WordPress is the world’s largest blogging platform. That also places it in the position to be the most attacked Content Management Systems. However, you can never know when the malicious mind will hack your site. Because it doesn’t matter how much traffic is on your site, you may at any time be a victim of Brute Force attack. Therefore, you should keep your site safe and secure with a WordPress Brute Force Protection Plugin.

Brute Force attack is one of the scariest thing for any website owner. Especially when your site is running on WordPress, it becomes a pool of opportunities for wrongdoers. Therefore, it becomes the primary need of a developer to keep this list of best WordPress Brute Force Protection Plugins within reach. The Brute Force Protection Plugin for WordPress is great help you to protect your WordPress website or Lock out bad guys.

Weak passwords are one of the major loopholes that lead to website hacking. And that is where you need an extra layer of protection for your site from hackers.

In this post, we have a list of the best WordPress Brute Force protection Plugins for you. But before we move on to look at the recommended plugins, let us briefly provide an understanding of brute force attack.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/best-brute-force-protection-plugins-for-wordpress.html

Read full post at: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/867/PrestaShop-Store-Configuration-Tutorial.html

Once you have your PrestaShop store successfully installed, you should settle down to properly configure and customize your store for your purpose. In this tutorial, we examine the basic configuration settings for your PrestaShop store:

Configuring the SMTP Settings
Configuring the Payment Methods
Configuring the Shipping methods
Configuring Contacts and Our Store pages
How to configure SSL for your Store
How to Change the Logo of your Store
How to Configure Special Promotion
How to Activate Maintenance Mode
How to configure the Email templates

SMTP Settings

SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and as the name suggests the protocol is mainly used for sending messages from your web hosting account to another user. Our Hosting packages fully support that protocol and in the next few lines of this tutorial we will provide you with more information on the integration of that protocol with your Store in order for all the emails sent from your Store to use that protocol.
To activate the SMTP protocol for your Store, you need to:

Step 1: Access the Mail Configuration for your Store
Step 2: Configure the SMTP mailer

Access the Mail Configuration for your Store

PrestaShop provides you with a fully dedicated to the mailing system of your store page where you can configure entirely the mailing system and also to test it. In order to access that page you will need to login into the Back Office of your Store and to navigate to Advanced Parameters>E-mail.

Once you click on that link you will be presented with all the emailing options which we will review further in the second step of this tutorial.


Read full post at: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/867/PrestaShop-Store-Configuration-Tutorial.html

Ranking for a keyword in organic search engines a great feat to achieve. Ranking well for a single great keyword can bring fortunes which come with traffic and sales. But it is a repeatable process. You won’t get the results you want 100% of the time, especially if you’re a new website trying to rank for a popular keyword, but if you take content marketing and SEO seriously, you can start to make things happen for things like rankings, traffic, and sales.

Here, we have put together the ten steps you need to take that will help you to rank for a keyword in Google Search Engine Result Pages.
Step 1: Lay the Groundwork

This is really more of a pre-step than a first step. You’ll need to have some basics in place before you can hope to rank for any random keyword. These pre-requisites include:

A strong website – The longer your website has been around, accruing authority and links, the better. It’s also key that your entire site follow SEO best practices – start with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines if you don’t know what that means.
A network to draw on – In order to rank quickly for a keyword, it’s very useful to have a built-in network to share new content with – a blog following, an audience on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, email contacts you can reach out to for occasional help with a link. If you don’t know what that means, it’s time to start thinking about link building as relationship building.

To read from source and to read full blog post, visit:: https://www.todhost.com/blog/an-seo-guide-on-how-to-rank-for-a-keyword.html

The confidence of internet users have been built on the integrity of online payment systems So also have there been an increase in shopping on the internet and tons of companies are accepting online payments, which also increases the risk for credit card fraud. Unfortunately, this is a familiar scenario for webshops. You receive a large order from a new customer. But at the same time, something doesn’t seem quite right.

With a little research, you realize that this is a case of credit card fraud – hopefully before sending the order. It can be very damaging to your business if you end up being the victim of many successful fraud attempts.

Although it is difficult to catch every credit card scammer, there are a number of things you can do as a web shop owner to protect your web shop against credit card fraud.

Indicators for credit card fraud

First and foremost, it is important to discover what you need to monitor in case of attempted fraud. We’ve listed some potential indicators of transactions that are very likely to be attempted credit card fraud:

1. An order that is much larger than normal

2. First-time customers you haven’t sent an order to before.

3. An order where the delivery address is not the same as the billing address

4. Any previously rejected orders prior to a successful order, especially if the billing information or card number was changed in subsequent order attempts

5. IP-addresses that are not in the same area as the billing information for the order

6. Email addresses where the person’s name in the email address does not match the name of the person in the billing information

These are just some of the things you need to be aware of. These indicators do not necessarily mean that you are dealing with a fraudster. Even so, it is important that you be aware of them before shipping out an order.

Read full blog post: https://www.todhost.com/blog/how-to-combat-credit-card-fraud.html

Once you have completed the installation of our Prestashop website and created your online store, you will need to set up and customize your store to make it operational.

Now lets go with our recommended and essential (but not exhaustive) steps to set you on the right track!
1. Maintenance mode

This option lets you work on your store in peace and quiet. Your customers will see a page letting them know that you are making changes to your e-commerce site. This mode lets you carry out tests and changes without your clients noticing, giving you a real view of your store. To enable maintenance mode in PrestaShop, follow these steps:

Log in to PrestaShop as the administrator.
On the top menu bar, click Preferences, and then click Maintenance.
Under Enable Shop, click No. This setting takes your store offline.
In the Maintenance IP text box, type the IP address or addresses that you want to allow to access the store while it is in maintenance mode.
Click Save. Now when you visit PrestaShop from an authorized IP address, it displays normally. All other site visitors, however, receive a PrestaShop maintenance message in their web browsers.

Some modules let you add a countdown to your maintenance mode, for example by installing “Maintenance with countdown mode module”. This can be handy if you want to promote a store launch campaign before it goes online.


2. Configuring languages

If you want to sell abroad, you must translate your store into various languages so that each visitor can understand your products and make purchases.

Add a language to your store and remember to translate all your categories and products.

You can find out more information that will help you configure languages in your e-commerce site’s back office.

Read full post: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/865/Basic-Steps-to-Take-After-a-PrestaShop-Installation.html

From the stand point of working from Nigeria, a power bank is certainly a great tool. You definitely cannot work in Nigeria without a power support alternative. But I still do not think it should be added to this generic list.

Alejob:
You need powerbank for your laptop and phone. Why don't you holla? I am the right person to talk to as far as powerbank for your laptop, Phones is concerned. See my signature below and recommend. Thanks

Designing websites for online merchants is one of the most time consuming aspects of launching or rebranding an online business. The challenge of designing a unique and successful web store is quite challenging and expensive. But with proper planning the design process can be very enjoyable.

The needs of website owners are different and so are their requirements but this list of the top 10 things to think about before designing an online shop will always apply to all merchants. All of these elements are subtly connected to each other but if you review them carefully, you’ll be on the right path!

Read full blog: https://www.todhost.com/blog/10-things-to-consider-when-starting-an-online-shop.html

n this tutorial we'll show you how to install PrestaShop 1.7 and above on your web hosting plan account. Free Script Installation is available on the Todhost cPanel control panel - Once you have an active web hosting plan, you can have our PrestaShop specialists take care of installing PrestaShop for you at no additional cost. All Todhost clients can request a free installation by submitting a ticket.

PrestaShop 1.7 pretty much installed in the same way as older PrestaShop versions.

You need to do the following basic things:

create a database for the application

download an installation package for the latest PrestaShop

upload the installation package on your hosting account

install the application

delete the install folder from the root PrestaShop directory on your hosting account

make sure that the admin folder in the root PrestaShop directory on your hosting account is renamed

In this tutorial we've used as a basic example PrestaShop 1.7.

Now we'll go over these steps in more details.
Create a database

Although it's possible to install different applications or several instances of the same application in one database it's recommended that you keep each application in a separate database. You can add new databases and manage your existing ones from the Databases section of the control panel. To add a new database click on the Add Database button that's in the black area on the right. On the following page type the name of the database and create a database user by specifying a username and password in the respective fields. Then click on the Add Database button that's under the options.

For some more details check out the tutorial on how to manage databases with the Todhost control panel, and more specifically the section on how to add databases.

Read full post at https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/864/How-to-install-PrestaShop-on-a-Live-Website.html

WordPress is the world's most popular content management system and so the massive attack against WordPress is not surprising. Using WordPress security plugins had just been one way to protect WordPress websites and it has been effective.

Not to get you scared about WordPress attacks – securing your WordPress site doesn’t require you to be a programming guru. But you will want some WordPress security plugins and tools to get the job done.

In this post, we will cover a selection of the best WordPress security plugins and tools out there, along with their pros and cons. Then, at the end, we'll try to help you pick the right set of tools based on your own situation.

Quick caveat: WordPress security isn’t just about plugins and tools

All of the security plugins and tools on this list will help you make WordPress more secure. But they don’t eliminate the need for action on your part.

Think of them kind like wearing a vehicle seat belt. Sure – seat belts will help protect you in a crash, but they aren’t a license to go out and drive recklessly. These tools are like that. They give you some much-needed protection, but you still need to drive safely if you want to stay safe and secure.

So what is “driving safely” in the WordPress world? Here we are talking about really simple things like:

Promptly updating your WordPress software, plugins, and themes
Using a secure password for your WordPress administrator account and web hosting account
Only using themes and plugins from reputable developers/sources
Backing up your site on a regular basis

Those tips might seem overly simplistic, but doing those four things alone will help protect you from most WordPress security issues. Then, to protect your site from everything else, you can use these WordPress security plugins and tools.

Read full post: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/861/WordPress-Security-Plugins.html

Generally speaking, cPanel and email login issues are common and normal. The most of the complaints we have received come from invalid login problems due to wrong username or password. The other had been frequent changes affecting connection IP addresses. In this post we look at all these issues and how to resolve them.

What are the Email and cPanel Login Issues Users Encounter?

Invalid Login Issues

Usually, thie error occurs when your username of password or both of them are not correct To be able to login to your email or cPanel environment, you must enter the correct email address(username), enter the correct password as well. The same will apply to cPanel environment you must enter the right username and password..
What if I Forget My cPanel Username or Password

If you forget your username and password, you can recover them. You can recover your username and reset your password through the Todhost client area.

Visit the secured client area
Enter customer support email address
Enter client area password.
Go to services
Click on the green active button applicable to the domain name for which you intend to change email or client area password
To change cPanel password, look on the left menu bar and click change password. Enter a new password following our recommended password rules - a combination of special characters, capital letters and small letters as well as numbers.
save your changes and you are done..

To Change an Email Password

Follow the same procedure to login to client area.
Scroll down to Quick Shortcuts
Click on email accounts
Click password and authentication to reset your password.
Change the account password band save your changes

Now you can try to login again to your email or cPanel control panel of your website.

Read full post at: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/860/How-to-Address-cPanel-and-Email-Login-Issues.html

The ImageSizer plugin from Lumis is a fantastic plugin and you will get to find that out very shortly. This great plugin will make it easy for you to upload any file, crop it and resize it on the fly in multiple places throughout your whole ExpressionEngine site.

We often use ImageSizer in conjunction with the FF Matrix FieldFrame field type to let users add as many images as they want with captions. Then we pull at the first one and give a link to view the rest in a lightbox gallery. Works great!

But some EE users do not realize that that those pictures they take with their tiny cameras are actually really large files. File size notwithstanding, the pixel dimensions are out of control. Now some lightboxes will scale the image to fit in the visible area, but either way it’s still having to load up images that are way too big for the web.

To cope with this problem, developers had to put instructions on the field: “900px wide max.” Yeah that worked. It will mostly meet with blank stares on that one. And then the question of…”so you’re saying I have to resize all my images before I even upload them? I thought you said this was supposed to be easy.” Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the way we use computers we forget that everyone else is still not so sillfull in using them.

Read full post: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/859/How-to-Use-ImageSizer-to-Scale-Lightbox-Gallery-Images-in-ExpressionEngine.html

The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) changes has made writing for SEO an adventure and a complicated problem that many are all trying to find the secret to get good the results faster. The number of search engine factors advanced, the Google algorithm updates increased, the number of businesses that use SEO increased, the number of SEO agencies increased and more and more people became aware of its importance, the market is pretty cluttered and the competition is very high. And we know how important it is to stand out in the crowd.

Read full blog post: https://www.todhost.com/blog/how-to-write-content-for-seo-a-step-by-step-guide.html

If you are familiar with ExpressionEngine for the design of your website, its important to have an optimized website to reduce the page load time. This guide takes you through the tips to optimize an ExpressionEngine website. Following that we look at why you need to speed up your website and some basic steps you require to speed up your website. Let's go.

1) De-install/remove unused add-ons(modules, extension, plugin, accessories) and templates (snippets & global variable), channels/weblogs, category group etc.

2) Practice to use disable parameter within channel entry tag. While using channel entry tag ({exp:channel:entries}), the system loads all the data/related data of the channel entry and one can disable few data which aren’t necessary anymore like:

Categories
Category Fields
Member Data
Pagination
Trackbacks

Read full story: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/858/Tips-for-optimizing-ExpressionEngine-website-for-better-performance.html

Optimising your Expression Engine website is fundamental to help our site performance especially to improve the speed and not slow down the performance of the hosting server.. Some tips to dramatically speed up your Expression Engine site. Following some of the simple steps below should result in a big improvement in your EE website performance. But let us first look at how and why EE is loved for SEO.

For any CMS to be seen to be good for SEO, it should have some features and handle some ranking factors in a professional way. It should handle SEO in the following ways:

Completely automate
Allow the developer to configure
Let the end-user manage

We went through the list of raning factors and pulled out the ranking factors we think a CMS has its fingers in. Here's that list and how the ExpressionEngine CMS from EllisLab would handle them:

Read full post at: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/856/ExressionEngine-Search-Engine-Optimization.html

Building links and sharing content through Web Directories have been the norm for the world wide web and for search engine optimization for a long time. But a lot have changed on the web and with Google, the leading search engine. The question now is whether web directories are still relevant in this age of advanced Google Algorithimic Updates. We will learn more about that.

Head of Web SPAM at Google John Mueller has thrown some insights when he said, “in general, no”. But the key words in that answer are “in general”. That’s the usual answer we get from John and, as much as we’d like to say we will dissect it, the truth is that we can only be speculating and interpreting things based on own knowledge and experience.

So we take some time to find out whether web directories are still useful for SEO today. But before then, let's look at some background information.

What Are Web Directories Really?

In order to better understand whether directories work or not, we have to create a background for them. Like an introduction.

Most people probably think of directories as just sites that list other sites. While that’s true, the reality is that they’re much more than that.

Before modern search engines, such as Google, web directories were THE INTERNET.

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/are-directories-still-useful-for-seo.html

The key advantage of all small businesses are derived in their competitive edge. If you run a small business, you should be looking for a competitive advantage or strengthening your advantage to get your leg up on the competition.

While there is no way of knowing what the future holds, one thing is for sure: you don’t want to be among the approximately 80% of businesses that fail within 18 months. So you've got to equip yourself with the right tools for internet marketing.

Gone are the days when you could afford to ignore the internet. If you want to achieve success, regardless of your industry, it’s imperative to have a sound online marketing plan in place – a strategy that leverages the power of social media, uses search engine optimization to drive traffic, and makes good use of the media marketing advancements that are out there.

In this post, we outline online marketing tools that you need when starting a business or seeing to run effectively. Each of these tools will help you get that competitive edge.

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/13-tools-that-will-enhance-your-online-marketing-efforts.html

Many SEO managers have taken the impact of images on website ranking lightly. Whenever SEO is talked about, some of the first things that come to our mind are content, backlinks or keywords. This is not wrong and these factors do have great impact on SEO, but it isn’t all that is important as there are many other possibilities for SEO that impact site performence on search engines. Especially since there are plenty of factors that weigh in a page rank that are not purely backlink or content-driven. So it should not have come as too much of a surprise when Google announced that page load speed is a ranking factor for both desktop and mobile searches. Of course, one factor out of more than 200, but one that is still worth serious consideration.
1. Website Speed as a Ranking factor

Site speed, according to Google, “reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests” and for all intents and purposes serves both the user and the site owner. Users get an enhanced experience, site owners are more likely to get reduced operation costs and… well, more users, who stay on the website longer.

Google thinks the same, as indicated by the very fact that it provides us with tools to check our site speed and suggests solutions for sluggish pages. There is the PageSpeed module in the Google Developers section and a Page Speed Insights for making a speed audit for every website.

Yahoo also has a developer module for page speed improvements, called Yslow. The slew of freely available tools is certainly meant to wear off some of the concerns that only big sites can benefit from this change. In fact, chances are smaller sites have the upper hand here in terms of flexibility and adjusting. Some questions and concerns remain though, the most important being:

What is and how exactly does Google measure “site speed?”

For instance, the difference between “document complete” and “fully rendered” time when loading a page was mentioned. The former means that while not all the elements on a page are showing, you can start clicking and navigating. The latter means that everything is clearly visible on the page, even background stuff like ads and images. Even though it is difficult to pinpoint specifically and with certainty which aspect of speed directly helps your rankings, working on your site loading speed, in general, is bound, at the very least, to enhance your users’ experience. So, for instance, having a “document complete” time which is faster than the “fully rendered time” could help.

Read full blog post: https://www.todhost.com/blog/image-optimization-for-high-ranking.html

Updating a website is critical for safety and security.. Updating is necessary mostly when their is a new version of software and you want to launch the new version of the website. In doing so you will need to take some steps to ensure that you do not damage your codes and also do not hurt your search engine rankings in the process. When you update your website, especially if you decide to change your domain name, these changes can potentially have negative impacts on SEO. You can avoid these problems by carefully planning the update process. Here are the steps that can guide you when you update your website.

1. Figure Out the Scope of the Project

The first thing that you will need to do is start by making a list of all of the URLs that need to be updated. You can use your sitemap to retrieve a list of these pages. There are also online software tools, including Google Webmasters, that can be used to crawl your website in order to generate a list of pages. Once you have this list available, you need to check it to make sure that all of the links are viable links and that there are no broken links or pages that you simply do not want to include in the upgrade.

Read more:

9 Common Problems of a WordPress Website

A checklist against cybercrime

A Guide to Google Website Ranking

2. Check Inbound Links

Your SEO strategy depends on the inbound links that point to your website. As a result, you will need to perform an inbound link audit that will determine which direct links need to be updated. You should make sure that you contact the webmaster for each inbound link and ensure that they update the old links on their site. If it is not possible for you to reach everyone because of a large number of links, you should make sure to establish 301 redirects for all of the old links in order to point them to the new URLs on your updated site.

3. Update Your Content

In addition to updating the design of your site, you should also make sure to update the content on your site. Review all of the existing pages to ensure that there is no content that is outdated. Is your current SEO strategy meeting your needs? Check the analytics data for your website to make sure that your current plan is working. You may want to consider updating the keywords that you are targeting on certain low ranking pages.

Although it might be tempting, try to avoid unnecessarily deleting pages of your site. There may be pages that are having a greater impact on your current rankings than you might assume at first glance. However, if you find duplicate content on your site, do a 301 redirect of the content pages to the correct version of the pages. In the future, avoid creating pages that contain mostly similar conten

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/a-detailed-guide-to-safe-website-updating.html

Updating a website is critical for safety and security.. Updating is necessary mostly when their is a new version of software and you want to launch the new version of the website. In doing so you will need to take some steps to ensure that you do not damage your codes and also do not hurt your search engine rankings in the process. When you update your website, especially if you decide to change your domain name, these changes can potentially have negative impacts on SEO. You can avoid these problems by carefully planning the update process. Here are the steps that can guide you when you update your website.

1. Figure Out the Scope of the Project

The first thing that you will need to do is start by making a list of all of the URLs that need to be updated. You can use your sitemap to retrieve a list of these pages. There are also online software tools, including Google Webmasters, that can be used to crawl your website in order to generate a list of pages. Once you have this list available, you need to check it to make sure that all of the links are viable links and that there are no broken links or pages that you simply do not want to include in the upgrade.

Read more:

9 Common Problems of a WordPress Website

A checklist against cybercrime

A Guide to Google Website Ranking

2. Check Inbound Links

Your SEO strategy depends on the inbound links that point to your website. As a result, you will need to perform an inbound link audit that will determine which direct links need to be updated. You should make sure that you contact the webmaster for each inbound link and ensure that they update the old links on their site. If it is not possible for you to reach everyone because of a large number of links, you should make sure to establish 301 redirects for all of the old links in order to point them to the new URLs on your updated site.

3. Update Your Content

In addition to updating the design of your site, you should also make sure to update the content on your site. Review all of the existing pages to ensure that there is no content that is outdated. Is your current SEO strategy meeting your needs? Check the analytics data for your website to make sure that your current plan is working. You may want to consider updating the keywords that you are targeting on certain low ranking pages.

Although it might be tempting, try to avoid unnecessarily deleting pages of your site. There may be pages that are having a greater impact on your current rankings than you might assume at first glance. However, if you find duplicate content on your site, do a 301 redirect of the content pages to the correct version of the pages. In the future, avoid creating pages that contain mostly similar conten

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/a-detailed-guide-to-safe-website-updating.html

How to Keep Your Customer Surveys Fresh

Surveys is one way businesses gather information on customers to understand their behavioural pattern. Surveys are useful in understanding customer needs, product development, customer buying patterns and are also useful in dealing with post purchase behaviour like dissonace situations.

Read full post at https://www.todhost.com/blog/how-to-keep-your-customer-surveys-fresh.html

Top 10 Ecommerce Platforms Recommended for Small Businesses

The world is changing with more internet users showing confidence in ecommerce platforms and making online purchases with less fear. The skepticism about online stores are declining with internet users understanding how to locate fraudsters and verify real shops over the net. There is also an increasing number of online stores and newer applications for building online stores have also sprang up. In this post, we examine the top 10 platforms you can use to build your ecommerce store.

https://www.todhost.com/blog/top-10-ecommerce-platforms-recommended-for-small-businesses.html

Useful Tips on How to Use Google Analytics on eCommerce Websites https://www.todhost.com/blog/useful-tips-on-how-to-use-google-analytics-on-ecommerce-websites.html

Assessing the performance of an ecommerce store will depend on different indices. The report from the analyses or assessment will determine what might be done to improve the site performance. This could include things like reading user surveys, customer posts on social networks, and frequently asked questions, but these cannot offer so much insight.

Read Full story at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/useful-tips-on-how-to-use-google-analytics-on-ecommerce-websites.html

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/848/How-to-Create-Redirects-in-WordPress.html

Redirections are a normal part of websites, plugins, and themes. Some are happening right before you and you may not be even aware what’s going on in the backend. Although redirections are usually left for developers, we are going to show you several tips that will let you understand how you can implement redirects in WordPress.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/848/How-to-Create-Redirects-in-WordPress.html

Read full blog post at: On-Page Optimization in OpenCart https://www.todhost.com/blog/on-page-optimization-in-opencart.html

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the most important part in any online business web site today. Not only because a well optimized website will help increase your traffic and then boost your sales but its been proven to be far more rewarding than online promotional methods like advertising and sales promotion. There are tons of SEO techniques, some are allowed and acceptable by Google while some are not. In this post, we will focus on the most aspect of SEO as it aplies to OpenCart ecommerce.

Understanding OnPage SEO

On-Page SEO is also often referred to as on-site SEO and involves optimizing internal elements of your website pages to make them more search engine friendly. On-page SEO helps search engines understand your website better, to gauge if your content would be relevant to people seeking for information about anything online using a set of keywords.

If you’re planning on using SEO as an integral part of your Internet Marketing campaign, it would be to your greatest advantage to have a clear understanding of the basics and importance of On-page SEO.

The Importance of On-Page SEO

In recent years, other Internet marketing channels have appeared, taking sizable bites of the online marketing space. Many shifted their online campaigns to some very popular channels like social media marketing and dropping their SEO efforts without carefully analyzing real data. Many have succumbed to the myth that “SEO is dead” and is not a relevant factor anymore in driving targeted traffic to websites.

SEO is still the most important source of targeted traffic to websites. In a report by Forrester Research, organic web search or natural search engine results still sits at the top of traffic sources used by survey respondents. The report also states that this percentage is growing at a steady rate and is expected to continue growing in the next couple of years.

That is why it is very important to optimize your On-Page SEO if you want to have targeted visitors knocking on your online doorstep. However, it doesn’t mean that you choose one Internet marketing channel over the other and drop the rest altogether. To get the maximum results, you need to explore each of these channels and select which can be combined with SEO to get the best results. But before you can dive-in to all these in greater detail, it would be best to proceed and understand a bit more information about the basics of on-page SEO.

Read full blog post at: On-Page Optimization in OpenCart https://www.todhost.com/blog/on-page-optimization-in-opencart.html

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/847/Top-5-Security-Issues-with-WordPress-and-How-to-Fix-Them.html

WordPress leads as the most popular content management system (CMS) on the Internet today powering over 74,652,825 sites with about half of those websites hosted on the free WordPress official site. The rest are hosted on private servers like Todhost.com.

There is a reason so many CMS-based sites use WP. WordPress is a smart and intuitive platform that nearly anyone can learn to use. There are numerous plugins and themes available to help website owners customize the look and features of a site. Plus, those who understand coding can easily customize their sites even further.

However, WP is also susceptible to a few security threats. Hackers love to go in through the backdoor of your WP site and attempt to set up residence there. Fortunately, if you are aware of the most common security threats, then you can easily fix them and prevent hackers from taking over your site. Below are the top 5 WordPress security threats and how to fix them.

1. Password Hacking

You’ve probably noticed that most sites requiring a password now require you to create a strong password with capitals, lower case, numbers and special characters. The more complicated you can make the password (but still remember what it is), the less chance hackers have of breaking into your site.

Understand that hackers often use bots and can try dozens of passwords in seconds. If your password is easy to crack, you can be certain they can and will crack your password. Creating a strong password includes tips such as:

Not using the same password for everything
Making the password at least 12 characters long
Making sure all your devices used to sign in are secure (two-factor authentication helps)

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/847/Top-5-Security-Issues-with-WordPress-and-How-to-Fix-Them.html

Useful Analytic Tools that Will Improve Your SEO https://www.todhost.com/blog/useful-analytic-tools-that-will-improve-your-seo.html

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is ever changing and so requires constant assessment and review. To understand your current performance and take steps to improve, you require analytic tools. That is the focus of this post. This post is completely dedicated to SEO analytic tools. For each tool, we will provide a brief overview of its functionality.

Read full blog post: https://www.todhost.com/blog/useful-analytic-tools-that-will-improve-your-seo.html

Read full post at: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/846/Tips-to-Speed-Up-Drupal-Performance.html

Drupal is an open-source CMS and or framework that is used by at least 2.2% of all the websites on the internet. It powers all types of websites ranging from blogs to corporate and government sites. In this post, we will discuss tips on how to speed up Drupal performance to ensure your website keeps running fast, ensuring a good experience for your visitors and the search engines.

Drupal was originally released in 2001, two years before WordPress was even on the market. With WordPress being so popular, many people ask why someone would choose Drupal over WordPress? Here are a few reasons Drupal is preferred by web developers::

Security: Drupal has enterprise-level security and provides in-depth security reports. WordPress tends to have more plugins with vulnerabilities, especially if the owner doesn’t update them.
Scaling: Drupal was meant to scale to thousands of pages! WordPress was originally designed as blogging platform and actually runs into a memory issues after 100 pages.
Powerful: Drupal was designed with developers in mind and so the design possibilities are endless, especially with its modular design.

“We chose to go with a Drupal-based platform because it is open source, has a dynamic developer community, and offers a powerful and flexible platform for building online communities.” Mitch Kapor, Electronic Frontier Foundation


Read full post at: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/846/Tips-to-Speed-Up-Drupal-Performance.html

Read full article at:: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/845/How-to-optimize-your-Drupal-website.html

In this tutorial, we examine the fundamental optimization steps required to enhance the performance of your Drupal website.

Drupal is a powerful content management system designed for rugged performance. A Drupal website that is well-optimized for performance can handle several million visits each day. That had been one of the advantages going for Drupal.

There are several ways to configure Drupal for optimal performance. These include optimizing MySQL, implementation of a Content Delivery Network (CDN), and different modes of caching such as View Caching and Page Caching. Apart from these, Drupal offers a range of options to reduce or optimize bandwidth requirements.


This post is more of checklist of performance optimization good for a Drupal website. Here are the recommended steps:

1. Update core module, contribs module, and themes of Drupal site

You always want to keep the core, contribs module, and themes updated.
a. To run updates, navigate to “Reports” → “Available Updates”
b. Click on “Check manually” to scan for additional updates

2. Use Content Delivery Network

Implementing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) with Drupal is a fast and easy way to instantly reduce load times for your website and ensure you are serving your static content (product images, JavaScript, CSS) from CDN.

3. Utilize Caching

Caching is fundamental to improving the speed performance in Drupal. Drupal provides caching options. This is probably the easiest way to speed up Drupal performance on your site.

a. Page Caching

To enable caching, navigate to Configuration → Development→ Performance
Enable “Cache pages for anonymous users” and also “Cache blocks.” You can then choose a time for minimum cache lifetime and expiration of cached pages.

b. Views Caching

1. To enable views caching, navigate to Administration → Structure→ Views
2. Click “Edit” on the view where you want to enable caching
3. Expand the “Advanced box”
4. Select “Time-based” and click on “Apply (all displays)”

c. PHP Caching

PHP Cache (APC) is well-known to increase the speed of Drupal installs. Add the below code .htaccess to enable PHP caching

<IfModule mod_gzip.c>
mod_gzip_on Yes
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
mod_gzip_item_include file .(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$
mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*
</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
# Compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Text, XML and fonts
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml

# Remove browser bugs (only needed for really old browsers)
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
Header append Vary User-Agent
</IfModule>
# Requires mod_expires to be enabled.
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive on
ExpiresDefault "access plus 30 seconds"
ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 15 days"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType text/js "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 months"
</IfModule>

Here are some other caching options that can be used to improve the performance of the Drupal website.

d. Memcache
e. File Cache
f. Redis
g. Boost (turns all Drupal pages into flat HTML files)

4. Optimize Your Images

You can change the compression ratio of an image. By default in Drupal 7, it is set to 75%.
1. To change the ratio, navigate to Configuration → Image toolkit
2. You can then change the % amount and click on “Save configuration"

5. Use Fast 404 module to reduce 404 error in Drupal

6. Aggregate CSS/JS

By aggregating your CSS and JavaScript files, you can improve the performance of your front-end and download times. This happens because the browser doesn’t have to fetch files, reducing the number of HTTP requests.

1. To enable, navigate to Configuration → Development → Performance
2. Now click on “Aggregate and compress CSS files” and “Aggregate JavaScript files”

3. Click on “Save configuration”

You can also use advagg module to simplify advanced aggregation of CSS/JS

7. Use minify js and css for page speed

8. Use syslog instead of database logging for error log

9. Use search engines like (Apache Solr, Elastic Search)


10 Optimize your database

a. Scale-up database server hardware, increase the number of CPU cores, and use RAM and disk storage array technology to maximize I/O on disk reads and minimize latency
b. Reduce the volume of queries by modifying your application or increasing their performance using standard database optimization techniques such as building appropriate indexes of the field.
c. Use AutoSlave module for master and slave database

$databases['default']['default'] = array (
'driver' => 'autoslave',
);

$databases['default']['master'] = array (
'database' => 'mydb',
'username' => 'username',
'password' => 'password',
'host' => 'master.example.com',
'port' => '',
'driver' => 'mysql',
'prefix' => '',
);

$databases['default']['autoslave'] = array (
'database' => 'mydb',
'username' => 'username',
'password' => 'password',
'host' => 'slave.example.com',
'port' => '',
'driver' => 'mysql',
'prefix' => '',
);

// Use locking that supports force master

$conf['lock_inc'] = 'sites/all/modules/autoslave/memcache-lock.inc';

// Use AutoSlave transactional safe cache wrapper with a memcache backend

$conf['cache_backends'][] = 'sites/all/modules/autoslave/autoslave.cache.inc';
$conf['cache_default_class'] = 'AutoslaveCache';
$conf['autoslave_cache_default_class'] = 'MemCacheDrupal';

11. Disable the PHP Filter module

12. Disable theme registry rebuilding

13. Disable unnecessary modules

You can disable modules—Administration Development tools, Devel, Devel node access, Module Filter, Blog, Forum, Taxonomy, Search, Help, Shortcut, Database Logging, Color, Toolbar, Tracker, Statistics (this module writes to your database on every page load. If you are using Google Analytics you probably don’t need this), Update Manager— if you don’t need their functionality for your site.

Read full article at:: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/845/How-to-optimize-your-Drupal-website.html

Read full post at: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/844/WordPress-image-optimization-tutorial.html

Images are a critical component of any website especially its impact on website speed. They make websites attractive, improve user experience, click through rates and can also reduce bounce rates. But they also can slow down your website. All of these will have some impact on your website performance both on search engines and the impression your users will have about yyour website.

Even though Internet speeds have dramatically increased over the years, it is important that you take care of pictures on your website because it will improve your website performance.

Just because it’s easy to upload images to your site, that doesn’t mean you should do that without any preparation. Unoptimized images can, in fact, hurt your site in many ways; from affecting the way visitors think of you to the speed of your website and SEO rankings. If you still haven’t thought of that, we’re here to show you several ways of improving images in WordPress.

In this guide, we are about to show you:

How to optimize images for WordPress to speed up your site and improve SEO
Change the way WordPress compresses JPEG images
The most popular image optimization plugins for WordPress
Add lazy loading for your videos and images
Display before and after images in an attractive way
How to create interactive images – draw, add descriptions and links
How to regenerate additional image sizes
Remove width and height image attributes with jQuery
How to create custom image sizes in Media Uploader
Create automatic screenshot of any website and publish it as image in your post

How to optimize images for WordPress so that you speed up your site and improve SEO

First, you need to understand why image optimization is important. Why you should optimize images for your WordPress website. Here are the top reasons you should improve our website images:

Faster site
Better SEO
Smaller backups
Less bandwidth usage
Happier users

You should also know that there are different stages at which you can optimize the images. You can take care of the pictures even before you upload them to a blog or you can do that after the upload.

Read full post at: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/844/WordPress-image-optimization-tutorial.html

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/conversion-rate-optimization-how-to-turn-prospects-into-customers.html

If you already have a website that is pulling reasonable traffic, then it should interest you to turn more of your website visitors into customers and you will want to do as much to optimize the rate at which visitors can become customers.

This guide will walk you through much of what you need to know about conversion rate optimization, why it is important and how you can go about building your own optimization strategy. The goal is to help you improve the performance of your website, as well as the tools you’ll need to be successful.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/conversion-rate-optimization-how-to-turn-prospects-into-customers.html