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Why Your Site Needs HTTPS: Better To Be Safe Than Sorry

In this day and age, all the most successful websites are highly reliant on user data and user experience. Everybody is worried about cybersecurity, as connections between browsers and servers aren’t always as fully encrypted as they should be. So how can data be handled safely?

HTTPS is an essential piece of digital architecture to maintain a user’s right to privacy, which provides three different layers of protection:

  • Encryption: While a user browses, it’s possible for people to “listen” in on what they’re doing. Any exchanged data will be encrypted to keep it safe from hackers and eavesdroppers.
  • Authentication: HTTPS websites prove to users that they are communicating with an honest website that’s not fake. It protects anybody from middleman attacks and promotes user trust, helping to grow an online business.
  • Integrity: Data transferred via HTTPS can’t be corrupted or modified during transfer without being detected.

Here in this article, we’ll find out more about these layers. We’ll take you through what HTTPS is, why you need it, and how you can implement it. Ready? Let’s find out more.

What is HTTPS?

HTTPS is a secure version of common Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP. It’s a system that allows you to send information between browser and server, transferring everything that’s needed securely, whether it’s credit card details or login IDs.

The ‘s’ stands for ‘secure’, meaning that your data will be encrypted and almost impossible for a hacker to get their hands on. An HTTPS address will have an SSL certificate attached with it, showing the world that this is a secure site. Think of it as your site’s personal security guard or camera.

Distribution for websites using SSL providers

Using a web server such as Apache or Nginx can work as a middleman to establish secure back and forth communication between server and browser. Servers such as these are highly customizable due to their open-source nature.

As a web developer, you can use its source code and adapt its many modules to suit your site’s needs, e.g. specific modules to help with security, password authentication, URL rewriting, and more.

Website integrity and trust

You’ll want to use HTTPS if you need intruders and potential hackers to be kept at bay. They need to be far removed from tampering with your website. From scripts and images to cookies and HTML, any unprotected resource that travels between website and user can be exploited by a hacker if you don’t have HTTPS protection.

SSL Certificates Categories:

  • Extended Validation: Entrust EV is currently the most popular technology in this category.
  • Root Authority: LetsEncrypt is the most trusted by all major certificates.
  • Wildcard

An intrusion can occur at any time and at any part of the network, including a Wi-Fi hotspot, user computer, or mobile phone to name a few. When you have an SSL certificate and HTTPS website protection, the browser will display a green lock right by its URL bar. This increases the audience’s trust in you – people only visit secure websites that they can feel safe at.

A lot of WordPress hosting services will offer their SSL certificates for a nominal fee, allowing successful website https configuration and your site’s HTTPS status to be shared for the World Wide Web. More expensive certificates are also available that can be registered to specific web properties. Different services offer different types of certificates for different prices.

Flexible SSL vs Full SSL

As an example, with a content delivery network such as Cloudflare, your site can gain HTTPS status for free if you use a multi-domain SSL certificate. Services such as Cloudflare are useful for developers who don’t want to keep up to date with SSL certificate expiration or run into problems configuring their SSL, as all of this can be managed with a click of a button.

User privacy and security

One of the most common misconceptions about people who create websites is that HTTPS is only needed to handle sensitive data and communication, but this is not the right way to look at the whole picture. Any unprotected HTTP request can reveal a lot of info about the user identity.

Hackers can aggregate data about your site’s users and make inferences about their intentions and behaviours, working to de-anonymize user identity. If a user visits an unprotected fake website, for instance posing as a real medical site, they could disclose an array of personal health information to their employers.
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Search Engine Optimization

Whether you’re running an artisanal bakery or casino lastschrift with WordPress, it’s of utmost priority for your website to pop up on either the first or second pages of Google search results. People need to find what they’re looking for, and they cling to these pages for guidance.

One of the most common methods to improve your ranking is to analyze keywords and see what people are searching for, using online tools such as Google Analytics. You can add the most popular and trending keywords to your images, titles, paragraphs, and much more.

But how does HTTPS affect Search Engine Optimization and boosts your website’s ranking? We can look at the most popular search engine Google for an answer. This company wanted a way that secure sites could be more easily found, so the search engine goes through and looks at HTTPS. It’s now one of the most important factors that will lead users to sites through a Google search, so if your website is protected by HTTPS, it’ll be visible on most search engines, and most likely, high up in the pecking order, too. If your website is similar to a competitor’s in almost every way, but they don’t have HTTPS and you do, you’ll have an obvious advantage.

So what about mobile devices? Google is indexing mobile devices, making their algorithms turn towards the mobile versions of sites and giving these a greater weight in SEO rankings. For mobile sites to be indexable, Google recommends migrating toward secure sites that implement HTTPS.

PCI compliance

If you’re in charge of eCommerce websites, HTTPS is vital if you want your site to be compliant with Payments Card Industry standards. The PCI is a set of operational and technical requirements mandated by credit card companies and banks to ensure that card transactions can be processed securely across the internet. The main set of rules known as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards was established to keep credit card user data safe.

Requirement 4 of these standards recommends that all the best website builders need to use strong cryptography and security measures so that transmitted data is never intercepted or compromised – this is where HTTPS configuration comes into play. The requirement forbids card payments from taking place anywhere other than on HTTPS sites with SSL certificates.

When you’re looking at getting an effective SSL certificate for your site, you should look for the following:

  • TLS versions higher than 1.1
  • Cyphers of at least 128 bits in size
  • DH parameters of at least 2048 bits
  • Strong cypher suites
  • Strong private keys
  • No export suites
  • No anonymous key exchanges
  • No insecure compression or renegotiation
  • A trusted company from a trusted Certificate Authority

To configure your SSL certificate and use HTTPS, there’s no hocus pocus to it, you’ll simply want to follow these steps:

  • Create private and public key pairs.
  • Prepare a CSR (Certificate Signing Request), including any information you have about the organization and the public key.
  • Based on your CSR, request an HTTPS certificate from an appropriate certification authority.
  • Install your signed-and-certified HTTPS certificate on your web server.

Your website will be better off with HTTPS

Along with an increase in internet traffic comes ever more increasing complexity – hackers, SEO, data, and much more. The internet is full of surprises, but we hope that you’ve taken our thoughts on board and will incorporate HTTPS into your site. By encrypting your traffic to WordPress site with SSL certificates, nobody will be able to snoop on user data, and the green lock icon in their browser bar will be seen as a symbol of trust.

In combination with this, everybody will be able to find your trustworthy site, as search engines such as Google will give priority to HTTPS sites. These are all great reasons to get familiar with HTTPS and incorporate it into your site today. Here at Ninja Team HQ, we recommend using Cloudflare SSL to get your WordPress sites to work with TSL vulnerabilities at scale.

When you’re choosing a website builder, what do you look for? Tell us your thoughts on website builders or anything on HTTPS in the comments section below.

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Guest Author

Thomas Glare is a passionate freelance content writer, always striving to inspire others and bring insight into the endless possibilities of the modern times we are currently living. He continues to improve his knowledge and is the co-designer of a Book of ra deluxe, one of the most popular games from Novomatics.

Top 10 WordPress SEO Plugins for Optimizing Your Websites

Okay, guys. Listen.

Your WordPress website might have great content, but you will end up being highly problematic if it isn’t SEO efficiently optimized. Right?

Your website won’t show up in the search results that will decrease your chances of significantly boosting traffic as a result. So you need to take WordPress SEO into consideration if you want to increase your website traffic.

But how can you execute if you’re not SEO savvy?

In this article, we’ll talk about the top 10 best SEO plugins for WordPress that can help your website operate faster and increase chances of your site’s presence in search engines.

These plugins won’t guarantee high search engine rankings immediately, but they’ll definitely improve your chances of SEO success.

Let’s get started!

1. WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress SEO by Yoast

With over 5 million active installs and thousands of 5-star ratings, WordPress SEO by Yoast can be seen as the best WordPress SEO plugin for almost all WordPress blogs.

If you’re a newcomer and looking for a tool to optimize your website for SEO, this plugin is definitely for you with various useful features like keyword placement, presence of focus keyword in URL, title, meta descriptions, etc, Yoast is what you should use.

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With Yoast SEO plugin, you can get an SEO score of your posts and pages showing how well they are optimized. It also gives suggestions on how to improve the SEO score.

WordPress SEO by Yoast readability

The score takes several metrics into account such as the number of words on the page, number of internal and external links, use of focus keyword on the page, use of headings, and more.

In addition to SEO score, you also get a readability score showing how readable the content on a page is. This will truly improve the content and make and make it easier for reader to follow.

WordPress SEO by Yoast readability

When you look at this, it’s easy to see what you’ve done right and if you’ve done anything wrong. In the event that a green check mark is absent from a particular line, you can take a look at the issue before publishing – for example, heading back to your meta description to make some modifications.

I highly recommend this wonderful SEO plugin for WordPress. It’ll never let you down.

2. Rank Math

Rank Math

Rank Math can be seen as the Swiss army knife of WordPress SEO and it will live up to your expectations just because Rank Math has everything you need in an SEO plugin.

Yeah, everything!

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There are many features to focus on, with some of my favorites including:

  • Very quick and easy to set up
  • Advanced redirection manager
  • Connect Google Webmasters and Google Keyword trends tool
  • SEO and Content analysis

You can run an SEO analysis for your post and pages. But, it can do better than that. Rank Math provides rich snippets support, XML sitemaps creation, redirection manager, 404 monitoring, etc.

Rank Math

3. All in One SEO Pack

All in One SEO Pack

If you don’t want to use Yoast SEO, why don’t you give the All in One SEO Pack a try?

The name pretty much explains it all.

All in One SEO pack provides advanced features to optimize your site’s SEO and can be a powerful Yoast SEO alternative.

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All in One SEO Pack

The primary benefit of this plugin is that you don’t need any experience to get started. If you can read and you can input the right data in the right fields, then you can use this plugin.

Overall, All in One SEO Pack offers a comprehensive set of features to become your SEO powerhouse. It may be quite difficult to set up so WP beginners who are unfamiliar with SEO jargons may find it quite not easy.

4. Image SEO Optimizer

Image-SEO-Optimizer-Plugin-Free-Version

Image SEO Optimizer plugin will help you to get more organic traffic from Google Images. This plugin uses artificial intelligence to automatically rename images’ files and ALT texts with SEO friendly content.

If you have been lazy with alt texts, the bulk option allows you to optimize thousands of images in a single click. The plugin is not free, but it’s an incredible time-saver.

ImageSEO also includes an open graph builder, so you can generate beautiful sharable previews for Social Media.

Design your social media cards in ImageSEO plugin WordPress dashboard

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You can also add metadata to social media card as well — this option is optimized for Twitter.

Key features:

  • ALT tags optimization
  • Image names optimization
  • Empty ALT tag checker
  • Open Graph tag builder

5. Broken Link Checker

Broken Link Checker

As you create more and more content, you’ll find one thing to be true: it can be difficult to keep up with the management of your blog.

This is where tools like Broken Link Checker plugin can help.

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The name pretty much explains it all, this plugin checks your content for broken links and missing images.

Some of the top features include:

  • Ability to monitor links in posts, pages, comments and even custom fields.
  • Detects any link that doesn’t work.
  • The option to give broken links a different appearance in posts.
  • The option to prevent search engines from following broken links.

It’s greatly beneficial that the plugin can keep an eye on your website and inform any broken links. This allows you to concentrate on what you do best such as composing content.

The Broken Link Checker plugin is both easy-to-use and powerful. With more than 400,000 active installs and a high rating, it’s worth checking out.

6. SEO Squirrly

SEO Squirrly

SEO Squirrly is developed for those who are not proficient in SEO by providing a complete SEO suite without any complicated elements.

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You start by typing in your article topic. The desired keyword is also appeared so that when you continue writing your content, a series of green lights is activated in real-time. It’s almost like you have an expert whispering into your ear as you’re writing.

SEO Squirrly

Another noticeable feature of this SEO plugin that outperforms the rivals is the live SEO assistant feature.

SEO Squirrly

You just have to enter the desired keyword that you’re trying to rank for with the article you’re writing. As you write, green lights and pop-up suggestions will show up at once in real time explaining how you can work with keywords in your content.

It’s kinda having an SEO expert standing next to you while you’re writing — that’s what you get with SEO Squirrly.

Cool, right?

7. SEMrush Writing Assistant

SEMrush Writing Assistant

Are you looking for a SEO writing assistant for your content?

If yes, SEMrush Writing Assistant is exactly what you are looking for. This plugin helps you optimize your content by analyzing the top 10 ranking pages for your keyword.

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Some of the notable features that I like about this plugin:

  • keyword recommendations and article word count based on top 10 ranking pages
  • plagiarism checker
  • check for overly optimized keywords.

The plugin analyzes your content and gives you scores based on how SEO-friendly the writing is. This plugin also puts forward suggestions to explain how to improve your content for SEO purposes.

It lists down the top keywords, readability, content score, average word count, etc.

SEMrush Writing Assistant

SEMrush Writing Assistant

With these useful recommendations, your content strategy will be more competitive and outrank your rivals.

8. WPtouch Mobile Plugin

WPtouch Mobile Plugin

Is your WordPress website mobile friendly?

This probably may not have been a great concern in the past. But, at the moment, it’s a must.

If you do not have enough time, money and resources to upgrade your site on your own, then you can switch to the WPtouch Mobile Plugin.

This plugin “automatically adds a simple and elegant mobile theme for mobile visitors to your WordPress website.”

Easy enough, right?

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This plugin only displays to those who are non-mobile visitors. It simply makes sure that any mobile visitors to your website can review your content in a seamless manner.

It’s obvious that your WordPress website needs to be mobile friendly if you want to compete with your rivals. So, let’s grab WPtouch Mobile Plugin today and give it a go.

WPtouch Mobile Plugin

9. SEO Optimized Images

SEO Optimized Images

Images are vitally important, right?

When using WordPress, adding images to posts and pages is a piece of cake. But, that doesn’t ensure that you’ll optimize each one for page performance.

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With SEO Optimized Images plugin, you can automatically add optimized alt and title tags to your images in less than 5 minutes. All you need to do is to activate the plugin and it will automatically add effective alt tags to all the images.

Easy stuff, right?

If you want to avoid any image-related SEO mistakes in the future, make sure to use this plugin. It’ll help your SEO as well as saving you time.

10. The SEO Framework

The SEO Framework

The SEO Framework plugin is born for those who want a fast, lightweight SEO plugin for WordPress without any ads. We are fond of this WordPress plugin because it’s built for small-scale enterprises rather than large corporations.

Here’s the plugin’s tagline:

“The SEO Framework is a reliable, accessible, unbranded, fully automated, and rigorously optimized SEO plugin for your website.”

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Its interface is self-explanatory and blends naturally when integrated with WordPress. The plugin offers a colored scale showing you exactly how to optimize each post for search engines.

All you need to do is to read notes showing ways to improve certain pages when you hover your cursor over the bars in the SEO column. The screenshot below explains how the title can be improved for SEO purposes.

The SEO Framework demo

The SEO Framework can be seen as one of the best free SEO plugins and does not pop up any ads while you’re working. Overall, we’re happy with the way this lightweight plugin performs.

11. SEOPress

SEOPress

SEOPress is another newcomer that’s making its mark on the market. The plugin can be used to improve your website’s SEO presence, increase traffic, or create sitemaps.

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You will find a bunch of handy tools and features in SEOPress that are not available in other WordPress SEO plugins.

SEOPress demo

Essentially, what SEOPRess aims to do is to help your website improve ranking in search engines and increase your website’s traffic.

Final thoughts

You need to prioritize SEO. I simply can’t underline how critically important it is.

If you have a WordPress website, there are hundreds of plugins at your fingertips, but we think you should pay attention to the top ten that we’ve covered above. We’re confident that you’ll find this list is a useful reference for adding SEO plugins to your WordPress site.

Some WordPress SEO plugins help maximize the power of your content and keywords, while others focus on image and graphic optimization. For example, you can even use multiple plugins at the same time such as RankMath and ImageSEO. One to strengthen your verbal content and another one to enhance thousands of WordPress media library files.

Do you have any experience with the plugins we have written about? What is your favorite one? Any say about these? Please leave your comments down below.

Thank y’all and warm welcome from Ninja Team! 😍