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On most web hosting platforms and every other environment requiring user login, it is recommended that users change their passwords after a certain time period. This provides an additional security layer to protect their network and servers. They also want users on their WordPress sites to change passwords after every few months. In this article, we will show you how to force users to change passwords in WordPress by expiring their passwords after a given time period

To expire user passwords after a period, first, thing to do is install and activate the WP Password Policy Manager plugin. Upon activation, you need to visit Settings » Password Policies page to configure the plugin settings

The first option on the settings page allows you to set number of days after which a user must change their password. After that there are options which allow you to enforce strong passwords.

You can set the minimum characters required in a password. You can also force users to use numbers and special characters in their passwords.

You can set the plugin to remember previous user passwords. This is useful incase a user forgets that they have changed their password. The plugin can then show them a notice that they are entering an older password which is no longer valid.

Lastly, ‘Reset All User’s Passwords’ button allows you to quickly reset passwords. This will immediately expire all user passwords in WordPress.
Don’t forget to click on the save changes button to store your settings.

Credit: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/708/How-to-force-WordPress-users-to-change-their-passwords.html

It is not enough to plan a positioning strategy, communicate to customers, and attract customers to the brand, store or place of purchase. The desired positioning strategy must reflect in the product brand or store. In a study conducted on retail outlet over 60 percent of the stores do not represent their product positioning strategy. A major point of disparity was their layout strategy. The business failed in some respect to present the image, quality, and services elements which their advertising communicates.

Most business boasts of prompt service, quality products, and courteous personnel. Once this becomes the company’s positioning strategy, management must ensure that customers get just that. Any deviation will send a wrong signal, a signal of deception, which could hurt the business image.

Good layout is a well recognized way of supporting the positioning strategy and sales program of a business. Often times, some businesses do not even understand the requirements for good layout. The principles we examine below apply to all businesses, small, medium scale or large.
The layout must match customers buying habits. In considering this factor, the business must ensure that its layout considers the array of impulse goods which customers need to see as they shop, make inquiries, and pay for the products they have bought. It also needs to be arranged so that convenient goods do take very little time to pick and pay for. The position of payment counter needs to be considered so that as customers make their payments, they also have the opportunity of viewing the countless display of convenience and impulse goods which they could easily pick up.

Merchandise display
Most customers want to compare products before making final decision. The availability of merchandise on display aids this process. This is particularly for products that involves price, style, or design alternatives. In doing this, the shop manager needs to remember that some products needs to be locked in showcases to prevent shoplifting.

Customer services
Customer services could include almost anything from pleasant surroundings, courteous personnel, convenient passageways, escalators or stairs, to Credit policy, delivery, return policies, and neat rest rooms.

Physical Surroundings
Business must make the best possible use of light, ventilation, and heat. These are all components of the customers’ assessment of the businesses and help the customers to build trust in the burliness

Organization of Merchandise
Related lines of merchandize should be displayed or placed on counters near each other. Men’s shirts and trousers are a classic example. Another is placing tooth pastes and tooth brushes close to each other.

Separation of Activities
Good layout always separate selling from non- selling activities. However, it is generally acknowledged that the prime selling space in the store is the front space. Activities such as telephone, repairs, wrapping, credit offices, and mailing should be located at rear areas.

Visual spaciousness
This concept has been widely abused in layout planning. For reasons of theft, secrecy in certain transaction, and confidentially in office processes, barriers are mounted in some stores to the extent that the customer cannot clearly view the floor space as much as possible. Research supports the position that most customers prefer being able to see other departments when shopping. If Possible, the entire floor should visible to customers, employees, and Managers. Research also supports the position that employees prefer at least a visual contact with other employees. It is recommended that visual spaciousness be used effectively if customers will not be inconvenienced and forced to looked for places that offer better comfort.

Fixtures
Fixture should reflect the desired image. If the appeal is to children, the fixture should reflect that position. If it is to women, the appeal should reflect a feminine atmosphere. The unisex movement is gradually making serous inroads and needs consideration if that is the appeal.

Floor space
Allocating floor space to each merchandise should be guided by the relative sales value of different parts of the store. Motion studies provide a lot of assistance in this regard. Studies have shone that most new shoppers turn to the right when they enter the store. Convenience goods and impulse goods will therefore be better placed by the right turn of the store. The front of the store records more traffic than the than the rear positions. It is therefore important to consider the type of merchandise offered before allocating floor space

Additional Notes: Explaining the Positioning Strategy and its relations with layout

Positioning strategy simply refers to stating to customers what a product means, and how it differs from current and potential competing products. This distinction could be established through the product attribute, price/quality, application , product, user, or product class. In doing this, there is always the danger of confused positioning where buyers are unsure of what the company stands for, over-positioning where customers perceive the product as being expensive and fail to recognize the full breadth of the range; and over-positioning where the message is simply too vague and consumers have little real idea of what the organization stands for. The best positioning strategy will create some points-of-difference. These are attributes or benefits consumers strongly associate with a brand, positively evaluate, and believe that they could not find to the same extent with a competitive brand. Positioning strategy also seek to associate one’s offering with highly rated brands thereby seeking to enjoy the preference consumers attach to such brands (points-of-parity).

“if a company does an excellent job of positioning, then it can work out the rest of its market planning and differentiation from its positioning strategy”. Positioning to them is designing the company’s offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the mind of the target market.

Author: Fegalo Nsuke

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/your-company-layout-could-earn-you-loyal-customers-and-increased-sales.html

Magento and WooCommerce are well known favourites in creating e-commerce websites. But like in every decision making process, the choice of which application to use will be guided by the user's needs, budget, and experience. In this article, we examine the pros and cons of both Magento and WooCommerce and hope that we provide a guide to decisions on when to use Magento or WooCommerce to build your website.

Both have their advantages and disadvantages and we shall take a look at them to provide further guide.

Brief Look at Magento

Magento is a flexible and feature-rich open-source ecommerce solution. Curently, Magento's estimated is put at over 200,000.

There are two different Magento platforms available:

Magento Community Edition, which allows anyone to modify the core system to extend functionality and add plug-in modules.
Magento Enterprise Edition, which has the same core files as community, but has more features and functionality. This is designed for large businesses requiring tech support, installation, configuration and troubleshooting, and therefore costs some money.

Advantages of Magento

Multi-store allows you to operate more than one store from a single platform, for example if you want to run a store for the U.K market and another for the US market. This makes Magento a time-saving platform for your multiple store design.
Easy payment gateway setup as Magento is already integrated with PayPal, Google Checkout, SagePay and more, but you can also add your own payment options.
Analytics and reporting help improve your business intelligence. Assess your statistics, sales reports, product popularity and other business facts.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) features including SEO friendly URLs and customised meta-descriptions for each product.
Mobile optimisation ensures that the store translates well to smaller screens.
Magento is rich in features, including ones not widely available on other channels, for example you can manage more than one storefront, and it supports multi-currency and multi-language.
It's incredibly user-friendly with a simplistic backend, nicely organised store management features and easy navigation.
There's a free version in the form of Magento Community, with the option to upgrade to its more powerful big brother - but at a high cost. The free version is perfectly fine for most sellers though.
There's a large community of users there to help and support you. They also develop extensions and plugins (of which there are many available - another pro for Magento) including ones for CRM, inventory management, accounting, Magento eBay integration and so many more.
Its architecture has flexibility, allowing you to customise almost anything, so you can design your store to look exactly how you want it to be.
It's incredibly powerful (yes, even the free version) and can easily handle 10,000 products and more.

Disadvantages of Magento

While the community version is free, the Enterprise version is very much expensive - it can cost as much as $10,000 or more, which is well out of reach for the casual seller.
It can be incredibly hard to source decent Magento developers because of its huge and complicated codebase.
Because of its complexity (which is necessary to make Magento so flexible), making customisations can take a lot of time.

An overview of WooCommerce

WooCommerce WordPress' most popular plugin and is essentially a toolkit for turning your existing WordPress site into a fully functional store. It's free.

You can use WooCommerce to sell anything, including downloadables like eBooks, MP3's, video content and it's easy to customize with plenty of great-looking storefront templates to choose from, as well as the option to create your own unique designs so you can get your branding across. It also has a range of free and commercial extensions, so you can optimise your shop however you want.

Advantages of WooCommerce

WooCommerce is built to integrate with WordPress, which means it's a great option for those who are already using WordPress and are looking to build a webstore.
It's expandable, so you can add whatever features you want onto your store.
You're granted full control of your content and store.
WooCommerce has strong SEO capabilities thanks to WordPress, plus the dozens of SEO plugins available, so you can make your store more visible in search engines.
There are plenty of existing themes to choose from, many of which look sleek and professional.
A wide catalogue of extensions to choose from, including customer support, integration with Amazon's store, subscriptions, booking and more.
The number of products and categories is not limited.
There is a large number of users and support groups who are willing to help other users out.

Disadvantages of WooCommerce

The "free" price tag seems too good to be true - and can be. While WooCommerce is free, many of the other plugins aren't, and these are needed if you want to make a store that goes beyond the basics.
WooCommerce doesn't offer a hosted solution yet, which means you'll need to take care of security and other hosting issues yourself, or find a partner.

Which one is best for you?

Magento and WooCommerce offer similar features and functionality, so it's going to be a tough decision.

Both platforms are free, but they're both so basic that you'd need to jazz them up with a variety of extensions and plugins to create a serious online store. Magento offers more powerful stores for much larger businesses, but these cost a lot more than it would to simply throw a few extensions on a WooCommerce store.

Both are highly flexible and customisable options when it comes down to design, but Magento is slightly more powerful than WooCommerce, and is great if you're a developer who has the skill to create truly individual and beautiful stores. It's also far more expensive to find a Magento developer because they need to know the highly complex system really well.

Neither platform offers free support. The official Magento community is a great source for finding help with issues. WooCommerce lacks an equivalent alternative, although there are many WordPress and WooCommerce-centric forums out there where you could search for solutions to any issues.

Ultimately it comes down to your own personal circumstances, budget and experience. If you're a serious seller looking for a highly powerful store, have the money to pay developers or have the skill to do it yourself, and are looking to expand massively, then Magento is probably better for you. If you're a newer seller or if you already uses WordPress, then WooCommerce will probably be a better option

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/e-commerce-website-a-guide-to-the-choice-of-magento-or-woocommerce.html

A large number of websites run on WordPress. Estimates put WordPress ahead of Microsoft SharePoint, Blogger, Joomla and Drupal. It also means that WordPress is a large target for hackers.

Half of the WordPress sites out there are self-hosted, which means that the WordPress administrator carries the lion's share of responsibility for a secure installation. Out of the box, there are several ways that WordPress security can be tightened down, but only a fraction of sites actually do so. This makes WordPress an even more popular target for hackers.

In this post, we examine the issue of sql injection in WordPress and how to cope with it.

SQL Injection & URL Hacking.

WordPress is a database-backed platform that executes server-side scripts in PHP. Both of these characteristic can make WordPress vulnerable to malicious URL insertion attacks. Commands are sent to WordPress via URL parameters, which can be abused by hackers who know how to construct parameters that WordPress may misinterpret or act on without authorization.

SQL injection describes a class of these attacks in which hackers embed commands in a URL that trigger behaviors from the database. (SQL is the command language used by the MySQL database.) These attacks can reveal sensitive information about the database, potentially giving hackers entrance to modifying the actual content of your site. Many of today's web site defacement attacks are accomplished by some form of SQL Injection.

Other versions of URL hacks can trigger unintended PHP commands which, again, can lead to injecting malware or revealing sensitive information.

The defense: Most WordPress installations are hosted on the popular Apache web server. Apache uses a file named .htaccess to define the access rules for your web site. A thorough set of rules can prevent many types of SQL Injection and URL hacks from being interpreted.

The code below represents a strong set of rules that you can insert into your web site's .htaccess file that will strip URL requests of many dangerous attack injections:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^(HEAD|TRACE|DELETE|TRACK) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [F,L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} \.\.\/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} boot\.ini [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} tag\= [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ftp\: [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} http\: [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} https\: [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (\<|%3C).*script.*(\>|%3E) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} mosConfig_[a-zA-Z_]{1,21}(=|%3D) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} base64_encode.*\(.*\) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^.*(\[|\]|\(|\)|<|>|ê|"|;|\?|\*|=$).* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^.*(&#x22;|&#x27;|&#x3C;|&#x3E;|&#x5C;|&#x7B;|&#x7C.* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^.*(%24&x).* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^.*(%0|%A|%B|%C|%D|%E|%F|127\.0).* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^.*(globals|encode|localhost|loopback).* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^.*(request|select|insert|union|declare).* [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !^.*wordpress_logged_in_.*$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [F,L]
</IfModule>

https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/10/WordPress

By default, Drupal 7 URLs look like this, "example.com/?q=node/6". This type of URL can be hard to read, hard to remember and may are not search engine friendly. The solution is to configure Drupal's clean URLs.

Drupal provides a test so you can see whether your site is ready for clean URLs: In the Drupal site's admin area, go to Configuration > Clean URLs and click the "Run the clean URL test".

If the test fails, then proceed with the troubleshooting following the rest of this tutorial:

Step #1. Ensure your .htaccess file is available and working.

This is applicable to an Apache server. The .htaccess is a file on Apache servers which sets important configurations for the directory it lives in and the directories below it and can affect the way your website functions. The .htaccess file, which is included in Drupal core, defaults to clean URLs. So if your clean URLs are not working, first ensure that you have a .htaccess file in your site's root folder

Note: Since the file name begins with a dot (.) it is hidden on most file managers and it is easy to omit the file when copying files to a new folder.

If your .htaccess file exists, then ensure that it is working by adding a line of gibberish into the file and reloading your web page. It should immediately return a "500 server error". If an error is returned then the .htaccess file is working. Remove the line of gibberish that you just added.

If your .htaccess file exists, it's also worth comparing it to the default Drupal .htaccess file. Some hosting companies will use their own version of .htaccess

Step #2. Check the RewriteBase setting

If clean URLs are still not working, you may need to change the RewriteBase configuration. First, check the DocumentRoot setting in your httpd.conf file: You are trying to find out if DocumentRoot accurately reflects the location of your site. If DocumentRoot is set to /var/www/ (i.e., /var/www/index.html is what is displayed when you browse to your site: http://www.example.com/) and your Drupal installation is installed in the subdirectory /var/www/mysite/, then the RewriteBase directive in your .htaccess file should be set to:

RewriteBase /mysite

and that might help. In some configurations, setting

RewriteBase /

will allow clean URLs. By default the RewriteBase directive is commented out. To uncomment the line, remove the leading hash sign (#) from the line.

Step #3. Check $base_url setting

You may need to manually uncomment the $base_url setting in your settings.php file. The settings.php file is found in the sites/default directory in the root of your Drupal installation. There are several examples in the file, one of which should match your configuration. This problem often occurs if your web host is using FastCGI. Check with your web host as to whether or not FastCGI is implemented on your server.

Step #4. Location of index.php

It may be necessary to make another change to the Drupal .htaccess file on some, but not all servers. Scroll to the bottom of your .htaccess file and locate a line that looks like this:

RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]

You may need to replace index.php with the URL path to your Drupal installation's index.php file (only the part after the base URL).

For instance, if your site's home page URL is http://example.com/subdir/, you might need to use /subdir/index.php instead of index.php.

If your site's home page URL is http://example.com/, you might need to use /index.php instead of index.php.

Read more at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/spam-management-on-a-joomla-website.html

Eliminating web spam or reducing the capacity of spammers to hurt web operations has been the concern of webmasters and server managers all over. Spam damages the reputation of a network and comes with a penalty. For the website owner, spamming could lead to a suspension or a complete deletion of your website.

In this article, we will examine the case of the Joomla website, a very widely used Content Management System(CMS), and take you through a step-by-step process of addressing spamming on a Joomla website.

Brief Overview of Joomla

Joomla is simply an open source web development tool available freely on most Linux servers. On Todhost, Joomla can be freely installed in the software section of the website control panel. It is CMS and so it can be used to achieve simple and also very complex tasks. With Joomla, you can develop a website within minutes.

Joomla and Spamming

One of the drawbacks of most Content Management Systems including Joomla is the possibility of exploitation. This is possible with outdated Joomla versions, plugins, modules and components(all known as extensions). Joomla uses plugins, components and modules to achieve functionality and attraction to a website. The extensions are developed by an active community of developers and made available freely or for a fee.

Because Joomla runs periodic upgrades on its core files, the current is version 3.4.4, some of the extensions are usually not compatible with recent versions and so will require upgrade. This incompatibility creates a loophole which can be exploited by skilled spammers to send messages from a porous Joomla website. Most of the time, this is done, using the Joomla contact us form or the member registration form.

But there are ways to address this issue and i will take you through very simple steps that you can use to control Joomla exploitation and spamming on your website.

1. Login to your Joomla administrator section.

2. Install a Hacker Protection Plugin: The Siteground JHackguard plugin has been most effective in this regard. It is available for free and can be downloaded from the Joomla community website and directly from the Siteground website - completely free.

3. Enable Captcha-Recaptcha on your Joomla Website.

From the Global Configuration page, you can enable captcha-recaptcha. This feature is available with all recent Joomla versions. Next, you will need to access the plugin section of your Joomla website and click on "Captcha-Re-Captcha" to enable it. Enter the private and secret keys as required. You should have obtained the keys from Google. If you do not have the keys, there is a link in your Joomla website in the plugin section which leads you to the page where you can create the captcha keys with Google.

You can now safe your work. Now you can be sure that your website will no longer be available for spammers. Keep in mind that the safest way to stay online is to run the recent Joomla software versions and to be sure all your extensions are up to date.

Author: Fegalo Nsuke

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/spam-management-on-a-joomla-website.html

Is Magento seeing the end of its life cycle. Many will think so with the news of a major security flaw. "Shoplift Bug" "Shoplift" bug which allows an attacker to take complete command of a Magento store and its server.

First came the news of eBay looking to sell eBay Enterprises, the parent company of Magento, leaving the future of Magento itself unclear. Now Magento faces one of the most bizarre security releases ever.

In January 2015, a security company called Check Point found a high critical security flaw in all Magento sites. The "Shoplift" bug.

Check Point disclosed this issue privately to Magento in January with a list of suggested fixes to eBay.
On February 9: Magento released a patch for the security flaw. The patch SUPEE-5344 was not marked as a security release and was behind a login wall.
Mid-April: Check Point notified Magento that they will finally publish details of the bug.
April 16: Magento sent out a second, more urgent email to its mailing list.
April 19: Magento placed a warning message inside the dashboard of Magento sites.
April 20: The security issue was made public by Check Point.

Magento's handling of the issue has been criticized and anyone downloading Magento today will be vulnerable as the community version of Magento hasn't been updated since 2014.

Of critical concern is that 10 weeks after the patch was released, 60% of Magento sites remain unpatched, according to the creators of a test to see whether websites are vulnerable to the Shoplift bug. The handling of this critical bug could mark the end of an already slugish software - Magento e-commerce.

Search Engine Optimization, simply refered to as SEO, means improving web presence on search engines. Google is the market leader globally, which is why SEO is closely tied with Google search engine. When SEO definition is clear, the content is from outer space. The thing is that SEO is hard to understand and could require several tests and trials to get good results. Even SEO specialist cannot agree what SEO is all about – linking, social signals, content marketing or something else. And Google makes it even more complicated with algorithm updates that have severely affected search rankings. So there is no wonder that SEO seems like some kind of witchcraft.

How important is SEO?

Millions of searches are made on Google daily. To get estimates about your business market size, log in to Google AdWords and use Google Keyword Planner tool. You can find out how many searches are made on average in your business field using related keywords. 94% of all clicks accounts for organic search results and 90% of users never look beyond first page of Google. Now you can estimate how many visits can you acquire from Google search. PPC investments are way beyond SEO investments - it’s a goldmine for your business.

AdaptiveSEO

AdaptiveSEO (ASEO) stands for web presence optimization rather than boosting keywords on search engines. ASEO objective is to focus on long-term results using quality content creation and emphasizing consumer values. ASEO methodology is explained below.

SEO ? keyword positions

SEO definition says that it’s about improving website visibility on search engines. As you may know search engines work on keyword basis which is why keyword strategy has been the core element of SEO. A company chooses bunch of keywords they want to show up on search and SEO service provider does the magic to fulfil their client’s dreams.

Instead of focusing fully on keyword strategy, it should be approximately 15% of the whole SEO strategy. This means choosing the right keywords by analysing search volumes, competition, visits and website conversions. Keywords are the core element of content plan that should be the heart of your SEO strategy.

Content marketing role in SEO

Content marketing is heavily supported by social media networks that are going more content centric. SEO is no exception. SEO in the 21st century is all about mixing keyword strategy with content marketing. Content marketing focuses on content creation and distribution.

What will this means for your business?

Regular content that you can share with followers
Social signals that support SEO by sharing, commenting and high engagement rate
Updated website that shows your business in a good light
Growing business authority

Content marketing is a great way to enhance website domain value that helps to boost even keywords that are not directly in business’s keyword strategy. This helps to reach consumers in different stage of buying cycle – those who are just in the beginning of solving their problems, those who search for specific products/services and those who need that last kick to make the decision.

Content marketing should take about 45% of the whole SEO strategy. This stage includes developing optimized content plan, choosing tools, formats and distribution channels. For example the client starts a blog, issues press releases, writes case studies and guides, creates infographics etc.

SEO is growing in scale

When content marketing is the core of SEO strategy, your company has the necessary tools to create content on regular basis. The content alone does not get you any traffic. Here comes in social media. According to EMarketer predictions social media users will reach to 2.5 billion people by the year 2017.

In the SEO perspective, social media has the role of content distribution channel. Content is needed to widen the reach. The more your posts are being shared and liked, the bigger online footprint you create. Google notices your efforts and values engagement rate as an important factor in the search algorithm. The more social conversation you manage to boost, make people share and like your posts, the greater engagement you will get and Google rewards you with higher search positions. Social media should be about 10% of your SEO strategy.

Don’t forget that search results alone have no value. When you’re active on your social media accounts and talk to real people and customers you get precious feedback about your business and products/services. If you’re boring and only talk about your business stuff, you need to accept that no social media glory is going to hunt you.

Source: [url]https://www.todhost.com/blog/url]

Joomla is a very popular content management system widely used by over 200million websites around the world as at April 2015. It has become the next most installed script on the Todhost web hosting platform after WordPress. Today, we will show you some of the quick checks and fixes that will keep your Joomla website running safe on the web.

1. Change the default admin username

By default, Joomla admin username is "admin" and the admin url is yourdomain/administrator. It is important to change these two parameters to forestall primary attacks on your Joomla website. Advanced attackers would still have a way of detecting your administrator login url but this is a strongly recommended measure towards securing your website.

2. Keep Your Joomla Installation Updated.

This is as important as maintaining your web hosting account. If you have un-updated plugins, components, modules and other extensions, then you are surely at risk of an exploitation. Your web host will possibly suspend or place some restrictions on your account if it ceates issues for other users and these issues will likely arise from poor maintenance. Keep your installation clean and safe by updating the extensions.

3. Be Mindful of Extensions you Install

Please take note that not all extensions are safe for install. We have come accross lots of Joomla extensions with issues ranging from compatibility with design frameworks to issues with Joomla versions. Some extensions and poorly developed and create issues which sometimes can breakdown your Joomla installation. You will need to verify the integrity of every plugin, module, component and any extension you wish to use before you go head wth installation. A good way to do this is to probe user experiences. Avoid extensions that you are required to write a favourable review before you can install them.

4. Follow Strong Password Rules

A strong password should have at least 1 special character (|#*\), at least 1 numerical character(1256778), combine lower and upper caes characters(SDecHYnniO) and be at least 12 digits. We recommend you use the cPanel password generator and safe a copy somewhere. Nevertheless, if you forget your password, you can always rest it. Better to change and rest often than be vulnerable. These combination will help protect you from brute force attacks. You will need to keep this rule as a password attack could be very devastating.

5. Disable Error Reporting in Global Configuration.

For Joomla 3.4.1, this is found under Global Configuration > Server > Error Reporting. Just set it to "none" This will ensure that errors do not display on your Joomla frontend.

6. Enable Captcha - ReCaptcha

To do this, you need to check two settings. Go to Global Configuration, under the site settings, enable Captcha - ReCaptcha. Then go to plugin manager and click Captcha - Recaptcha - Enter the required settings and make sure it is set to "enabled". You will need to get a site and secret key for your domain from http://www.google.com/recaptcha.

7. Enable Cache on Your Website

Caching speeds up your website. We have emphasized the need for caching in several other articles in our knowledgebase. In Joomla, to enable your cache settings, go to Global configuration > System > Cache Settings and choose a preferred setting. For small and moderately sized websites, i recommend the you choose "Conservative Caching". You can choose the progressive caching for large websites.

Next, go to plugin manager and locate "System - Page Cache". Make sure it is enabled.

8. Install a HackGuard Plugin

We have found the Siteground JHackGuard to be very helpful and effective here. So, make sure you have it installed and enabled under plusin manager.

9. Maintain a Healthy Backup

10. Install a Cleaner for Your Database
Repairing your database can be done using the phpMyAdmin tool of your control panel. However, there is an Akeba component called "Admin Tools" for Joomla which does all of that and more, Install it like every normal Joomla component and use it to optimize your database, clean the temporary directory and more.

Keep in mind that anything can happen and so a healthy backup would be the sure way to recover. To avoid overloading your server space, maintain not more that two recent backups. We suggest you download the backup to your local computer.

These are our recommended steps to ensure your Joomla website is safe. Let's haveyour comments on any additions you know could help keep Joomla safe for users.

Read more blog posts: https://www.todhost.com/blog/

The following tutorial will show you how to redirect your site's domain from non-www to www or vice versa. Redirecting one to the other is useful for SEO. Technically reffered to as canonical urls, it helps resolve your domain name to one url.

If you go to https://todhost.com, you'll see the URL changes a bit once you click enter. It goes to the www version. In order words, it goes to https://www.todhost.com. It's a subtle change and it's usually not noticed by users.

So why have they done this? It's because, technically, the two are different domains but they have the same content. Without the redirect, they end up with duplicate content. With the redirect, they only have one site, so only one set of content.

With only one set of content, they guarantee they won't be penalized by search engines or have their ranking split.
Using The .htaccess File

To move your site to www, find your .htaccess file using your host's file manager or an FTP client.

Within it, look for the following code:

RewriteEngine On

If the code isn't there, insert it at the top of your file.

Then, to redirect non-www to www, use the following code directly below RewriteEngine On:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

For www to non-www, use:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

If you're on a Windows IIS server, the above code won't work for you.
On an IIS server

On a Windows (IIS) server, find your web.config file and make the following rule changes to your rules tag:

Redirect non-www to www


<configuration>
<system.webServer>
<rewrite>
<rules>
<rule name="Redirect to www" stopProcessing="true">
<match url=".*" />
<conditions>
<add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^yourdomain.com$" />
</conditions>
<action type="Redirect" url="http://www.yourdomain.com/{R:0}"
redirectType="Permanent" />
</rule>
</rules>
</rewrite>
</system.webServer>
</configuration>


Redirect www to non-www


<configuration>
<system.webServer>
<rewrite>
<rules>
<rule name="Redirect to non-www" stopProcessing="true">
<match url=".*" >
<conditions>
<add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^yourdomain\.com$" />
</conditions>
<action type="Redirect" url="http://yourdomain.com/{R:0}" redirectType="Permanent" />
</rule>
</rules>
</rewrite>
</system.webServer>
</configuration>


Afterward, check your site, including some internal pages, and try different www and non-www combinations of your domain to see if the redirect is working as expected.

More: https://www.todhost.com/blog/

In May, 2015, Joomla released a roadmap for Joomla 3.5. That suggests that Joomla 3.4 may not live for as long as thouht. There's no estimated release date yet, but there are some exciting plans.

Here's an overview of what you might see in Joomla 3.5.

Joomla 3.5: Override all the things!

A key goal for Joomla 3.5 is to make sure that everything in Joomla can be overriden. The core team hope to use JLayout to make this happen.

Goodbye to com_messages

After removing Weblinks, the next extension to be removed from the Joomla core will be com_messages. It will placed on the JED and on it's own Github repository.

Joomla 3.5: New Media Manager

Buddhima Wijeweerahas been working on a new media manager that addresses many complaints with the current version. Here are some of the key features:

A redesigned Media Manager interface
A better drag and drop image uploader
Image tagging
Improved image editing with options to crop, resize, rotate, filter and more

It remains to be seen how much of the work makes it into Joomla 3.5, but there are signs of progress.

The Joomla 3x series is showing a sign of leading the way to a whole new and improved way for web development.

Read more: https://www.todhost.com/blog/joomla-3-5-may-be-here-much-earlier-than-thought-but-what-do-we-expect.html

Content Delivery Networks (CDN) have great benefits for optimizing your Joomla websites and for Google higher ranking due to website increased speed. You can use a CDN component/plugin to integrate a Content Delivery Network (CDN) in Joomla.

Incorporating a CDN with your website gives you several benefits, including the following:

Faster Page Loads - Since most of your files will be served from a much closer location to your end-users, the speed in which your page loads will be greatly increased.
Reduced Server Load - Since most of your files are no longer served by your own host, your server will be freed up to perform the basic tasks required of it.
Handle More Visitors - Because of the improvements just mentioned and other factors, your website will be able to handle the strain of a much larger user base that it could otherwise.
Higher SEO Rankings - Caused by the increase in performance to your site, something Google recently claimed effects SEO rankings.

Integrating your website and a CDN (like MaxCDN or Amazon CloudFront) with this plug-in is incredibly easy! This tutorial gives you the simple process involved with this integration.

Download the “CDN For Joomla!” plugin from download page.
Log into your Joomla Administrator Panel, hover over “Extensions” and click “Extension Manager.” Next to the “Upload Package File” box, click “Browse”, select the downloaded plugin file, and click “Upload & Install.”
After the installation is complete, go back to “Extensions”, click “Plugin Manager”, then find and click on “System – CDN for Joomla!” Click on it to setup the plugin.

Leave the “Site Root” value alone, type your CDN URL (e.g. http://foo.bar.netdna-cdn.com) into “CDN Domain”, then click “Save & Close.”

All done! You are now officially using our CDN service. You can check if your URLs are being rewritten to CDN URLs by loading the page and viewing the source code of the page.

Source: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/707/How-to-setup-CDN-for-Joomla.html

Google notes that images often account for most of the downloaded bytes on a web page and also often occupy a significant amount of visual space. Image optimization is therefore very important especially as the speed of a website is now considered to be a ranking index in Google Search Results. In this article, we examine how to optimize images for the web.

Tips for optimizing your web images
Image file formats: The rules and preferences vary but generally, the most widely used are the JPEG, PNG and GIF image file formats.

Here we provide a basic guide to saving images for the web.

Make sure you have saved a copy of the image as a lossless version, meaning that you can come back and edit it again later if needed. For example, .raw, .tiff, .png, .psd file formats to name a few.

If it is a photograph, then select .jpg file format to save the final image. Remember to test several quality and compression settings until you get the perfect balance between quality and load times. If your image editing tool allows the "progressive" setting use that as it will allow the image to "blur" or display gradually as it is rendered on the web instead of line by line. The load time is not improved with the progressive setting, however it does give the image a softer look and feel when rendering on screen. If your editing enables "save for the web" then use this as it will make your image a bit lighter.

If your .jpg image is to be used as a background on the web document then use the Medium or Low compression setting. Otherwise for displayed images keep the compression at High.

If you have the option to adjust the image "quality" then use the settings to make the appropriate change; again, remember to strike a balance between acceptable quality and suitable file size.

File sizes: Depending on the use of the image follow these guidelines for optimal file size:

For background images try to keep the file size around or below10KB.
For banners or header images a file size up to 60KB is acceptable.
For high end photographs try to keep them to within 100KB at an absolute maximum.

This is not going to be one of those highly technical articles you find on "how to" yet, it will provide a very concise and clear guide to starting your own blog. For this article, i will like us to be guided by a Joomla website, that is, a website built with the Joomla Content Management System.

Let us presume you have successfully installed your Joomla website and want to operate your blog with it. On how to install a Joomla website, you can read this tutorial: Joomla Installation Tutorial

You will need to decide on some key areas of configuration of your blog namely:

How many article columns and rows will you have?

Once you have taken these decisions, you are set to create your personal blog with your Joomla website.

Now, you will need to login to the Joomla backend to configure your blog. For our purposes, we will create a blog with one article column and four rows.

You will now proceed to make some basic configuration to your Joomla website:

Login to the backend of your Joomla website.
Go to menus at the top bar and click on "main menu"
Next, click on the "home".
Under the Home menu item, click on "layouts" and make the following changes:

Leading articles: set to 1
Intro articles: set to 3
Columns: set to 1
Links: leave default.
Click the save button at the top right.

Now, you will need to select the category from where your blog posts will be displayed. to do this, you need take the following steps:

Click the Details button
Click on the "menu item type" button
Next, select the menu type and choose the "category blog" option.
Next, choose a category from the options directly below the menu type button.
From the right side of your page, you will find the "menu location" button. Select as appropriate to make your menu a sub menu or a parent menu.
Save your page.

Now you can begin to add article to your blog. Make sure your articles are set to the category you have chosen for your blog posts.

Author: Fegalo Nsuke.
http://todhost.com

Read more at: http://www.todhost.com/blog

Google is changing its search results to benefit sites that are mobile-friendly. This has been widely termed Google's "Mobile Armageddon". Google provided a mobile-friendly test that you can use to check whether your site will benefit from these new changes. Check Your Website Mobile Friendliness

I used Google's test for some of the websites we have designed and found some errors. A particular website gave a major error but i was able to make some progress and improve on the mobile display for the site simply by adjusting my robots.txt file.

I found out it was a simple fix and all I had to do was modify the robots.txt file to give Google access.

Background on the mobile armageddon

The robots.txt tells search engines what pages they shouldn't index.

As more people have started using mobile devices, Google's been modifying their search algorithms to make it easier for mobile devices to find mobile friendly sites.

In February, Google announced that on April 21st, they would rely more on their "mobile-friendliness" signal for ranking and that it would have a significant impact on search results.

The April 21st change is what some people on the web have termed as Google's "Mobile Armageddon" since many sites that aren't mobile friendly will likely have a significant loss in traffic over the coming months.

Checking whether Google thinks your site is mobile-friendly

By now, you've probably heard of "responsive design" and know that it helps to make your site mobile-friendly. A responsively designed web site adjusts to the width of the device viewing it.

If the site doesn't adjust to the width of your mobile device and if you have to scroll horizontally to see the whole page, it's not considered mobile-friendly and you'll likely see a loss of ranking as a result.

If you navigate your site with a mobile device and it looks, navigates, and functions great, it's mobile-friendly. However...

It doesn't matter if you see it as mobile-friendly, but rather whether Google sees it as mobile-friendly.

If your site is mobile-friendly for you, go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ and double check that Google agrees with you. You should primarily check your home page and your main traffic generating pages. You might be surprised by the results, as I was.

Google's Mobile Armageddon and Your Robots.txt File

Thankfully, Google's tester is very informative and points out the exact issue for this particular site. It's that the robots.txt file is blocking Google from accessing the resources it needs.

The robots.txt fix

Here's the robots.txt file for the particular site.

It's a Joomla site, which has much of the resources that Google needs stored in the "media" and "templates" folder. Also, there are some resources in "components", "plugins", and "modules". So here are the lines that I'm going to remove:

Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /templates/

You can find the exact resources that are blocked by Google by clicking on the "Show resources" link in Google's tester. Compare the files there to your robots.txt to determine what needs unblocking.

Now Google agrees that the site is mobile-friendly.

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/

In 2012, a major controversy over the effect of Google's paid ads on search engine rankings have been raised by a new employee, Jonathan Rockway. Rockway have siad in a discussion forum:

If the social features are relevant, though, then users are getting a better experience. And that’s a good thing, even if individual pages get less traffic from Google. Instead of being able to SEO the entire Internet, businesses can now only affect the search results for a tiny percentage of users. That’s a good thing because SEO can’t scale, and SEO isn’t good for users or the Internet at large.

More worrisome was Rockway's comments about ads when he said:

Perhaps more worrisome, however, was Rockway’s comments about ads. He said:

If you look at the Google experience from the standpoint of customers, it’s pretty good. Users get relevant search results and ads. Advertisers get their content on top of everything else. It’s a good compromise between advertising and usability, and it works really well. It’s a bug that you could rank highly in Google without buying ads, and Google is trying to fix the bug. Manipulating Google results shouldn’t be something you feel entitled to be able to do. If you want to rank highly in Google, be relevant for the user currently searching. Engage him in social media or email, provide relevant information about what you’re selling, and, generally, be a “good match” for what the user wants.

But Google's official stance is that SEO isn't bad and the company's head of Web Spam Team, Matt Cutts did a video on how Google does not see SEO as spam. You can watch the video here

Does Ads Really Matter

Jonathan Rockway's quote highlighted above suggests that ads matter to gain search engine rankings in Google. This position has been supported by many search engine experts whose experience show that paid ads tend to elp drive organic search results to a page and support search engine rankings,

Dana Tan, an SEO strategist at iprospect says: PPC, if it's really well done, can augment your results and could possibly have a residual effect that does benefit your SEO.

Tans position has been supported by Mark Ginsberg, founder and CEO and DriveHill Media who says: the other positive aspect of running PPC ads is that it increases your exposure (both search and display), and leads to a rise in branded searches. Branded searches, like direct traffic, often convert pretty nicely, and helps to send more signals to Google that you're a brand and should the lovely treatment they often provide to brands. So I do think there are residual benefits to ppc advertising for SEO.

Google has confirmed that the video noted above by Matt Cutts potrays the company's position on SEO rather than what Jonathan Rockway said.

Google says: As always, Google search rankings are completely unrelated to Google’s paid advertising services and other partnerships, and there is absolutely no way for a webmaster to pay money to increase search rankings.

When it comes to SEO, many owners of high-quality sites can and do get their site listed well in Google’s search results without any outside help. Some site owners prefer to have someone else check and optimize their sites, and for these folks we’ve published some guidelines relating to evaluating SEO companies.

This is some releive as it shows that SEO is still something one can exploit through experience, studies and hardwork.

Our experience at Todhost shows that rankings is something related to website content and particularly impacted by web page titles.

Conclusion.

Search Engine Ranking is the product of hardwork and quality content generation coupled with a proper website structure - design and metadata inclusive. This is not to say that regular content generation is the key to high rankings. The emphasis is on originality, relevance and quality.

Let's have your comments on this

Read more at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/wordpress-performance-how-to-find-a-slow-plugin.html

One common problem with Content Management Systems including WordPress is that they are usually slow. The quick fix to a slow WordPress site and any other Content Management System is to enable a cache system.

But there are cases where increased traffic leads to slow site despite the existence of a functional cache system. In this article, we shall address this issue with slow WordPress plugins.

The answer is that it's likely an unoptimized WordPress plugin. One slow plugin can slow down the entire site.

We shall look at the P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) and how it can be used to identify a slow performance plugin on your WordPress website. With P3, you'll be able to see each plugin's performance on the site.

Installing P3

In the admin, go to Plugins > Add New.
Search for P3
Click "Install Now" and than activate the plugin.

Running the First Scan

Go to Tools > P3 Plugin Profiler.
Click "Start Scan".

Enter a scan name (no spaces).
Click "Auto Scan".

If only certain pages are giving you trouble, you can do a Manual Scan and navigate to those pages in P3.

You'll see a message, "Scanning is complete".
Click "View Results".

Plugin Performance

Along the top, you'll be able to see some overall stats for your plugins. You'll see breakdowns per plugin.

Runtime by Plugin: This is a pie chart showing a percentage of each plugin's total. If you hover over each part, it will also show the time of each.

Also, it shows the load time of the WP Core (in blue) and your theme (in red).

The gold line across the top is the total load time of the site. If it's under one second, you're in good shape. If it's over two seconds, and there's one plugin that's taking up most of the load time, that's the slow plugin.

Hover your mouse over each dot to see which page was tested.

If one or more of the pages takes significantly longer than the others, you can run a manual scan for it to find the offending plugin. Or, use the Detailed Timeline, which we'll show you next.

Each dot that's lined up vertically is for a specific page. Hover your mouse over a dot to see the page URL.

Generally, the more queries, the slower the page load. If some of your pages are getting thousands of queries, this is likely why they are slow.

You can hover your mouse over each bolded term to get more detailed information.

Resolution

Based on the above data, you should be able to see a plugin that's taking significantly longer than others to load. If it's accounting for 50% or more of your total load time, there's cause for concern.

To resolve the issue, report it to the plugin's developer. The developer will be able to look into it in detail and provide a solution.

If it's not an essential plugin for your site, you can temporarily deactivate it from Plugins > Installed Plugins.

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/wordpress-performance-how-to-find-a-slow-plugin.html

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/benchmarking-for-website-performance-on-search-engines.html

Dealing with questions like what is a “good” bounce rate for a web page, what is the “average” number of visits, how much traffic from different sources is “normal” is not easy until you compare your website performance with others.Now, Google is making things much easy by bringing a new type of report into its analytics – the benchmarking report.

What is a benchmarking report?

This is not a completely new tool in Google Analytics. In 2011 Google closed this report and left marketers to rely on their knowledge and intuition when assessing the average market situation. Now the benchmarking report has returned! Users can get an overview of channels, location and devices for 1600 areas and 1250 different markets.

Why is Benchmarking Important?

The benchmarking report compares the company’s web site with the average on the market. This gives quite a reliable understanding of what is the competitiveness of the company’s web site.This means that companies have sufficient data for setting realistic goals and assessing performance. For example, if you know that the bounce rate of the average web site in your field or area is 40% and your rate is better than that, there is no point in focusing on reducing bounce rate. Better to put your focus somewhere else where it is more crucial. So, the benchmarking report shows what are the strengths of the company and what could be improved.

How to use it?

You can find the benchmarking report under the Audience tab. This can only be seen by users who have configured the Universal Analytics and who share their data with Google. You can configure this setting at Admin -> Account Settings and by putting a tick next to the “Anonymously with Google and others“ box.

The report can be seen in 3 variations:

Channels – compares the sources of your web site visits with your competitors’ visits.
Location – shows what countries are your competitors’ visits coming from. Important for exporting companies.
Devices – compares your web site’s operation and activity on different devices compared to your competitors.

Before diving into to the data, check if your settings are correct. Google has automatically categorized your company into a field which describes your company the best. Select the market and the average daily number of visits. If you would like to receive information about the local market, you need to take into account that the more specific you become, the less comparable data is available and it is possible that the report will not give you an adequate match.

How to interpret the report?

The channels report that shows where the visits for your web site and for your competitors’ web sites are coming from will probably be the most important tool in this regard. From this you are able to conclude which channels are your competitors mostly investing in and where you still have some room for development. The report itself is colorful and reminds us of the heatmap, meaning that positive and negative trends have been marked accordingly which gives the user a quick overview of the company’s position.

Channels report

Channel report will give insights into where competitor traffic is coming from. The report will give some insights into the impact of social media visits and the people who have come to the web site via direct traffic. The report will indicate which strategy in these channels should be reviewed and modified accordingly,

Location report

The location report is useful to exporting companies mostly. In this report you can see the data for only the selected location. This is useful only when you select “all regions” from the settings. Then you are able to compare how well your web site is operating in different markets and it is possible that you will find potential new target countries, where the consumer behavior promotes export.

The Devices Report

The devices report is currently especially beneficial as the relevance of mobile devices is growing rapidly. The devices report will tell you if there are significantly more visits with mobile devices than the market average or not.

Conclusion

The benchmarking report is a great tool for marketing both in setting realistic goals and in working to achieve them. With the help of the report, online marketers are able to identify the strengths of the company online and find new opportunities of development. We also will like to note that there has to be some care in using the report because it could also be misleading because especially because of the complexity of dealing with information for different areas on a local level. Our recommendation would be to take it as a useful tool for making general conclusions about the performance of your web site.

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/benchmarking-for-website-performance-on-search-engines.html

Source: https://todhost.com/blog/wordpress-manual-update-tutorial.html

Updating WordPress manually is an option especially when you do not have admin access to automatic and you want to quickly fix things up. Manually update is an option you have. There are several reasons you may not be able to update WordPress to the latest version automatically or you may want to try out the latest Beta version which doesn't offer automatic updates at this time.

WARNING: The WordPress update process will affect all files and folders included in the main WordPress installation. This includes all the core files used to run WordPress, the Akismet plugin and the WordPress default theme. If you have made any modifications to those files, your changes will be lost.

Befoe you get started
• Backup your WordPress website. Just incase things do not turn the way you desired, you can still be able to roll back with your backup.
• Check New WordPress Requirements before updating
• Check server requirements to be sure you are running compatible server specifications including PHP and mySQL versions.
The requirements have changed as of WordPress 3.2.

Recommended for better security - suPHP: This is not a requirement however we do recommend you use a host which offers suPHP for increased security. Todhost has suPHP installed on server.

Check Plugins
If you're updating WordPress before your plugin authors have tested their plugins with the latest version of WordPress then you could run into trouble. Installing the Beta version of WordPress would mean most, if not all plugin authors haven't had a chance to test against the latest WordPress update yet.

Manual WordPress Update
First step:
Download the latest version of WordPress here http://wordpress.org/download/
• Unzip the files: Delete your existing old wp-includes and wp-admin directories on your server (Using FTP or File Manager).
• Upload the new wp-includes and wp-admin folders (directories) to your server.(using FTP or Shell Access SSH)
• Open the wp-content folder and upload the individual files from the new folder to your existing wp-content folder (Using FTP, File Manager or Shell SSH), overwriting existing files. Do NOT delete your existing wp-content folder. Do NOT delete any files or folders in your existing wp-content directory (except for the one being overwritten by new files).
• Upload all remaining new individual files from the root directory (folder) of the new version to your existing wordpress root directory.

Caution: If you have customized your themes without renaming them, make sure not to overwrite those files, otherwise you will lose your changes.

Second Step:
Update WordPress by logging in to your dashboard and follow the update instructions. You will probably need to upgrade your database simply by following the process and clicking upgrade.

Third Step:
You may need to Clear your cookies, Delete or refresh your cache if you’re using a caching plugin like WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache

Re activate your plugins if you deactivated them before upgrading WordPress (recommended)

Your update has been successful and you can now play around with the latest version of WordPress.
Remember: To avoid losing any custom changes you make to the WordPress core files after you update, you may consider creating your own child theme which will save all your custom coding in a separate directory and therefore not be overwritten when you update to the latest version in the future.

Source: https://todhost.com/blog/wordpress-manual-update-tutorial.html

By default, Drupal 7 URLs look like this, "example.com/?q=node/6". This type of URL can be hard to read, hard to remember and may are not search engine friendly. The solution is to configure Drupal's clean URLs.

Drupal provides a test so you can see whether your site is ready for clean URLs: In the Drupal site's admin area, go to Configuration > Clean URLs and click the "Run the clean URL test".

If the test fails, then proceed with the troubleshooting following the rest of this tutorial:

Step #1. Ensure your .htaccess file is available and working.

This is applicable to an Apache server. The .htaccess is a file on Apache servers which sets important configurations for the directory it lives in and the directories below it and can affect the way your website functions. The .htaccess file, which is included in Drupal core, defaults to clean URLs. So if your clean URLs are not working, first ensure that you have a .htaccess file in your site's root folder

Note: Since the file name begins with a dot (.) it is hidden on most file managers and it is easy to omit the file when copying files to a new folder.

If your .htaccess file exists, then ensure that it is working by adding a line of gibberish into the file and reloading your web page. It should immediately return a "500 server error". If an error is returned then the .htaccess file is working. Remove the line of gibberish that you just added.

If your .htaccess file exists, it's also worth comparing it to the default Drupal .htaccess file. Some hosting companies will use their own version of .htaccess

Step #2. Check the RewriteBase setting

If clean URLs are still not working, you may need to change the RewriteBase configuration. First, check the DocumentRoot setting in your httpd.conf file: You are trying to find out if DocumentRoot accurately reflects the location of your site. If DocumentRoot is set to /var/www/ (i.e., /var/www/index.html is what is displayed when you browse to your site: http://www.example.com/) and your Drupal installation is installed in the subdirectory /var/www/mysite/, then the RewriteBase directive in your .htaccess file should be set to:

RewriteBase /mysite

and that might help. In some configurations, setting

RewriteBase /

will allow clean URLs. By default the RewriteBase directive is commented out. To uncomment the line, remove the leading hash sign (#) from the line.

Step #3. Check $base_url setting

You may need to manually uncomment the $base_url setting in your settings.php file. The settings.php file is found in the sites/default directory in the root of your Drupal installation. There are several examples in the file, one of which should match your configuration. This problem often occurs if your web host is using FastCGI. Check with your web host as to whether or not FastCGI is implemented on your server.

Step #4. Location of index.php

It may be necessary to make another change to the Drupal .htaccess file on some, but not all servers. Scroll to the bottom of your .htaccess file and locate a line that looks like this:

RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]

You may need to replace index.php with the URL path to your Drupal installation's index.php file (only the part after the base URL).

For instance, if your site's home page URL is http://example.com/subdir/, you might need to use /subdir/index.php instead of index.php.

If your site's home page URL is http://example.com/, you might need to use /index.php instead of index.php.

Source: https://todhost.com/blog/troubleshooting-the-drupal-clean-urls.html

you can simply sign up for a web hosting service and use any of the web building scripts in the software section of the control panel.
Check http://www.todhost.com and you will find an affordable plan with free web building tools.

You may also try http://www.todhost.com

Joomla is a very popular content management system widely used by over 200million websites around the world as at April 2015. It has become the next most installed script on the Todhost web hosting platform after WordPress. Today, we will show you some of the quick checks and fixes that will keep your Joomla website running safe on the web.

1. Change the default admin username

By default, Joomla admin username is "admin" and the admin url is yourdomain/administrator. It is important to change these two parameters to forestall primary attacks on your Joomla website. Advanced attackers would still have a way of detecting your administrator login url but this is a strongly recommended measure towards securing your website.

2. Keep Your Joomla Installation Updated.

This is as important as maintaining your web hosting account. If you have un-updated plugins, components, modules and other extensions, then you are surely at risk of an exploitation. Your web host will possibly suspend or place some restrictions on your account if it ceates issues for other users and these issues will likely arise from poor maintenance. Keep your installation clean and safe by updating the extensions.

3. Be Mindful of Extensions you Install

Please take note that not all extensions are safe for install. We have come accross lots of Joomla extensions with issues ranging from compatibility with design frameworks to issues with Joomla versions. Some extensions and poorly developed and create issues which sometimes can breakdown your Joomla installation. You will need to verify the integrity of every plugin, module, component and any extension you wish to use before you go head wth installation. A good way to do this is to probe user experiences. Avoid extensions that you are required to write a favourable review before you can install them.

4. Follow Strong Password Rules

A strong password should have at least 1 special character (|#*\), at least 1 numerical character(1256778), combine lower and upper caes characters(SDecHYnniO) and be at least 12 digits. We recommend you use the cPanel password generator and safe a copy somewhere. Nevertheless, if you forget your password, you can always rest it. Better to change and rest often than be vulnerable. These combination will help protect you from brute force attacks. You will need to keep this rule as a password attack could be very devastating.

5. Disable Error Reporting in Global Configuration.

For Joomla 3.4.1, this is found under Global Configuration > Server > Error Reporting. Just set it to "none" This will ensure that errors do not display on your Joomla frontend.

6. Enable Captcha - ReCaptcha

To do this, you need to check two settings. Go to Global Configuration, under the site settings, enable Captcha - ReCaptcha. Then go to plugin manager and click Captcha - Recaptcha - Enter the required settings and make sure it is set to "enabled". You will need to get a site and secret key for your domain from http://www.google.com/recaptcha.

7. Enable Cache on Your Website

Caching speeds up your website. We have emphasized the need for caching in several other articles in our knowledgebase. In Joomla, to enable your cache settings, go to Global configuration > System > Cache Settings and choose a preferred setting. For small and moderately sized websites, i recommend the you choose "Conservative Caching". You can choose the progressive caching for large websites.

Next, go to plugin manager and locate "System - Page Cache". Make sure it is enabled.

8. Install a HackGuard Plugin

We have found the Siteground JHackGuard to be very helpful and effective here. So, make sure you have it installed and enabled under plusin manager.

9. Maintain a Healthy Backup

Keep in mind that anything can happen and so a healthy backup would be the sure way to recover. To avoid overloading your server space, maintain not more that two recent backups. We suggest you download the backup to your local computer.

These are our recommended steps to ensure your Joomla website is safe. Let's haveyour comments on any additions you know could help keep Joomla safe for users.

Source: https://todhost.com/blog/recommended-security-checks-for-your-joomla-website.html

Optimizing your WordPress website needs more than a simple appraoch. Because of the importance placed on SEO, most website owners would want to find the perfect plugin to do this. But there some common mistakes associated with most WordPress Search Engine Optimization strategy and we will be discussing this in this blog.post.

1. Optimize Page Titles & Descriptions

Page titles and meta descriptions are arguably two of the most important aspects when it comes to your SEO strategy. We place page title most important in this order.

These attributes are important for two major reasons:

Search Engines. Page titles factor heavily into whether your website will be shown in SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and whether users will click through. Keyword-rich page titles help search engines determine what your page is about and whether it’s relevant to a user’s search query.
User activity. Even after serving your site as a result, it’s important to have a well-crafted page title and meta description to help guide users to your site. Relevant and informative page titles and meta descriptions help influence users to click through to your site.

Once you determine what keywords you’d like to optimize for, there are several user-friendly WordPress plugins to help users easily create optimized page titles and meta descriptions, most notably WordPress SEO.

2. Fix Duplicate Blog Content

One common mistake with SEO is the issue of duplicate content. Duplicate content is extremely harmful to your site; not only does it devalue your content, but most importantly, this could be viewed as “spammy” and can negatively impact your rankings.

If you must keep posts under multiple categories, you have several options. One option is to completely remove the category from the URL structure of your blog posts.

To change the link structure of your blog posts, you begin by visiting Permalinks in the Settings section of your WordPress dashboard:

You can then select the URL structure of your blog posts. A helpful hint: these changes will be immediately applied to all blog posts, including ones you’ve already published.

3. De-index Tag & Archive Pages

In an effort to help organize your blog content, you’ve likely inserted relevant tags. As a result, your blog will generate tag pages to help visitors browse your blog topics by tags. This can certainly help users navigate your blog, it could have an impact on SERP. Although search engines may find these pages to be relevant to search queries, tag pages aren’t ideal for new visitors coming to your site.

Another byproduct of your blog are archive pages. These pages are automatically generated, and depending on the size of your blog, can add numerous pages to your site. These pages might improve user navigation in your blog, but it usually creates several archive pages at the root domain.

Search engines tend to find pages easier the closer they are to the root, meaning they’re also at a higher level. With numerous archive pages at the root, Google and other search engines could see your archive pages as the same level of importance as your optimized landing page – simply because they’re both located at the root domain.

Inserting noindex tags or disallowing these pages in the robot.txt file are both effective solutions to allow these pages to exist without affecting search results. Noindex tags are very straightforward – they tell search engines not to index these pages for search results. Your robot.txt works similarly, but rather than simply tell search engines to not index, you can prevent search engines from crawling these pages altogether.

4. Optimize Site Images

It’s important to make sure you’re optimizing your images for search.

Search engines do a great job in identifying your website’s content, but it’s not as strong at identifying images. Inserting descriptive alt texts will help search engines identify the content of your images and as a result, help your site appear in more relevant searches.

Another factor to consider in regard to your site images is load time. Google has used site speed as a ranking factor for several years, and images can have an impact on your overall site speed.

Try to avoid using large image files when possible; many sites mistakenly insert large images and simply resize them on the page rather than uploading a smaller image file. Although the image appears smaller on the site, visitors still must download each image at its original size which negatively influences your site speed.

5. Optimize for Mobile Traffic

A mobile-friendly site is important for all websites, especially after Google recently rolled out changes for mobile search to emphasize pages that are mobile-friendly and penalize those that aren’t seen as mobile-friendly.

This change could have a big impact on your site traffic, especially if the majority of your traffic comes from mobile users. You can determine your mobile traffic through the Audience section in Google Analytics.

6. Don’t over-optimize

One of the best SEO strategies is often one of the most overlooked: creating quality content. Search engines want to share the best and most relevant sites, and your site should reflect this as well. Your SEO strategy should never rely on the number of times your keyword appears on your site – quality content should always be your number one priority.

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/useful-tips-and-tricks-for-wordpress-search-engine-optimization.html

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