What does always-on SSL mean to your business?
SSL / TLS ensures that the connection between your device (phone, tablet, PC) and the website that you’re using is encrypted. This means that data you enter, whether it’s a simple search term or your name and address, can only be accessed by that website – not by a third party. Always-on SSL means that the whole website loads securely. Google will boost your search ranking if you use SSL The web is moving toward being ‘secure by default’ – and Google is one of the leading advocates of this process. Securing your entire website, with all pages loading over SSL/TLS will now count as a positive factor in ranking your site. Browsers may soon start warning your customers that your site is insecure Google Chrome has announced that sites that load over http:// (that is, most sites at this time) should be marked as ‘insecure’. Creating trust is a very important goal of most websites – it’s important to ensure that trust is not compromised by a browser warning. Always-on SSL is fast https:// previously could be significantly slower than http:// – not any more! If properly configured, there is no slowdown in your traffic. It’s affordable Securing your web traffic is…
Why might emails from your website end up in Spam?
Don’t lose potential customers! You have put a lot of effort into converting your website visitors – make sure you don’t lose them at the final hurdle. Here are some basic, and more advanced tips on how to ensure that emails from your website arrive correctly. First – check your setup. Send a regular test email via your website and make sure it gets through. You might have several forms on your site so make sure you test them all. Keep it simple – minimise the number of forms, and the number of email addresses they go to. Save the messages on your site – if you use a good form plugin, such as Gravity Forms, the submissions from your forms will be saved, so even if you lose or accidentally delete the email, the information is backed up. Now some more technical reasons why your mails might not be getting through. TLDR make sure you have correct SPF records and DKIM signing SPF records Your domain should have an SPF record – this is a DNS record which sets out which servers are allowed to send email from your domain. A receiving server should check there is one, and…
Web design as a profession
Are we web designers a trustworthy profession? This week I’ve been involved in a couple of incidents that have reminded me that high standards might not be as universal as we’d like. Being held hostage over Domains Registered in the web companies’ name The first was a new customer who wanted to move to us because his existing provider was charging him for a lot of small updates, and because we were more local. Of course we were very happy to welcome him on board, and I looked at his site and was pleased to see it was WordPress – it needed an upgrade so I offered to do this at no cost as part of the move to our hosting. Then the domains – alarm bells rang when I saw that his existing provider had registered the domains to themselves. Sure enough, they refused to release their customer, demanding an exorbitant sum to give back access to the domain that he understood belonged to him. Then about 2 days later, a similar story. A new customer, we had to help track down the domain, which eventually led back to a previous web designer. And again before he would release…