Easy & simple ways to improve your Blog pt1

From seeing, reading and navigating plenty of blogs i can at least pick up a few areas for improvement. These steps or improvements listed here are not hard nor will they take long to apply. They will improve SEO, usability and aesthetics of the modern web.

Get and use LetsEncrypt free SSL

LetsEncrypt are providers of free SSL certificates, these make your website secure and have the green padlock plus https instead of http. Your WordPress hosting may (hopefully) be through a CPanel account. Cpanel is how to manage your domain + hosting and LetsaEncrypt provides a plugin for CPanel that allows you to easily get SSl certificates. If your CPanel doesn’t have this plugin talk to your hoster.

Direct all traffic through https and remove the www.

Once you have your SSl certificate on your WordPress domain we want to direct all traffic through this secure exchange. To do that go install a plugin called Easy HTTPS (SSL) Redirection Its simple, make sure to select the option for the whole domain in its settings.

Now we are going to want to remove the www. part before your domain or subdomain. This makes your URL cleaner and take up less space allowing the actual URL to be displayed better. To do this go into the root or home directory for your domain and find (or create) a file called .htaccess and put the following code into it, ensuring you change your domain to your actual WordPress domain.

RewriteEngine On 
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://yourdomain.com/$1 [R,L]

Make URL structure simple

The final piece for now is to make your URL structure to your posts simple. I go into URL’s for better SEO here. For me personally not having the date is the best way, it looks so much more simple and clean with just yourdomain.com/my-cat-milky rather than mydomain.com/12/6/2015/my-cat-milky . Date in the URL has little meaning for SEO as Google can easily get the page create date from the page itself. To remove dates from your URL’s go to Settings->Permalinks you will see options, choose the Post name option.

Doing these few things above wont take long, It will improve your blog for SEO with SSL and shorter + precise URLs. Viewers of your blog to will be happy that your website is secure and modern in its approach.