Ultimate WordPress SEO Guide for Beginners (Step by Step)

Improving your WordPress SEO is crucial for getting more traffic to your website. Sadly most WordPress SEO guides are too technical for new users to get started. If you are serious about increasing your website traffic, then you need to pay attention to the WordPress SEO best practices. In this guide, we will share the top WordPress SEO tips to help you improve your WordPress SEO and get more organic traffic.

You might have heard experts saying that WordPress is SEO friendly. This is actually why a lot of people choose WordPress to start a blog or website.

While WordPress makes sure that the code it generates follows the SEO best practices, there is a lot more you need to do if you want to maximize your SEO efforts.

We have a number of actionable steps that you need to take to properly optimize your WordPress SEO.

To make it easy, we have created a table of content to help you easily navigate through our ultimate WordPress SEO guide.

Table of Contents

Introduction

• What is SEO?


• Why SEO is important

The Basics of WordPress SEO

• Check your site's visibility settings


• Using SEO friendly URL structure in WordPress


• WWW vs non-WWW in URLs

The Best WordPress SEO Plugin

• Choosing the Best WordPress SEO plugin


• Add XML sitemaps in WordPress


• Add your site to Google Search Console


• Optimizing your blog posts for SEO

WordPress SEO Best Practices

• Properly using categories and tags in WordPress


• Make internal linking a habit


• Optimize WordPress comments


• NoFollow external links in WordPress


• Full posts vs summaries (excerpts)

Speed and Security for WordPress SEO

• Optimize your site's speed and performance


• Optimizing images in WordPress for SEO


• Security and safety of your WordPress site


• Start using SSL/HTTPS

Finally, see more SEO tools and resources to take your WordPress SEO even farther.

Introduction

We know the idea of optimizing for WordPress SEO can be intimidating for beginners, especially if you're not not a tech geek.

But don't worry - it doesn't have to be complicated. Start here to learn the basics, and then you can start applying them to your own website.

What is SEO?

SEO is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimization. It's a strategy used by website owners to get more traffic by ranking higher in search engines.

Search engine optimization isn't about tricking Google or gaming the system. It's simply about creating a website that has optimized code and formatting which makes it easy for search engines to find your website.

When people search the web for the topics you write about, your search-engine-optimized content will appear higher in the search results, and you'll get more people clicking through to your website.

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Why SEO is important

Search engines are often the biggest source of traffic for most websites.

Google and other search engines use advanced algorithms to understand and rank pages appropriately in search results. But those algorithms aren't perfect - they still need your help to understand what your content is about.

If your content isn't optimized, then search engines won't know how to rank it. When people search for the topics you write about, your website won't appear in the search results, and you'll miss out on all that traffic.

It is really important for all business owners to make their website search engine friendly, so that they can maximize their search traffic.

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Basics of WordPress SEO

SEO can get technical, but it doesn't have to be. Just learning a few basic SEO tips to optimize your site can give you a noticeable boost in your website traffic.

You don't have to be a tech genius to use the techniques below. If you're already using WordPress, then you've got what it takes!

Let's get started optimizing your website.

Check Your Site's Visibility Settings

WordPress comes with a built-in option to hide your website from search engines. The purpose of this option is to give you time to work on your website before it's ready to go public.

However, sometimes this option can get checked accidentally and it makes your website unavailable to search engines.

If your website is not appearing in search results, then the first thing you need to do is to make sure that this option is unchecked.

Simply log in to the admin area of your WordPress site and visit Settings » Reading page.

You need to scroll down to the 'Search Engine Visibility' section and make sure that the box next to 'Discourage search engines from indexing this site' is unchecked.

Don't forget to click on the 'Save Changes' button to store your changes.

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Using SEO Friendly URL Structures in WordPress

SEO friendly URLs contain words that clearly explain the content of the page, and they're easy to read by both humans and search engines.

Some examples of SEO friendly URLs are:

http://www.wpbeginner.com/how-to-install-wordpress/

http://www.wpbeginner.com/common-wordpress-errors-and-how-to-fix-them/

Notice that these URLs are readable and a user can guess what they will see on the page just by looking at the URL text.

So what does a non-SEO friendly URL look like?

http://www.wpbeginner.com/?p=10467

http://example.com/archives/123

Notice that these URLs use numbers unrelated to the content, and a user cannot guess what they will find on the page by looking at the URL.

Using SEO friendly permalink structure improves your chances of getting better positions in search results.

Here is how you can check and update your WordPress site's permalink structure.

You need to visit the Settings » Permalinks page. Select the post name option and then click on the 'Save Changes' button to store your settings.

For more detailed instructions take a look at our guide on what is a SEO friendly URL structure in WordPress.

Note: If your website has been running for more than 6 months, then please don't change your permalink structure unless you're using the numbers option. If you're using Day and Name or Month and Name, continue using that.

By changing your permalink structure on an established site, you will lose all of your social media share count and run the risk of losing your existing SEO ranking.

If you must change your permalink structure, then hire a professional, so they can setup proper redirects. You'll still lose your social share counts on the pages.

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WWW vs non-WWW

If you are just starting out with your website, then you need to choose whether you want to use www (http://www.example.com) or non-www (http://example.com) in your site's URL.

Search engines consider these to be two different websites, so this means you need to choose one and stick to it.

You can set your preference by visiting the Settings » General page. Add your preferred URL in both the 'WordPress Address' and 'Site Address' fields.

Despite what someone else might say, from a SEO standpoint there's no advantage to using one or another.

For more detailed information on this topic, take a look at our guide on www vs non-www – which is better for WordPress SEO.

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The Best WordPress SEO plugin

One of the best part about WordPress is that there's a plugin for everything, and SEO is no exception. There are thousands of WordPress SEO plugins which makes it harder for beginners to choose the best WordPress SEO plugin.

Instead of installing separate plugins for individual SEO tasks, we will help you choose the best WordPress SEO plugin that does it all, and it's 100% free.

Choosing the Best WordPress SEO Plugin

When it comes to choosing the best WordPress SEO plugin, you will most likely narrow your choices down to the two most popular solutions: Yoast SEO or All in One SEO Pack.

They are both effective solutions, and we've done a pros and cons comparison of Yoast SEO vs All in One SEO Pack.

At WPBeginner, we use Yoast SEO, so in this tutorial we'll be using Yoast SEO for screenshots and examples.

Regardless, we have a step by step guide on properly setting up each of these plugins:

• How to install and setup Yoast SEO plugin in WordPress


• Users guide for All in One SEO Pack

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Add XML Sitemaps in WordPress

An XML Sitemap is a specially formatted file that lists every single page on your website. This makes it easy for search engines to find all of your content.

While adding an XML sitemap does not boost your site's search rankings, it does help search engines find the pages quickly and start ranking them.

If you're using the Yoast SEO plugin, then it will automatically create an XML sitemap for you. To find your sitemap, just go to this URL (don't forget to replace example.com with your own domain name):

http://example.com/sitemap_index.xml

We will show you how to submit your XML sitemap to Google in the next step.

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Add Your Site to Google Search Console

Google Search Console also known as Webmaster Tools is a set of tools offered by Google to give website owners a look at how their content is seen by the search engine.

It provides reports and data to help you understand how your pages appear in search results. You also get to see the actual search terms people are using to find your website, how each page appears in the search results, and how often your pages are clicked.

All this information helps you understand what's working on your site and what's not. You can then plan your content strategy accordingly.

Google Search Console also alerts you when there is something wrong with your website, like when search crawlers are unable to access it, find duplicate content, or restricted resources.

We have a step by step guide on how to add your WordPress site to Google Search Console.

If you're using Yoast SEO, then follow step 11 in our Yoast SEO setup guide.

If you're not using Yoast SEO, then you can watch our video that shows an alternative way:

Once you have added your website to Google Search Console, click on the Crawl menu and then select Sitemaps.

After that you need to click on the Add Sitemap button.

Your main sitemap is sitemap_index.xml so go ahead and submit that.

Once you have successfully added your sitemap, it will appear as pending. It does take Google some time to crawl your website. After a few hours, you would be able to see some stats about your sitemap. It will show you the number of links it found in your sitemap, how many of them got indexed, a ratio of images and web pages, etc.

We recommend that you check your Search Console at least on a monthly basis for gathering insights and see your website's SEO progress.

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Optimizing Your Blog Posts for SEO

Often beginners make the mistake of thinking that installing and activating a WordPress SEO plugin is all what's needed. SEO is an ongoing process that you must keep up with if you want to see maximum results.

Yoast SEO allows you to add a title, description, and focus keyword to to every blog post and page. It also shows you a preview of what users will see when they Google your website.

We recommend that you optimize your title and description to get maximum clicks.

When writing your blog post, simply scroll down to the Yoast SEO section and take full advantage of it.

If you're wondering how to choose a focus keyword, what is a good title, or what is a good meta description, then we have covered it in details in our beginners guide to optimize your blog posts for SEO.

We highly recommend that you read it because on-page SEO is crucial for your success.

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WordPress SEO Best Practices

If you follow the basics of WordPress SEO and use the best WordPress SEO plugin, you will already be ahead of most websites.

However if you want even better results, then you need to follow the WordPress SEO best practices below.

These aren't too technical and most won't even require you to touch any code. But they will make a big difference if you follow them.

Properly Using Categories and Tags in WordPress

WordPress allows you to sort your blog posts into categories and tags. This makes it easy for you to manage your content by topics, and for your users to find the content they're looking for.

Categories and tags also help search engines understand your website structure and content.

Often beginners get confused on how to best use categories and tags. After explaining this to thousands of readers, here's how we approach categories and tags.

Categories are meant for broad grouping of your posts. If your blog was a book, then categories will be the table of content.

For example, on a personal blog you can have categories like music, food, travel, etc. Categories are hierarchical, so you can add child categories to them.

On the other hand, tags are more specific keywords that describe the contents of an individual post. For example, a blog post filed under food category can have tags like salad, breakfast, pancakes, etc. Think of these as indexes section in a text book.

For more on this topic, see our guide on categories vs tags and SEO best practices for sorting your content.

By using categories and tags properly, you make it easy for your users to browse your website. Since it's easy for users, it also makes it easier for search engines to browse your website.

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Make Internal Linking a Habit

Search engines assign each page on your website a score (page authority). The recipe of this score is kept secret so that people cannot game the results. However, the most common signals of authority are links.

This is why it's important that you link to your own content from your other blog posts and pages.

You should make it a habit to interlink your own posts whenever possible. If you have multiple authors, then create a pre-publish blog post checklist that requires them to interlink at least 3 other blog posts.

This will help you boost your pageviews, increases the time users spend on your site, and ultimately will improve the SEO score of your individual blog posts and pages.

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Optimize WordPress Comments

Comments can be a strong indication of user engagement on your website. Engaged users means more links back to your site, more traffic, and improved SEO.

But you need to make sure that your comments are real and not spam. Spammers submit comments with bad links which could affect and even ruin your search rankings.

This is why we recommend everyone to start using Akismet. It is one of the two plugins that come pre-installed with every WordPress site, and it helps you combat comment spam.

If Akismet alone is unable to handle comment spam, then see these tips and tools to combat comment spam in WordPress.

If your blog posts attract a lot of genuine, spam-free comments, then you should pat yourself on the shoulder for building such an engaging website!

However, too many comments on a post can make it load slower which also affects your search engine rankings. (Keep reading below to find out more about how speed affects SEO.)

To prepare your website so that it can handle the burden your comments put on your server and speed, you can split comments into multiple pages. See our tutorial on how to paginate comments in WordPress.

(If you'd like to get more comments on your site, check out these 11 ways to get more comments on your WordPress blog posts.)

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NoFollow External Links in WordPress

As mentioned above, links help search engines decide which pages are important. When you link to a website, you are passing some of your site's SEO score to that link. This SEO score is called “link juice.”

For good search rankings you need to make sure that you are getting more link juice from other websites than you are giving away.

Adding the “nofollow” attribute to external links (links to websites that you don't own) instructs search engines not to follow those links. This helps you save link juice.

A normal external link looks like this in HTML:

Example Website

An external link with the nofollow attribute looks like this:

rel="nofollow">Example Website

You can also add rel=”nofollow” checkbox to the insert link popup. This will allow you to easily add nofollow to external links.

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Full Posts vs Summaries or Excerpts

WordPress displays and links to your posts from a number of pages like home page, category archive, tags archive, date archive, author pages, etc.

By default, it shows the full article content on all these pages. This affects your site's SEO, as search engines may find it to be duplicate content. Full articles also make your archive pages load slower.

Showing full articles everywhere also affects your page views. For example, users who subscribe to your RSS feed will be able to read the full article in their feed reader without ever visiting your website.

The easiest way to solve this is by showing summaries or excerpts instead of full articles.

You can do this by going to Settings » Reading and select summary.

For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to customize WordPress excerpts without coding.

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Speed and Security for WordPress SEO

Even if you follow all the WordPress SEO tips and best practices above, if your site is slow or gets taken down by a hacker, your search engine rankings will take a big hit.

Here's how to prevent your site from losing search engine traffic due to slow performance or lax security.

Optimize Your Site's Speed and Performance

Research shows that in the internet age, the average human attention span is shorter than that of a goldfish.

Web usability experts believe that users decide whether they want to stay or leave within few seconds of visiting a website.

That means that as a website owner, you only have a few seconds to present your content and engage users. You don't want to waste this precious time making your visitor wait for your website to load. Search engines like Google admit that they rank faster websites higher than slow loading websites.

If you need to improve your site's speed, check out this expert advice on 18 useful tricks to speed up WordPress and boost performance.

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Optimizing Images in WordPress for SEO

Images are more engaging than text but they also take more time to load. If you are not careful with image sizes and quality, then they can slow down your website.

You need to make sure that you use images that are optimized to load faster. See our guide on how to speed up WordPress by optimizing images for the web.

Another trick you can use to optimize your images for search engines is to use descriptive title and alt tags. These tags help search engines understand what your image is about. They also help users with visual impairment as their screen readers can read the alt and title tags to them.

WordPress allows you to add title and alt tags when you upload an image.

If you are a photographer or add a lot of images to your WordPress site, then you need to use a gallery plugin.

We recommend using Envira Gallery. In our speed tests, we found it to be the fastest WordPress gallery plugin. It's also fully responsive and SEO friendly out of the box.

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Security and Safety of Your WordPress Site

Each week, Google blacklists around 20,000 websites for malware and around 50,000 for phishing. When a site is blacklisted, it doesn't show up in any search results at all.

This means that the security of your WordPress site is crucial for good rankings. You don't want all your hard work on SEO to go to waste if your site is compromised by a hacker.

The good news is that it's not that difficult to keep your WordPress site safe - see the step by step instructions in our ultimate WordPress security guide.

At WPBeginner, we use Sucuri to protect our website against attacks. To see why we recommend this service, check out our case study of how Sucuri helped us block 450,000 WordPress attacks in 3 months.

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Start Using SSL/HTTPS

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a technology that encrypts the connection between a user's browser and the server they are connecting to. This adds an additional security layer to your WordPress site.

Websites secured with SSL are indicated by a padlock sign in the browser's address bar. This makes your website more trustworthy, and it is required if you are running an online store with WordPress and processing sensitive payment information.

If you are using Bluehost, then you can purchase a SSL certificate. If you're going to purchase your SSL certificate through your web hosting company, see our guide on how to add SSL and HTTPS in WordPress.

You can also get free SSL with Let's Encrypt. Several WordPress hosting companies like Siteground, Dreamhost, and WPEngine have already started offering easy Let's Encrypt integrations.

For step by step instructions, see our guide on how to add free SSL in WordPress with Let's Encrypt.

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More SEO Tools and Resources

Once you get the hang of WordPress SEO best practices, you'll want to take your skills even further to get ahead of your competition.

We have compiled a list of best WordPress SEO plugins and tools that you should use to boost your SEO. If you're ready to try some more advanced techniques, you can also check out our archive of WordPress SEO articles.

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We hope this article helped you learn how to properly optimize your WordPress site for SEO. Go ahead and implement a few of these WordPress SEO tips, and you should see an increase in your traffic within a few months as the search engines process your changes.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post Ultimate WordPress SEO Guide for Beginners (Step by Step) appeared first on WPBeginner.

12+ Best Medical WordPress Themes for Hospitals And Health Care Services.

Health as a trending topic is not a recent phenomena, health has always been on people's mind. Millions of people worldwide are directly engaged into the health profession and thousands of businesses compete with each other at any given time.

Below is the list of most trustworthy WordPress themes and it promises to fuel up your business growth so that you prosper. Listing 12+ Best Responsive Medical WordPress themes filtered around the internet.

8 Must-Do Steps for Securing and Hardening Your WordPress Website

Imagine with me for a moment that you're a hacker looking for ways to hijack reputable websites and use them to funnel unsuspecting traffic to a nefarious phishing scam.

How would you target websites for maximum impact? One option would be to locate and target a single vulnerability that affects hundreds or thousands of sites. If such a thing could be found and exploited you could create digital carnage in very short order.

Are you starting to see why hardening WordPress is so important?

As the most popular content management system on the web, WordPress is a prime target for hackers everywhere. But there's something you can do about it.

Why Do Bad Hacks Happen to Good Websites?

Thankfully, the WordPress core software is quite secure. Hacks are rarely able to get under your website's skin by going straight after the core. When exploits in the core are identified they're promptly patched.

Rather than go after the core – which they know is a tough nut to crack – hackers generally target things like lazily chosen passwords, poorly-coded plugins, lax file permissions, and sites that haven't been updated in far too long and are therefore vulnerable to patched exploits.

Since hackers tend to go after the low-hanging fruit, it really isn't that complicated to harden WordPress and keep it secure. As a matter of fact, you can keep your site at the far upper end of the security bell curve by taking eight simple steps.

Let me walk you through them.

Exploiting Digital Currents With WordPress

As an agency, to be successful in digital marketing you must face the challenges of today and the future. These problems are not only worth solving now, but worth investing in solving because they will still be problems in the future.

In his speech at Agency Summit, WP Engine's CTO and founder Jason Cohen discussed how to take current problems in the digital landscape and turn them into a differentiating advantage.

Let's take a look at some of those obstacles we see today, including how they are addressed and solved by WordPress.

Today's Digital White Waters

There's a technical term in whitewater rafting called a “boof”. When rafting, whitewater indicates an obstacle that can be a challenge to pass through. According to Cohen, “the human tendency when you see water rolling around is to go around it. But when you do that in a kayak, you turn over, meaning leaning away from the problem actually is the problem.”

“So the correct technique is to go right at the white water to fly over the obstacle and use it as an advantage to go fast,” Cohen explained.

This is a great metaphor for what it means to take on these challenges in digital marketing. Rather than work around the problem, turn the problem into a differentiating advantage.

According to Cohen, here are some of the “boofs” (or obstacles) digital marketing faces today that can be overcome…

the marketing it explosion

Source: Chiefmartec.com

“One thing that's obvious to me is there's an explosion in types of marketing tools from chat to geo-targeting to lead generation forms and so on. It's clear that in the future there will be more of these types of things, not fewer,” said Cohen.

Within each marketing category, it's getting more specialized and complicated. So this implies that if there's only going to be more types of 'things', and it's very hard to do those things. The general conclusion is platforms are going to start offering to do everything for you… 'we'll do all in one' so to say.

However, according to Cohen, being able to do everything on one platform isn't the future of digital marketing. Ask yourself “how do I take it to the next step from basic integration to doing something custom with that integration?” For instance, taking these marketing IT tools and turning them into something unique.

Personalization

From the film “Minority Report”

Personalization is a trend that's gaining rapid momentum. But how do you persuade your clients of its importance? According to Cohen, sometimes your clients aren't convinced to invest in something that's highly personalized. It's important to convey to them that conversions will go up when you're specific and personalize content based on information you can gather about your customers (say from AdTech).

Therefore, in terms of technology, this means your website has to collect and manage data. To be personalized, there has to be a lot of data. You must be able to access the data in real-time too.

Brands As Publishers

In the 90s brands were told to get on the internet. “It's the future,” they were told without really any other explanation. You weren't able to say, “you need to get online because Amazon is going to happen…or Google's going to happen..or social media is going to happen.” We didn't know any of these things, but we knew this was the future, Cohen explained.

Today, the equivalent to getting online is giving your brand publishing agility. “Content should be the centerpiece of marketing,” said Cohen. He added, “people on Facebook share content, not home pages.”

The obstacle here is being good at publishing…many brands don't specialize in this area, so it's a challenge to go above and beyond to make your brand stand out from a publishing perspective.

“Those who don't publish will not only stand still, but they'll fall behind,” said Cohen.

Intrapreneurship

When you think like an entrepreneur in the context of a bigger company, that's called intrapreneurship. There is so much unknown and it's hard to plan for the unknown or how things will unfold. “One of the ways you deal with this uncertainty is to act or think more like a startup that also doesn't know anything about their customers, their products, or their market,” said Cohen.

He further explained that what you do is you run experiments. You acknowledge that you aren't sure how to use certain technology and that you need a technology platform that is flexible and lets people move quickly when they want to.

Secondly, you need an agency that's flexible and creative because it doesn't matter what the technology is doing, it's the campaigns and creative inside there that actually counts.

Thirdly, you need to be able to run tests quickly and cheaply so you can try things and learn and figure out what's working.

“This notion of intrapreneurship is more than just nice, it's mandatory when you're navigating a world where it's not exactly clear what the right answer is,” said Cohen.

To Boof or Not to Boof?

What are the answers to some of these obstacles? Let's take a look…

Technology Can't Replace Human Creativity

“It doesn't matter what the technology is if the creative isn't there,” Cohen explained. He added, “at the same time, if you have the best ideas in the world, but it costs 50 thousand dollars and two months for a test campaign, that also won't work.”

The relationship between technology and creativity is a marriage - you have to have both the technology platform to support these activities, along with non-A.I. humans to drive the creative strategies.

What's Needed from Technology to Exploit the Rapids to Your Benefit?

To attack these sorts of challenges, here's what you need from technology:

Scale

A solution that already runs at scale, meaning globally. Your content should be able to be reached from all over the world and cater to different languages, etc. But also, in a technology sense, say something goes viral and you get tens of millions of hits in a day; your site should be able to handle this volume of traffic without crashing.

Agility

Agile = fast. You have to be fast to be entrepreneurial at all of these things.

Right Cost

Not everything is cheap, obviously. Yet, simple things ought to be easy and they should be cheap. Complex things are not cheap, yet they are possible.

Integration

As data sources continue to expand, being able to easily and quickly connect and access all that data is essential.

Why WordPress?

“WordPress is actually perfectly suited to take on these particular obstacles,” said Cohen.

Here's how WordPress addresses these challenges:

Size

WordPress powers more than a quarter of the web and 60 percent of the CMS market share. It also powers 27 percent of the top 10K websites.

Agility

Here's an example: When Google Glass came out, by the next day there were three free WordPress plugins that you could use that would take your content and make it available in Glass. This means that you and your clients are in control of the when and how to go and apply this new technology.

“It's the control and power to go at the rate that's appropriate for you and your clients…that's agility,” said Cohen.

On the other hand, a closed platform, like Adobe, took four months to declare when they'd have support for Google Glass..the answer…nine more months and then they didn't even end up supporting it.

Right Cost

The WordPress software is free and so are many plugins and themes. “Sometimes it's not about making the budget smaller, but rather making the value bigger,” said Cohen.

Ask yourself 'what are you spending the money on?' Are you spending it on software licensing fees? This doesn't make a project more successful. Or are you spending it on making a better project or a more effective campaign which generates more value?

Integration

WordPress is open source and has 30,000-plus people working as freelancers whose primary income comes from WordPress. The fact that all this exists makes it easy to make integration points. Since it's open, you can take whatever somebody else did and customize it to the integration you want, making it that much easier.

The Catch…

“WordPress is free like a puppy dog is free,” explained Cohen. But of course, it's not actually free. Just like you have to give a puppy shots and keep it fed, WordPress comes with maintenance tasks too.

“This is the part where WP Engine comes in. We take an open source project and we make it an enterprise-grade platform. All of the challenges of open source goes to all of the things we want to solve,” said Cohen.

He then explained the inspiration behind WP Engine. “I wrote a blog post on a dedicated WordPress server. When it got popular, the server would crash,” said Cohen. This led to the need for a managed WordPress solution, and so WP Engine was founded.

“Just because you have a pile of zipped up PHP code doesn't mean it scales, doesn't mean it's secure, doesn't mean it has high uptime or doesn't mean it will perform well under a lot of traffic. There are all of these pieces required to actually make a website work,” said Cohen.

According to Cohen, there are three vital pieces to taking an open source project and making it an enterprise-grade platform. This includes high performance, security, and service.

With WP Engine, high-performance is just one result noted. The infrastructure was built to address scalability among other performance factors.

Security is also another important piece to an enterprise-grade website. “YTD we've blocked 1.6 billion attacks on our platform,” said Cohen. As technology evolves, security attacks will not be something that'll lessen in the future, they'll only get worse. That's why it's important to invest in an enterprise-grade solution that hardens your WordPress site against potential threats.

In addition, another component to being enterprise-grade is having access to great service. “We have 400 people in our organization and about half of them work in customer experience,” said Cohen. He added, “Because investment in humans beings the right way is how you have great service.”

Check out more from Agency Summit #wpeagency. 

The post Exploiting Digital Currents With WordPress appeared first on WP Engine.

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Introducing Let's Encrypt: Free SSL Certificates

At WP Engine, we're committed to protecting our customers' online business, while delivering secure and blazingly fast sites. That's why we are happy to announce that WP Engine has made Let's Encrypt certificates available to its 56K customers.

Let's Encrypt is a certificate authority who is making HTTPS ubiquitous by providing free SSL/TLS certificates. In addition to being free, Let's Encrypt certificates are fully automated, so after you configure your site's certificates, we'll auto-renew them before they expire (every 90 days).

Websites starting with https use encrypted connections and have padlock icons on browsers.

A More Secure Site

HTTPS, the secure protocol for the web, safeguards your visitors by creating encrypted connections between your visitors and your site, protecting your visitors' privacy and the data they share with you over the internet.

Blazing Fast Results

On our platform, HTTPS also automatically enables HTTP/2 (the latest hypertext transfer protocol), which improves website load times.

Improved SEO

By enabling HTTPS with free Let's Encrypt certificates, you can also expect better Google search engine rankings, since HTTPS is used as a ranking signal.

Get Started Today

To get free Let's Encrypt certificates for your sites, visit the WP Engine User Portal, and then visit your install > SSL > Add Certificates > Get Let's Encrypt. For more details, visit our Support Garage article about HTTPS.

For more information about Let's Encrypt, see Torque's Why Let's Encrypt Has Completely Changed the SSL Landscape.

The post Introducing Let's Encrypt: Free SSL Certificates appeared first on WP Engine.

How to Protect Emails from Spammers with WordPress Email Encoder

Do you want to share your email address on your website without getting caught by spam bots? When you add an email link or plain text email address, it will most likely be copied by an spam email harvesting bot. In this article, we will show you how to easily protect emails from spammers with email encoder.

Why is Email Encoding Important?

Most website owners don't realize that pasting their email address into their posts, pages, or on a contact page can put you at risk for a lot of email spam.

Spammers use email harvesting bots that automatically browse the web to collect email addresses. These email addresses are then sold to spammers all over the world.

This is why we almost always recommend creating a contact form instead of sharing an email address.

Now the problem is that sometimes you may really need to add an email address that users can copy or click to email.

Thankfully there is a way to do that and protect your email address from spammers. It's called email encoding and it's quite easy.

Let's take a look at how to do that.

Protecting Email Addresses from Spammers

First thing you need to do is instal and activate the Email Address Encoder plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

The plugin works out of the box, and there are no settings for you to configure.

Once you activate the plugin, Email Address Encoder simply starts encoding email addresses in WordPress posts and pages, custom post types, widgets, etc.

What that means is that it converts the plain text email addresses into decimal and hexadecimal entities.

If you see the page source of your page, then you will see the email addresses encoded looks like this:

This way when an email harvesting bot visit your page source, they will not be able to see the email addresses.

However, real human users will see the plain text email addresses in their browser window.

That's all. We hope this article helped you protect email addresses in WordPress from spammers. You may also want to see our guide on 24 must have WordPress plugins for business websites.

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The post How to Protect Emails from Spammers with WordPress Email Encoder appeared first on WPBeginner.

Kinsta Managed Hosting Review: Blazingly Fast and Solid Features

Kinsta is a relative new-comer to the WordPress managed hosting scene, but since launching in 2013 has quickly become a force to be reckoned with.

Marketed as “Better, faster, stronger managed WordPress hosting,” the web host uses Google's Cloud Platform to provide fast speeds from the web giants secure and reliable data centers, paired with Kinsta's simple and intuitive hosting panel.

We get asked all the time for web hosting recommendations and do our best to point members in the right direction, but who you go with ultimately comes down to your site's needs – and also how much you're willing to spend.

To help make the decision a bit easier, we've put some of the biggest WordPress managed hosts to the test, with a focus on customer experience. There are already plenty of reviews out there that look at speed and stability, but the ease of use and support capabilities of a company are just as – if not more – important because you'll run into trouble sooner or later and a great host will always go above and beyond to help you out when disaster hits.

With all that in mind, this is the fifth of eight reviews, this time putting Kinsta to the test.

Check out the other posts in this managed WordPress hosting reviews series:

• WP Engine Managed Hosting Review: Feature-Packed and Hard to Fault


• SiteGround Managed Hosting Review: Excellent Support, Not Really for WordPress


• Flywheel Managed WordPress Hosting Review: Beautiful, Functional Solution for Designers


• Pagely Managed WordPress Hosting Review: Solid Service, Shaky Communication


• GoDaddy Managed WordPress Hosting Review: Budget Hosting, Poor Features


• Kinsta Managed Hosting Review: Blazingly Fast and Solid Features

Monstroid & Divi Multipurpose WordPress Themes – Main Features & Comparison

Monstroid and Divi are probably the most popular all-in-one solutions on the net. However, you don't need two similar web design and development toolkits, do you? So, the time when you should choose either Monstroid or Divi will come by all means (if you consider only these two themes, of course).