A sitemap is the file that you specify to let the search engines know about the pages, videos, and images hosted on your website. By creating a sitemap, you can specify which pages are important, when they were last updated, and how often they were changed as well as alternate language versions (if any). You may also create an HTML version of the sitemap for your visitors to allow them to easily navigate your website.
Client Hints is a new feature introduced by Google on Chrome browser and is later adopted by other browsers and included in the HTTP specifications. Client Hints was developed to help deliver responsive web easier and faster, and also makes it easier for webmasters to markup less code.
Google is introducing new search algorithms such as mobile-first indexing and passage ranking as well as new frameworks like advanced mobile pages (AMP). Page load time is a key factor in search rankings, and more and more users are searching from mobile devices than desktop. The key takeaway from this is (1) speed and (2) mobile-friendly.
Internet is a part of our lives, and can no longer live without it. We use it to check our daily weather forecast, read morning news briefs, trade stocks, and listen to our favorite music on Spotify. More people are using smartphones to access the world wide web (WWW) than desktop PCs, and this trend will continue to shift toward mobile. The Internet has been around since January of 1983, and someone had to manage it.
Development of heat maps dated back to the 19th century to provide a graphical representation of complex data so that it is easier for humans to analyze at-a-glance. Back then, a gray-scale shading was used to depict data patterns and the darker color was used to indicated dense values while lighter color was used to depict lesser values. A few applications of heat maps include depicting weather reports, real estate market data, and financial market analysis. The beauty of using heat maps is that you don't have to read a table of data in rows and columns to understand complex data, but rather view a simple colored map to grasp the big picture of data representation.
When a browser requests a webpage, the server returns the response with an HTTP status code. Regardless of whether the server fulfills your request, the server will always return a status code to indicate the response was successful. If the server fails to return a response, the status code will indicate why it failed. The HTTP Status Code is returned as a part of the HTTP response header from the webserver.
A user agent is a string sent to the webserver when a page is requested by a browser. User Agent is a request header that is included with other HTTP headers and sent by the browser to identify itself which operating system and type of browser it is. The user agent is sent with every HTTP request it makes to a web server. Each browser provides a built-in user agent string when making a request, but this string can be changed by a user.
One of the best features of chromium browsers including Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, and Brave is the ability to install browser extensions and add capabilities not built into the browser. There are thousands of browser extensions, and we have hand-picked a handful of "free" extensions that are useful to digital marketers. We've displayed the extensions in no particular order, so explore the extensions and see if it's worth to you.
Web browsers today offer a built-in password manager, and auto-populate username and password on the websites you visit. This is a very convenient feature offered by virtually all web browser makers including Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge. The question is whether you can trust browser password managers to store your passwords without a security risk.
Google Analytics keeps track of website visitors as users, and it uses the Client ID stored in the browser cookie to determine it. Google Analytics stores _ga cookie in the user's browser and the browser sends cookie data to a web server every time it makes a request. To view your Google Analytics (GA) cookie for a specific site, you may use developer tools available on your browser to view them. For example, on Google Chrome you may click the F12 key -> Applications Tab -> Cookies to view them. An example of "_ga" cookie looks like below:
WordPress is the most popular website builder platform that hosts up to 75 million websites on the Internet today. Despite its core being secure, hackers and other mischievous characters have compromised security for millions of self-hosted sites. The following 8 reasons describe why you need to secure your Wordpress website, and how to achieve them.
Bounce rate is a metric used to measure the percentage of visitors leaving your website after only 1-page view and nothing on the website. If a visitor lands on a web page and bounces back with no additional engagement after viewing the landing page, you have a bounce rate of 100% for that visit. By improving the quality of your website, you can lower your bounce rate and increase pages per session.
A reverse proxy is a server that sits in front of the webserver, intercepts the request, and either respond to the client with a response from its cache or forward the request to the origin server. A reverse proxy is used to protect the web servers from DDoS attacks, distribute load amongst multiple servers, and utilize its cache to serve static contents without sending requests to the origin server. No client will communicate directly with the server, and the server's IP address will not be revealed to the public.
You cannot afford slow loading pages if you are operating on the online platform. Internet users want quick access to information. You have seconds to capture and keep their interest. If they have to wait for your site to load, you will lose them.
It is important to carry out speed tests to determine page loading speeds. There are tools you can use, such as Google PageSpeeds. If you determine that there is a problem, you need a way to fix them. Our article will share with you six reasons why your website is slow and how to fix them.
The average eCommerce conversion rates fall around 1% to 2%, and it measures the checkout rates which don't include newsletter signup or abandoned carts with customer emails. If you have a brand new website, the conversion rate may fall far below 1% despite advertising on Facebook, Google Ads, and other comparison shopping engines. It is harder and harder to make money from online stores, and the average conversion rate continues to decline for new merchants.
One of the biggest challenges with online stores is detecting and preventing fraudulent orders. Fraudsters attempt to use stolen credit cards to purchase goods online, and sometimes such transactions do go through without detection. If a fraud chargeback occurs, it is the merchant's responsibility to prove to the bank that the charge was made legitimately. If you can't prove the legitimacy, the money will be withdrawn from your bank and you can't do much about it.
When you're in-market to purchase a product and find a very attractive price but the website doesn't look very professional. Would you take the risk and purchase the product at the site where it offers the best price, or will you research the product and determine if the company is legitimate before purchasing a product?
Slow websites not only hurt your search engine rankings, but also lead visitors to leave your website and decrease visitor engagement and conversions. A couple of extra seconds to load a webpage has a huge "negative" impact on bounce rate, page views, and customer satisfaction. This is especially true for eCommerce websites where conversion is of utmost importance. Nearly 50% of the visitors expect a webpage to load in less than 2 seconds, and the vast majority will exit out of the page if load time exceeds 3 or more seconds.
Most casual users only take a glance at the green HTTPS padlock when they open up a website, not paying attention to some of the more precise details of the platform itself. In practice, this is most often a good way of telling if a site is safe. But, there's one question that a growing number of privacy-oriented users are asking - as most websites nowadays can boast with HTTPS, can such a feature maintain the same reputation and security levels as before? In this post, we go into the details of HTTPS to find out if it can be enough to protect your online privacy and security.
As a webmaster, we often run website speed test and learn that use of the cookie-free domains will improve website performance. A cookie-free domain saves network traffic by not sending cookie data with HTTP request.
Magento is one of the most widely used eCommerce platforms behind Shopify and WooCommerce. With popularity comes with increased security risks, and many Magento sites often become the target of hacker's attack as customer data amassed from online stores is worth a lot in the black market. Magento has a scalable architecture with many plugins to offer features not available on other platforms, but the biggest problem for average webmasters is keeping the website secure from hackers. In recent years, many Magento sites are converted to Shopify due to security and maintenance reasons. In this article, we'll discuss a few simple steps to secure Magento Websites.
Wordpress is the most popular blogging platform and it represents about 34% of all websites hosted worldwide. With gained popularity, hackers target Wordpress websites to infect with malware and viruses. As your site grows in traffic, hackers find your website through search engines and infect with malicious codes or redirect users to another website. There are known vulnerabilities in every open-source platform including Wordpress, and it is important to update your site with the latest patches and protect your website from hackers by securing your site. In this article, we'll discuss simple steps to secure Wordpress website.
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a geographically distributed network of servers working together to provide fast delivery of web contents. Use of CDN makes the webpage load faster by transferring web contents including HTML pages, JS, CSS, Images and even video files from the distributed servers geographically closer. Some of the most popular javascript libraries, fonts and CSS frameworks are hosted on public CDNs, and utilizing such CDNs for your web pages will improve your site performance. Use of CDN may also help protect your website from DDoS attacks.
Nearly every website and smartphone apps we use require you to create an account. Creating an account means you'll have to create a username and password. Some websites allow you to use your email address as the username, but you'll have to create a password for each website or an app you intend to use. Due to strong password requirements, many websites mandate a hard-to-guess password that is comprised of letters, numbers and symbols. Some websites require capital letters while others won't allow certain character symbols. You tried to use one password for every website (or an app), but the password you created in the past doesn't meet a new password requirement so you're creating a new one with some variations. Having to use one password for every website is dangerous as not all websites are bullet-proof to hackers, and they are all vulnerable to some level of security threats. Our memory cannot even keep up with a half-dozen passwords, and having to remember all password used is next to impossible. Some folks write down the password in a notebook (or in a cloud), but we all learned that storing password is not a good thing to do. So, how do we keep up with all the passwords we created for each website and smartphone apps we use?
Incognito mode, or sometimes called private mode by various browsers, is basically a means to provide some level of anonymity for users while browsing the Internet. These browsers such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari accomplish this by making sure all of the information that you are viewing and entering onto the website is not stored on your machine. Essentially, running in incognito mode disables storing of browsing history, cookies, site data and forms you've filled. This way, the user ensures that whatever content they are viewing cannot be later found from searching on the same machine they're using.
Technology has come a long way and is constantly evolving every day and it's no exception with geolocation. Thanks to this, geolocation has found a very strong and everyday use in today's world. RFID (radio frequency identification) tags have come about as a result of this and function as neat little devices which can be tagged to other items that have no means of connecting to the Internet. Through this, one can then geolocate these tags and their tagged objects.
Not everyone likes to be interrupted by unprecedented Ads. To block such ads, you'll have to use a software generally referred as Ad blocker. This is a content filter and is an ad blocking extension which can be added to most popular browsers. The Ad Blocking extensions work on Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Firefox, Opera, and Microsoft Edge.
With hacking attacks going to the next level, most websites have become more vigilant to shield every possible cyber-attack. Captcha is something that has been around for some time now and several top websites incorporate captcha. Captcha is a challenge-response test provided over the website. This is used to determine if the user is a human or an automated bot. Captcha was first formed in 1997 and was officially introduced in 2003 by John Langford, Nicholas Hopper, Luis von Ahn, and Manuel Blum.
A Web browser also referred commonly as "browser" is a software which is used to access World Wide Web (www). The browser identifies individual URLs and displays the corresponding page on the user's device.
The web has evolved several changes since its inception, starting from Web 1.0 which forms the most rudimentary form of a web. Next going on to more advanced forms of Web which were called as Web 2.0.
JSP is also referred as Java server pages. It is a language used for web development and is similar to PHP or ASP. It is used extensively for dynamic web page generation. JSP was first released in 1999 by Sun Microsystems.
Dark web forms a part of the Deep web which cannot be indexed by search engines. These are a collection of websites that are publicly visible but can hide the IP addresses. This makes tracking of such websites difficult. A search engine will never be able to find such websites.
World Wide Web, also commonly referred to as www is a term we frequently hear about. Though this has become an integral part of our lives, many still feel it is same as the Internet. However, Internet and World Wide Web are closely linked and are two different entities. Internet refers to a global network of computers interconnected in a specific way. The World Wide Web or www is a collection of web resources and pages found over this network. To access the world wide web, a web browser is needed.
A webmaster is the position given to a person responsible for maintaining one or more websites of a company. The position came about for the need of having someone to fulfill these duties and after once it was required for there to be a single point of contact for those who administered a domain and as such, the "webmaster" title unofficially became tied to "web administrator".
As the prominence of technology continues, the advent of mobile technology will continue to grow and expand as well. For many developers, this means learning and understand mobile development intimately and being capable of not only identifying the differences between mobile web development and normal web development; but also knowing and understanding why these differences exist.
Web2.0 refers to websites on the World Wide Web (WWW) which focus on user-generated content, usability and ease of use, and interoperability between one website and other products, devices, or systems. To be perfectly clear, the term does not refer to an update of any specific language or application but rather; a change in the process involved with how developers web pages were created and used.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing and defining the presentation of a document written in some markup language such as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). As a matter of fact, next to HTML and JavaScript (JS), CSS is one of the core parts of the World Wide Web (WWW) to create visually engaging websites and user interfaces for both web applications and mobile applications.
PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP for short) is a language made for server-side scripting with a focus on web development; although, it can also be used as a general language tool. Although originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, its reference implementation is now managed by The PHP Group. Originally, “PHP” stood for Personal Home Page but since then, it became a recursive acronym for the full name of PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
JavaScript (JS) is a high-level interpreted programming language that is also considered to be dynamic, weakly typed, prototype-based, and multi-paradigm. Alongside Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), is one of the three core technologies of the World Wide Web (WWW). Its characteristics allow for the creation of dynamic web pages which can be interactive with users. It can be found employed commonly by most modern-day websites while all modern-day browsers support it without the need of any plugin through means of a built-in JavaScript Engine. Each JS Engine represents a different implementation of JS and is all based on the ECMAScript specification with some not supporting the spec fully while many others support it entirely and more features beyond it.
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language used for creating web pages and web applications. Alongside Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript (JS), it forms the triad of the World Wide Web (WWW). A web browser would typically receive HTML documents from either a web server or local storage. These documents are then rendered into multimedia web pages by the browser for viewing by a user and as such; one can say that these documents basically make up the structure of a web page semantically and originally, cues for the appearance of the document.
A Content Management System (CMS) is a computer application made with the goal of managing and creating digital content. Typically, the program will be capable of supporting multiple users at once in a collaborative environment. As such, they are very popular and common programs used when businesses build an online presence.
InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol which seeks to replace the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) with the goal of having a truly decentralized Internet by changing how data is communicated across the World Wide Web (WWW). This is accomplished by a decentralized network where all devices on the network have hypermedia content stored and content-addressed for sharing. This process makes it similar to the World Wide Web (WWW), however, it is very different as it creates another network which works alongside a file system. The protocol was realized in 2014 by using the Bitcoin blockchain protocol and network as its framework which allowed it to store immutable data, handle duplicated files, and obtain addressing information across the network. This led to achieving faster speeds, more reliable performance, and better security than HTTP and HTTPS although it is not popular nor commonplace.
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a protocol at the application layer of the Internet Protocol (IP) Suite. The protocol is used for distributed, collaborative, and hypermedia information systems which put it at the core of data communication across the World Wide Web (WWW). This means that when a user goes to a (distributed or collaborative information systems) website or loads any form of interactive media (hypermedia information systems), it is this protocol which transfers the information back and forth. Hypertext is structured text which has the feature of logical links (hyperlinks) between endpoints. This means that HTTP is literally the protocol to handle the transfer of hypertext.
In the world of technology which is constantly growing and improving comes with increased risks and security vulnerabilities that those with malicious intent seek to take advantage. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is one such method which is primarily used in web-applications to allow the attacker to inject client-side scripts onto web pages. This type of attack is called code injection. Unsuspecting users then view these web pages which then give the attacker a means of bypassing authorization for access controls. One such access control is the same-origin policy which follows that a script running on a web page is allowed to run on the same web page only if they are both of the same origin (URI scheme, hostname, and port number). Typically, this would prevent a malicious script from one web page to go to another web page and access sensitive data and information; however, XSS bypasses this by taking advantage of security flaws in web applications' servers or plug-in systems. Once the attacker has successfully taken advantage of one of these vulnerabilities and compromised the site, unsuspecting victims have basically granted the script the same level of permissions they would have given to the site, such as access to cookies. This would then allow the attacker to view any sensitive information a user might be inputting onto the site ranging from passwords to credit card information. The website's page content, session cookies, and browser-maintained information would all be accessible by the attacker at this point.
Do you know why you're creating a website? Are you trying to sell products online, provide customer support to your existing business, or make money from blogging or with affiliate marketing? Here are a few reasons why people build their websites.
Changing a web host is nuisance, but there is no reason to tolerate less then optimum service from your current web host if you're not happy with them. If you plan ahead, changing a web host may not be too bad and can be done without downtime or email disruptions. The most important thing to note is not to cancel your existing account until you're done. Even if you hate your current hosting provider, it's essential that you keep your account active until the transfer is complete. Cancelling the account ahead of time will make the transition difficult.
To create a website, you'll need to find a web host to place the files and publish your website. Choosing a good web host is tricky as there are hundreds of web hosts making all sorts of promises, but there are only a few that delivers what they promise. Your website requires 24x7 uptime, good performance, and with uninterrupted email services. A good web host delivers what you're looking for, while bad host will cause a lot of pain. This article provides the information you'll need to pick a good web host.
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