Educating a client is rewarding, and fun. At WebDevStudios, we take the time to walk clients through our processes and their new website, never abandoning them after launch.

Here are five things all WordPress website owners should understand. Comprehension of these concepts makes it easier for the discovery and strategy process of their website project.

1. Process vs Plugin

When you install a plugin that has the features you need, it is a small part of the process. Let me explain further with some examples.

SEO is a process, not a plugin.

One thing WordPress website owners should understand and accept now is that SEO plugins cannot magically improve your search engine rankings and get you more traffic by themselves.

Let’s take a look at the SEO process:

SEO Audit

This step includes auditing the whole website and content. Without this step, website owners cannot understand how to find and fix technical errors or flaws in the content strategy.

Technical SEO

Checking, creating, or fixing the following is a part of technical SEO: sitemaps, faster load times, internal links, 301 redirects, broken links, indexing status, and crawl errors.

Keyword Research

This is a significant step in SEO. Research the costs for keyword research software and services, and you can see this step is an industry itself.

Know your audience, then you can find what they are looking for online. The general rule is to choose long-tail keywords with high search volume and low competition ratio. But you can also choose competitive keywords and their related keywords.

If your competitors have long-form articles and rank high for a keyword, you can create videos. This gives you the edge over them.

Content Strategy

Once you have keywords, you should come up with a clear content strategy. This helps you create content related to each topic and is also valuable to your website’s visitors.

WordPress website owners should understand that there are many critical factors involved in SEO. You can’t predict the search engine algorithms, but you can control the quality and relevancy of your content and user experience.

There are a few popular SEO plugins out there, well documented and maintained. You might be using one of them, but SEO doesn’t stop there.

If you are not sure about which plugin to use, our UX designer Jennifer Cooley’s comparison of the top SEO plugins should be helpful.

Security is a process, not a plugin.

A security plugin or combination of plugins can let you set up a Web Application Firewall, IP-based restriction, etc. However, a security plugin alone can’t stop cybersecurity attacks.

Your hosting provider plays a crucial role in keeping the environment safe. You should keep the plugins and themes and core WordPress version updated.

Google / Harris Poll 2019 found that 24% of Americans used common passwords or some variation like Password, abc123, iloveyou, Welcome, etc.

WordPress introduced a password strength indicator in 2013, to encourage the use of strong passwords. But many users go with predictable passwords, even today.

Use two-factor authentication to add another layer of security to your website. DDoS, butte force and XSS attacks could be prevented with a combination of SSL, CDN, and following The Open Web Application Security Project’s best practices.

Security plugins play a part in the security process. You can keep your site secure with a combination of plugins, server configuration, and automated backups. For better understanding, watch this WordCamp London 2108 talk by Thomas Vitale.

Accessibility is a process, not a plugin.

Accessibility should be included in the development process. All WordPress website owners should understand that each component of the website should be accessible.

Allow your website development partner to take time and implement accessibility and audit the website in each sprint. Many website owners assume that installing an accessibility plugin at the last minute is good enough, which is not true!

2. Performance Scores vs User Experience

A performance optimization plugin is not the magic pill for performance issues. A popular myth among website owners is that a good performance score alone can bring more traffic.

The main idea behind core web vitals (CVW) is to offer a good user experience. You should not just rely on the CVW scores. Delight your website visitors with relevant content, clear navigation, faster load times, and follow best practices.

The content has to be relevant and worth reading and sharing with others, if not users might bounce off the page. This in turn increases the bounce rate which signals search engines that the content is not the best for the search query.

For further reading on CVW, dive into this piece from the Search Engine Journal.

3. Rebuild vs Redesign

Every website deserves a fresh look. No one likes the outdated design. This brings up the question, does your website needs a redesign or a rebuild?

Redesign refers to changing the look and feel of the website, and retaining the same content and features. Rebuild means you are changing the website structure, adding or removing features, and even migrating content from one website to another.

• When you change your brand’s colors or messaging, a redesign can help.
• If you want to introduce new features like memberships, shopping carts, etc., you need to rebuild the website.

Further reading: Dev Shortie: Rules For Your Redesign

4. You need to test before you update.

Updating plugins and themes and also core WordPress is always recommended. However, every major update needs to be tested on a development or staging site before going to the live site.

If you know that certain plugins are customized, then it is a must to test the new version before updating it to the live site. Take a look at the change log and see what has changed between the new version and the current version that your site has.

Fields, HTML markup, CSS class names other new features, or bug fixes might be introduced in the new version. Often newer versions require a database update too.

So you have to have a complete backup of files and database before the plugin, theme, or core updates go into the live site. If something goes wrong you can restore the backup.

Do you need auto-updates?

Since WordPress 3.7, you can allow automatic updates for maintenance and security releases. While this is good and saves time, it is not recommended for websites with a lot of customization. In most cases you will not get any critical errors or conflicts, so test it on a development environment, then update the live site.

Further reading: How to Test New WordPress Releases to Avoid Problems

5. Choosing the right approach for you.

When we say competition, we compare our products and services with the competitors on the market. It is common and unavoidable to compare, but you don’t have to go with the same tech stack that your competitors are using.

Choose the right plugins, themes, hosting, and other stack related to your website based on what works for you. Discuss with the web design agency and discover the available options. This will help you narrow down and decide well.

Don’t go with the trend just because someone is using it. Every website is unique in its own way. WebDevStudios is committed to delivering the best services to every client, as our mission statement goes, “Your success is our mission.”

Have an enterprise project in mind? Let us build and launch it together, contact us now!

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Why Start Now?

It’s still 2019, so why should you be concerned about what will be on-trend next year? The planning process is pivotal in successful website builds, which takes time. You want to ensure your site is at the forefront of the the changing landscape of the web and not playing catch-up against your competitors. The sooner you start planning, the faster development can begin to get your site become a trailblazer in the new year. 

Why Do Trends Change and Why Are They So Important?

It probably feels like it’s a never-ending cycle to keep up with the new trends and updates that come yearly for WordPress and the web in general, and you wouldn’t be wrong. With so many talented developers (many of which we have here at WDS) contributing to open-source platforms, trends and necessary features will always be changing in an attempt to find the next big thing for developers and consumers alike.

Some of these trends may be purely aesthetic, which are still very important in maintaining your brand’s image on the web, but many of them are imperative to ensuring your site remains secure, accessible, and provides a friendly user experience. You want to position your company as a leader in your industry, and your website is going to be the first reflection of that for many visitors. Let’s explore some of the ways you can improve your website for next year.

What Improvements Should You Make in 2020?

1. Make sure your website is mobile-first and thumb-friendly.

Due to the continued growth in the use of mobile devices, it’s not enough anymore to just make sure your site works on mobile. Since so many users will be interacting with your site on a mobile device (and in some cases, solely on mobile), it’s imperative to design for a mobile experience first. By keeping mobile at the forefront of your design, you’ll definitely see some of the following benefits.

• You’ll give users an improved customer experience with design elements meant to be displayed on a smaller screen utilizing touch interactions.
  
• Keeping the design “thumb-friendly” (since often times users hold phones in the palm of the hand using their thumb to scroll, click, and interact) ensures all the content is within easy reach.
• Search engines, such as Google, are starting to give preference in indexing mobile-first designs to serve up more relevant searches for mobile users.
  

2. Use motion in your design with micro-animations.

Users love feedback and emotional connections with websites. Micro-animations are becoming increasingly popular in providing users with a rewarding user experience while providing valuable user feedback. These may sound like small details to add to a site, but don’t underestimate how something so simple can help differentiate a site from ordinary to a stand-out. 

Micro-animations can provide beneficial feedback through elements such as:

• Showing visual progress – visually seeing the progression of a loading bar complete
• Directing user navigation – utilizing subtle direction arrows or colors to directional cues
• Making use of natural swipe tendencies – creating seamless transitions generate an interactive and smooth site flow
• Visual feedback for security – implementing a color bar illustrating the strength of a password
• And so many more!

3. Optimize your site for accessibility.

Just like many other facets of life, some individuals need to utilize the web in a different manner than as initially designed due to a disability. Therefore, although this one may be more difficult to implement than some other trends, upgrading the accessibility of your website is a crucial way to improve your website for next year because it allows you to reach a vast audience and, in some cases, makes sure you are in accordance with laws and policies.

Designing for accessibility includes a vast number of things to consider and can require some additional education in understanding proper code structures to do so. However, simple things can be done to make drastic improvements to your accessibility on your site, including:

• Adding closed captions to videos
• Using headers correctly
• Integrating tab navigation
• Utilizing high color contrast

4. Make use of audio and voice search optimization.

Going along with accessibility, users are exploring websites with more than just their finger tips now. With the increase in voice assistants, such as Siri, Google Home, and Alexa, more users are navigating the web utilizing their voice. 

Ensuring your site is set up for audio and voice optimizations comes down to how content is organized on your site and how easily a search engine is able to find it. Here are some key factors to keep in mind:

• Making sure that your important content is within HTML (not images)
• Use phrases similar to natural speech (not just keywords)
• Ensure your site has a quick load speed (since Google will search those first in its queries)

Positive Impact of These Trends

These are just a few of the trends to note, and by no means do you need to start incorporating every new one you come across. By keeping some of these in mind to plan for next year, you can ensure you are are positioning your site as a leader in the web landscape for 2020. Some of these improvements may give your site a visual edge that will attract a consumer’s eye. Some will ensure your site remains secure and safe, while others are working to make sure you are presenting the best user experience.

WebDevStudios Can Improve Your Website

Are you ready to make improvements to your website for the new year? We’d love to chat. Contact us today and let’s start 2020 right by building an updated and on-trend website for your business or nonprofit organization.

The post Ways to Improve Your Website for the New Year appeared first on WebDevStudios.

We often forget about our websites as life starts to get busier, especially if we don’t need to update our websites with any regularity. This time of year, more importantly for eCommerce website owners, site traffic will increase, and there are a few things we can do to potentially help your users our, as well as help, protect yourself.

I like to keep things clean and running smoothly with SOAP: secure, optimize, assess accessibility concerns, and prioritize updates. So, let’s get started.

Secure

Security, especially around the holidays, is essential. Even the smallest website could potentially put your users at risk if not adequately audited, configured, or updated. You don’t need a computer science degree to keep your website secure; you need to make sure you’re looking at a few key points.

Make sure your hosting provider has your back. Companies like WP Engine often release information about their ongoing security efforts to let you know that you’re covered. Hacks are happening all the time and often without your knowledge. It’s important to know that the hosting platform you choose is just as dedicated to staying safe online as you are. If they’re not, it might be time to find someone new.

Add a secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate to your site. It used to be that the only sites that handled sensitive data like names or credit card numbers required additional security in the form of an SSL certificate. Now, companies like Google and Mozilla, to “secure the internet,” are requiring SSL certificate on every website. Sooner or later, your website visitors (and customers) may not even be able to see your website without first seeing this:

You can imagine how much that will affect your website traffic. Plus, an SSL certificate is an extra layer of security at little to no cost. Check out options like Let’s Encrypt before paying the big bucks to your hosting provider.

There are a myriad of other ways to keep your WordPress and non-WordPress website up-to-date and secure, but the aforementioned items are more than enough to secure most websites and protect yourself and others into the New Year.

Optimize

Optimization is a funny industry buzzword. I get the impression that the word “optimization” gets thrown around as the goal of any website without really understanding what optimization means or what limitations revolve around a truly optimized website. Not every website needs to be optimized to the fullest. The more site traffic or interaction you have, the more beneficial it is for you to make some optimizations, but you won’t know until you take a look at your site traffic to figure out who’s visiting, which pages they’re visiting, for how long, and on which devices.

There are a few easy ways to optimize a WordPress website. For example, keeping in mind that some hosts already handle a good number of these for you, Flywheel and WP Engine both handle server-side caching and have options for a CDN to serve up media. You can learn more about some of those optimizations by reading Best Practices for WordPress Website Image Optimization.

• Utilizing a CDN to serve up images and media will help speed up your website by using cached images rather than needing to download them each time the page loads, which is especially important if your users are typically on slower networks or utilizing mobile devices.
• Utilizing a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache are good options for automatic handling site caching on Apache websites. Nginx websites may need a bit more manual configuration.
• If your theme has changed or you’ve made updates in the past six months, you may want to rebuild all of your thumbnails to make sure that you’re using an image meant for space rather than an extra large image in an area that renders a small image. Regenerate Thumbnails is an excellent option for doing this efficiently without needing to access your server directly.
• Remove unused plugins, and deactivate those that aren’t in use. You can cut down on extra JavaScript or CSS files being loaded when you don’t need them. Things change from year to year, and we often forget about that gallery plugin that we replaced six months ago but never deactivated. It happens. Deactivate, remove, and enjoy a tall cup of coffee for a job well done.

Assess Accessibility Concerns

Accessibility refers to two things: a user’s ability to access your WordPress Admin and the ability for website visitors with special considerations to access your website. Both items should be addressed to help you in the new year.

For access to the WordPress Admin, update and audit your Users. People come, and people go, but we often forget to remove old users who can leave your site open to unexpected access. Removing unused users and keeping passwords secure and changing them frequently will help optimize your site, not for performance, but for organization and security’s sake.

Bonus tip: stop using one login for all of your users. You’ll thank me later.

For visitor accessibility (WCAG 2.1, for example), you may need to do more comprehensive updates. If your site is trafficked highly, primarily if your website sells a product, you may be dismissing users with any disability because they are unable to navigate your website with the keyboard or by sound with the help of text to speech technologies. Picking a theme that meets WCAG standards is a great place to start.

Keep in mind that not all eCommerce and WordPress plugins are created equal. WooCommerce places much importance on their plugin’s accessibility; so it might be worth switching if you don’t already use it.

If you’re curious, you can use an online service like WAVE Web Accessibility Tool (also a browser plugin) to audit your website’s accessibility status. You might be surprised.

Prioritize Updates

Keeping your WordPress website up-to-date is probably the most important thing you can do to keep your website optimized and secure. This includes your platform, plugins, and add-ons. Auditing them and removing unused ones is crucial, but it’s also important that the ones that remain on your site are updated.

• WordPress Core: Unless you’ve switched the option off, updates can occur automatically. Along with new features and performance improvements, these updates address potential security vulnerabilities as they’re found and go a long way to securing your data.
• Plugins: Keeping plugins up-to-date offer the same benefits as keeping the Core updated, in most cases, but I recommend that you make sure that the plugins are confirmed compatible with your current version of WordPress, are updated fairly regularly, actively installed, and rated highly. The little things make a big difference.

I get asked a lot about plugins that go through a development change or are no longer supported with the current version of WordPress, but yet the website owner is reliant on a specific feature that the older version of the plugin provides, causing them to not update the plugin or the WordPress core and continue to operate their website on an old version of WordPress. In other words, they simply refuse to update anything.

To them, I say this: it’s time to update! You’re out of SOAP!

You risk security vulnerabilities, are probably causing optimization issues, and ignoring accessibility considerations. Plus, because you’re out-of-date, living in the past, and not taking advantage of the newest technologies the internet has to offer, you and your website visitors (aka your customers) are missing out on all the things meant to make your life and the lives of your users better. Think about that.

To the Future!

So, let’s see if we can’t get your website updated, secured, and optimized. I appreciate it and bet your users will, as well. If you’re one of those that have just been sitting on an old version of WordPress to preserve functionality, why not reach out and see how we can help you bring that up-to-date?

The post Get Your WordPress Website Ready for the New Year: What to Do Now! appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Did you know that you, too, can join in this effort? If you’re a website owner, whether you have a modest blog or a robust media publishing website, here are some ways that you can help to improve not only your own site, but the internet overall. We even include some suggested reading—articles from our blog—to aid in your journey.

Set up HTTPS

While the whole point of HTTPS is to, of course, add a layer of security to the HTTP protocol of your website, beginning this month (July 2018), Google is now demanding it. Maintaining a secure website means you care about your website visitors. If you still haven’t set up your secure sockets layer (aka SSL), read “How to Set Up HTTPS on WordPress Multisite Without Headaches.”

Think Accessibility

Are you trying to exclude certain readers and/or internet users from accessing your website? If the answer is no, then you had better ensure that your website is accessible by all! First, read the article “How Thinking About Accessibility Can Lead to Success.” And, if you’re a developer who is interested in learning more about building accessible websites, we highly recommend these two pieces here: “Accessibility of Semantics: How Writing Semantic HTML Can Help Accessibility,” and “Accessibility in Chrome DevTools.”

Design Easy-to-Use Web Forms

Not only should the forms (be it a contact form or request for more information) on your website be easy to use, they should also be simple to understand and complete. A long, drawn out form can have a negative impact on the accessibility of your website, too. (See previous recommendation.) Use these “3 Tips for Proper Web Form Design” to help you create forms that your visitors will be happy to fill out.

Speed Up Your Website

Web users hate slow websites! As a matter of fact, so does Google. Do something good for your site, your visitors, and the internet overall: improve the speed of your website today. Read “Ways to Speed Up Your Website” to get started.

Give Back

If you want a safer neighborhood, you should volunteer for your local crime watch committee. If you want to improve your child’s school, join the PTA. It’s the same with the web. Give back.

WDS actively gives back to open-source development and the WordPress community through our Five for the Future contributions. You can give back, too. Read “Five Ways to Contribute to Five for the Future” for ideas on how to donate your time and talents.

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