Not noticeable but important

An HTTPS connection guarantees three things

• Confidentiality. The visitor’s connection is encrypted, obscuring URLs, cookies, and other sensitive metadata.
• Authenticity. The visitor is talking to the “real” website, and not to an impersonator or through a “man-in-the-middle”.
• Integrity. The data sent between the visitor and the website has not been tampered with or modified.

Here are those points explained by Kayce Basques, technical writer at Google.

1. HTTPS helps prevent intentionally malicious attackers snd legitimate but intrusive companies from inserting their ads into your websites or onto your users’ browsers. They also like to trick your users into giving up sensitive information or installing malware that will negatively affect user experiences and create security vulnerabilities.
2. HTTPS is not only for those that handle sensitive communications. Every unprotected HTTP request can potentially reveal information about the behaviors and identities of your users.
3. HTTPS doesn’t just block misuse of your website. It’s also a requirement for many cutting-edge features and an enabling technology for app-like capabilities.

HTTP will soon be considered non-secure
And it’s also important to know that Chrome and Firefox security teams are working on gradually marking plain HTTP as non-secure. Ultimately, the goal of the internet community is to establish encryption as the norm, and to phase out unencrypted connections. This means that not have https, will negatively affect your seo and that having it improves a website’s own SEO and analytics.

Can an HTTPS connection be attacked?
There are only three ways for attackers to get through the https security wall and they are very difficult and require significant expense. In addition, they would all have to be targeted attacks, and not feasible to execute against any user connecting to any website. By contrast, plain HTTP connections can be easily intercepted and modified by anyone involved in the network connection, and so attacks can be carried out at large scale and at low cost.

I was surprised that getting an https on your website is fairly easy and inexpensive to do. Ask your service provider to set it up for you. You can set it up yourself on the control panel at your hosting company. Be sure the https shows up in the url of your browser. If it doesn’t, call your hosting company and ask them to help you out. There might be some settings they need to set on their end. and then rest assured, your visitors will have a better experience.

Perhaps you made a major marketing effort the previous month and want to see how that affected your website’s SEO. You can see here that visits were doubled in the period from October 11 to October 22. I made some home page edits and wrote a few blog posts. I was surprised to see the change. The chart on the right side lists my top competitors in the area.

This tool also allows you to track specific key words

Let me give you an example. The keywords I wanted to track are “web design” and the also towns where I do the most business, such as Framingham, Natick and Boston. One of the ten keywords I chose is “Framingham Web Design” and another “Boston Web Design”.

How did I do?

I am on the first page of Google for the keywords “boston divi theme”, “framingham website design”, “natick web maintenance” and wellesley web maintenance.” Perugi Design is number 12 for “natick website design” and number 14 for “boston wordpress websites”. I think that’s quite good considering the number 12 spot is located on  the second page of the orgainic area on Google.

Part of the work is figuring out the best keywords for the audience you are trying to attract. There are other tools we use for that too.

The softeare creates a pdf booklet that itemizes everything that is updated on a weekly basis. such as number and dates of backups saved, plugins that have been updated, security checks, spam comments that have been removed and if and when and how long your website was offline.

Only clients on the monthly web maintenance plan gets these reports, either monthly or quarterly. (It cannot be accessed via the dashboard.) The pdf report is great for presentation purposes, too. If you are an existing or new client thinking about taking advantage of this service, message me. I’d be happy to talk to you about it!

Perugi Design has several Web Care Plans to fit your goals and budget. We can update your website software (WordPress, themes and plugins) on a weekly basis and schedule backups as often as you need. We also keep in touch with your hosting company when issues arise as part of all three bundled Web Care Plans.

Here is a list of the tasks a website typically needs on a weekly and monthly basis. We do most of these for you for only $10 per month.

1. Backing up your website
Your website should be backed up at least monthly and stored on several servers. Don’t depend on your hosting company. Some backup and some do not. If your site gets damaged from malware or gets hacked, you will need to restore your entire website and you will need a clean backup to do it. We use Amazon Web Services for our backups.

2. Installing updates
WordPress Software gets updated at least 12 times a year in order to add new features or to for important security reasons. I usually wait a week or two before updating the WP software, to allow the other third party plugins and themes to catch up. Updating the plugins is also important, as they may interfere or stop working after any new WordPress updates.

3. Processing comments
You may receive comments if you use the default settings on your blog. Sometimes they are welcome, but other times, you get spam. Going through the dashboard, you can find these and approve or trash as you see fit. If you don’t check in on a regular basis, the spam comments can add up. But, we can use a plugin to regulate comments or turn it off. Spam can come through the forms as well. Always use a Captcha to prevent this from happening.

4. Setting up security
Receiving spam comments leads to security concerns. There are several good plugins or hosting add-ons you can use to secure your site from being hacked. This is a major concern for many people and should be. When a site gets hacked, our hosting company detects it and will shut it down to protect the other sites on a shared hosting plan. Uptime Security is another feature to consider. You and your web manager find out when your site goes down so that you can attend to the situation immediately.

5. Optimizing your database and checking performance
If you have a busy site with tons of content continually being uploaded, your database will probably need cleaning out. By maintaining your database it will help to improve your loading speeds and reduce the frequency of database errors. There are several free plugins to help you with this.

6. Checking Google Analytics
This is more about marketing, but some clients ask for help setting up analytics. It is useful to help you determine if an ad or blog post was popular. Use this information when planning your next campaign.

Remember, updating your website’s software is vital to reaching your customers in a positive way.

But, What if you want to allow comments so that you can get the few that are legitimate?  Then you have to allow all the others that aren’t. Before long, if you are not watching the dashboard, you can have over a thousand spam comments. The worst part of it is — each one has to be checked and removed individually. That can take over an hour of painstakingly going through each comment page. Not fun.

Over the years I’ve looked for plugins that help with this process. How can I select all of them on each page and remove them all at once? That would save a lot of time. I found a plugin that did the task, but then could not find it again. Today I was combing through a client’s website and found one already installed. It’s called WP Database Cleaner by WPMize. I have to say I didn’t remember this one, but I will now. It can remove all of your spam in one click. Wow!  But, remember: add this plugin through your dashboard on the plugins page.