, MTV, Facebook, eBay, Google, LinkedIn, Flickr, NASA, and TED.

Then there’s Jay Z, Beyoncé, Katy Perry, Justin Timberlake, Kobe Bryant, The Rolling Stones, Malala Yousafzai, Sylvester Stallone, just to name a few.

WordPress.com’s VIP service hosts many of these brands and names. WordPress.org also showcases some of the Fortune 500 companies that use the CMS.

6. There Have Been 143 versions of WordPress to Date

This figure includes both major and minor (security, maintenance etc.) releases.

Volunteers all over the world contribute to the WordPress project, ensuring it is regularly and continually updated to improve both its functionality and security. WordPress 4.4 alone had 471 contributors.

The latest version, WordPress 4.4, has been downloaded more than 6.5 million times since it was released just three weeks ago.

7. WordPress is Available to Download in 57 Languages

WordPress can deliver your content to visitors worldwide in a variety of languages. If English isn’t your native tongue, you can download WordPress in Bengali, Danish, Esperanto, and Icelandic, just to name a few of the translations on offer.

If the language you prefer isn’t available, it probably will be soon – the WordPress translation team has almost finished translating the CMS into 12 other languages, with even more translations underway.

According to W3Techs, 37.3% of English language websites use WordPress, while usage numbers are between 38% and 40% for Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish sites, and they reach 51.3% for Bengali and 54.4% for Bosnian.

If the language you prefer isn’t available, it probably will be soon – the WordPress translation team has almost finished translating the CMS into 12 other languages, with even more translations underway.
If the language you prefer isn’t available, it probably will be soon – the WordPress translation team has almost finished translating the CMS into 12 other languages, with even more translations underway.

8. There Are 42,000+ Plugins for WordPress

And that’s just the plugins you can download for free. There are more than 100 premium plugins on our site, another 4000+ hosted over at CodeCanyon, any many developers release their own plugins for free on GitHub or on their personal websites.

With many thousands of plugins available, there’s no end to how you can extend and expand the functionality of WordPress.

9. Tuesday is the Most Popular Day for Downloading WordPress

According to WP Central, users are more likely to download WordPress on a Tuesday than any other day of the week. Saturday is the least popular day.

10. WordPress.com Gets More Monthly Visitors Than Apple

On average, WordPress.com receives visits from 35,910,572 people each month, compared to less than half that number, 16,837,476, at apple.com. To put it into perspective, that’s the population of Canada inundating WordPress.com monthly to start new blogs, write new posts, or visit existing sites.

11. WordPress Developers Earn $50 an Hour

In his 2012 State of the Word, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg revealed 6,800 self-employed people had built more than 170,000 sites personally, and charged a median hourly rate of $50. If each site took only 3 hours to make, that’s $29.5M of work at the average hourly rate. Combine that with data from the 2014 State of the Word, which showed a quarter of the people who filled in the annual WordPress Survey make a full-time living off the CMS.

Over at Quora, WordPress contributor Mark Jaquith puts the $50 figure into perspective, saying a “WordPress consultant” could be someone who can copy-paste some basic theme modification for $30-$60 an hour, to someone who can code a plugin from scratch ($80-$150 an hour), to high-end consulting on performance, security, scaling and deployment ($200+ an hour).

Freelancer, a popular outsourcing marketplace, lists 739,794 WordPress developers worldwide and reports 393,250 projects have been completed, worth $71,020,304.

Upwork lists “WordPress” as one of its top skills, with an average project cost of $194 and an average project duration of 5+ weeks.

According to SimplyHired, the average salary for “WordPress jobs” is $40,000.

12. 18 New WordPress Posts Every Second

In an average month, bloggers who use WordPress.com or have Jetpack installed on a self-hosted setup post 53.1 million new posts. That’s 1.7 million new posts every day, 71,000 every hour or about 1000 every minute.

All up, bloggers produce 43.5 million new comments each month.

Traffic-wise, more than 409 million people view more than 20.3 billion WordPress.com pages each month.

WordPress.com regularly publishes traffic stats.
WordPress.com regularly publishes traffic stats.

13. WordPress Takes Care of 80-90% of Google’s Crawling Issues

According to Matt Cutts, the former head of Google’s web spam team, sites built with WordPress are capable of ranking higher in search results because the CMS takes care of 80-90% of Google’s crawling issues.

That’s most of the hard work done so you don’t have to worry about the small things and you can get on with creating quality content for your site.

Do you share any other WordPress stats and facts with clients? Have we missed any of your favourite stats? Let us know in the comments below.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design)

Responsive web design (RWD) is an approach to web design aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing and interaction experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).

A site designed with RWD adapts the layout to the viewing environment by using fluid, proportion-based grids, flexible images, and CSS3 media queries, an extension of the @media rule, in the following ways:

  • The fluid grid concept calls for page element sizing to be in relative units like percentages, rather than absolute units like pixels or points.
  • Flexible images are also sized in relative units, so as to prevent them from displaying outside their containing element.
  • Media queries allow the page to use different CSS style rules based on characteristics of the device the site is being displayed on, most commonly the width of the browser.

Responsive web design is becoming more important as the amount of mobile traffic now accounts for more than half of total internet traffic. This trend is so prevalent that Google has begun to boost the ratings of sites that are mobile friendly if the search was made from a mobile device. This has the net effect of penalizing sites that are not mobile friendly.

Note

All artKenya websites are responsive! See our portfolio here: artkenya.net/what-we-do/portfolio/