Seattle WordPress Development and Consulting

Keep Your WordPress Site Secure

hscreative — Tue, 03 Oct 2017 22:33:20 +0000

Good WordPress Security: A Secure WordPress site is an important concern for many of our WordPress clients in Seattle. Here are a few tips to better help keep your WordPress site safe and secure.

Keep your WordPress installation, themes and plugins up-to-date

Each new version of WordPress comes with enhanced security and updates to address potential vulnerabilities in the previous versions. Keeping your site current on the latest stable release version of WordPress is probably the single most overlooked security measures you can take.

Use only plugins from trusted sources.

We suggest doing your research before adding any plugin to your site. The WordPress plugin repository is the most trustworthy place to download plugins. There is a team of volunteers that review plugins to make sure they abide by a strict set of guidelines before they’re added. The repository is constantly under the watchful eyes of the community and if anything malicious is added to a plugin after it’s been approved, it’s removed until it’s fixed.

Add a WordPress security plugin and do not use “admin” as your username.

We always recommend that our Seattle clients utilize a security plugin with their WordPress website. There are several popular WordPress security plugins to choose from. A good security plugin scans your WordPress installation for malware infections and will notify you instantly if any vulnerabilities are found, it will notify you. A good security plugin will also block brute-force attacks and can add two-factor authentication via SMS.

Use a Strong Password

The weakest point in any security for your online accounts is usually your password. Password-cracking techniques have matured quickly and significantly in the past few decades, but the way we create our passwords hasn’t kept pace. As a result, the most common advice you’ll hear about creating a strong password today is very outdated and impractical. There are many different approaches to generating a strong password, but password managers and passphrases are the best.

If you have any questions about WordPress security or would like a complimentary review of your Seattle Wordpress site’s security measures, feel free to contact us!

Why use WordPress?

hscreative — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 20:26:05 +0000

Our small team here at HS Creative has years of experience developing human-centric WordPress sites for our clients. Here are just a few reasons why we love WordPress and why its sure to be a great fit for your business.

WordPress is the World’s #1 most popular CMS

WordPress is used by 59.2% of all the websites whose content management systems we know about. That’s an astounding 74,652,825 websites or 26.2% of ALL the websites online are now using WordPress. Because of this we typically find our clients are already familiar with WordPress and thus requiring less training time.

Search engine and SEO friendly

WordPress is optimized for organic SEO (search engine optimization) and getting your site in front of searches on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others. Google Engineer Matt Cutts once said, “WordPress automatically solves a ton of SEO issues.”

WordPress is written using standard compliance highest quality code and produces semantic markup with making your site attractive to search engines. By design, WordPress is very SEO friendly, but there are a few plugins we use to boost SEO performance with every site we build.

Accessibility

WordPress sites are built using simple accessible technology. WordPress can be installed on both Windows or Linux servers, using free licensing software. Your site’s pages render in HTML and CSS which works of phones, tablets, and alternative browsers for people with disabilities.

Integration

WordPress easily integrates with some of the most powerful platforms around. Need to send customers emails? You can use a service like MailChimp. Need to sell a product or get paid for services? WordPress can work with some of the most popular payment gateways in the world.

Effective Responsive Layouts

WordPress is the ideal platform for developing responsive websites helping to make your content pop on any device. Mobile devices are quickly becoming the most popular way to browse the web. Mobile has already surpassed desktop usage, in fact, Google recently reported that more than 25% of all search queries are done on a mobile device. We build all of our sites using a responsive design to deliver a consistent user experience on all browsers. Using CSS and JavaScript we adapt our layouts to viewports of varying sizes from mobile phones all the way up to giant televisions.

Security

We often hear claims that WordPress is not secure, however, evidence shows that managed currently WordPress is an extremely secure CMS platform. WordPress takes security very seriously and employs both server level and client level security measures, along with added layers of security from plugins and user best practices.

WordPress Makes Life Easy

hscreative — Wed, 12 Jul 2017 15:49:34 +0000

We are often asked by clients who come to us with older websites and are considering a move to a WordPress system what the benefits would be, so we thought we’d list a few of the “biggies” here.

In-House Content Management
The big obvious benefit to establishing a WordPress platform for your website is that it enables the website to be easily administrated internally, with minimal training. A variety of user security levels can be applied for different levels of access such as authors, editors and administrators, and when editing a page the system is much like editing a Microsoft Word document. Easy peasy!

Some clients are so busy they prefer to have us perform updates on their behalf, but still like the idea of being able to “drive their own car” if they wish. Many clients will perform simple content updates themselves, and call on us when they have more complicated changes they need done. Companies who are still paying a web developer to perform simple page copy updates should definitely take a hard look at making a change.

When we do a website redesign for a client, one-on-one training on the WordPress system is always included. We can also travel to businesses to train groups on WordPress administration.

Reliable, Adaptable and Expandable
WordPress has proven to be a reliable system and is infinitely flexible and expandable. For designers, it’s a dream to work with because we can lay out amazing templates and rely on a strong infrastructure to hold our design together over time, producing easily navigable world-class websites that are affordable for our clients. Our clients are happy to know their new WordPress site can accommodate branding changes, marketing adjustments and other visual tweaks without ripping anything apart. Time and again we have seen clients with WordPress websites save thousands when confronted with the prospect of a major look and feel overhaul that with another system would be a nightmare to implement.

Mobile Friendly Responsive Layouts
You know those websites that have separate mobile systems? That costs as much as it sounds. There is no need to go to those lengths, as responsive websites become more prevalent and pre-packaged responsible themes are available for WordPress systems. Beware, however – not all WordPress out-of-the-box themes are truly responsive. We work with our clients to make sure that their site is truly responsive and compatible with mobile devices of any size.

We’re happy to answer your WordPress questions – give us a shout!