1. Headless WordPress 

In 2021, WP Engine conducted a study that revealed that 64% of enterprise respondents already use headless technology. The benefits of a headless WordPress setup are:

• Better Performance 
• Improved Flexibility 
• Better Security  

2. No-Code WordPress Development  

No-code platforms are taking more space in the development world. With the help of visual page builders like Elementor and plugins like WooCommerce for e-commerce, WordPress allows you to have a fully functional website or shop in days and at a fraction of the cost you would spend to build it from scratch. This will also help if your company is the one maintains it after it is built. 

3. WordPress for SaaS 

SaaS products have various use cases for B2B and B2C clients, including automating tasks, streamlining business workflows, adding new functionalities, or providing an alternative to expensive custom-coded options. 

4. WordPress for E-Commerce  

According to a Statista report, WooCommerce is the second leading e-commerce platform (after Squarespace) with a 23.43% market share worldwide. The e-commerce software application market is forecast to grow to approximately $6.3 billion by 2023, and WooCommerce. Over 1,000 WooCommerce plugins are listed in the official WordPress plugins repository, and on CodeCanyon, a popular premium plugins marketplace, over 1,300 WooCommerce plugins are available to purchase. 

5. Gutenberg Enhancement 

With every WordPress version update, it got a lot of new features, and many bugs have been resolved. Gutenberg 11.9 introduced improvements to the site editor in preparation for full site editing. FSE will change how users design and develop WordPress websites using Gutenberg blocks to post content and edit the website elements like the header, footer, menus, and sidebars.

6. Performance Improvements 

Code contributors from Yoast and Google outlined the need that WordPress should have a coordinated approach toward improving performance and proposed creating a performance team. In 2202, according to Search Engine Journal, expect improvements, new features and updates related to the following key areas:

• Images
• JavaScript And CSS
• Themes/Plugin Requirements

7. Accessibility Improvements 

Make your website and its content available for all people, whatever their device, software configuration, language barriers, location, or level of ability. When a site that passes all the accessibility tests, all users have equal access to its functionality and content. This may also be a legal requirement in many territories.

Need help implementing these steps? Call 248.528.3600. 

The post 7 Top WordPress Trends You Should Watch appeared first on Miller Media, Digital Marketing Agency, PPC, Industrial Web Design, WordPress.

Always Install Updates

When vendors release updates, it is usually to fix vulnerabilities that they have discovered. The race against the clock makes it critical to regularly check for updates for your operating systems, especially if your website is built in a CMS such as WordPress. Additionally, check for updates for themes, templates, and plugins. Cybercriminals like to target free plugins and templates to plant a virus or steal sensitive user data. 

Safeguard Passwords & Use Multi-Factor Authentication

Hackers like to use a tactic called brute-forcing, where they attempt to gain access to your accounts by rapidly trying thousands of possible passwords. Create a strong password for your backend and anywhere that has important or confidential information (such as credit card numbers, client info, etc.). Password managers are great tools that encrypt and store each of your passwords, allowing you to easily access them across all your devices. They also usually notify you when you need to change a password and will help you generate a strong password to replace it. Add an extra layer of protection by using a multi-factor authentication (MFA). It will require two or more factors of authentication to access a system, this might include, passwords, PINs, facial or voice recognition, fingerprints, or phone notifications.

Use Trusted Antivirus Software

Antivirus software will protect your website against a variety of threats. They are created to proactively block, detect, and remove cyberthreats like viruses, malware, and ransomware before they can cause any harm. A comprehensive package should also include anti-spam and anti-phishing protection, a firewall, and browsing protection. There are many software packages available in the app store. If you are having trouble determining which software is compatible with your website, consider consulting a professional agency that regularly maintains websites. 

Invest in Professional Services 

Maintaining a website is a full-time job. It can be overwhelming making sure your website is running smoothly and that it well-protected, especially if you’re busy running your business. Make sure to create a budget that you can use to hire a professional web agency. Look for agencies that offer web maintenance. If your website is not built yet or you have one that is outdated, look for an agency that offers design and development services. The professionals know how to keep your website updated and safe as well as can monitor your website, so you don’t have to. This leaves you to focus on other areas of your business without stressing over your website. 

Need help improving the security of your website? Call 248.528.3600.

The post How to Improve the Security of Your Website appeared first on Miller Media, Digital Marketing Agency, PPC, Industrial Web Design, WordPress.

1. AMP

Back in 2015 Google updated their search engine to award websites with good speed and is still in effect today. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open-source project developed by Google to instantly load content for mobile users, allowing web content to load faster on mobile devices. It transforms your website layout and strips it down to the core essentials. 

The AMP plugin also allows you to automatically generate the AMP markup while writing content. This markup is executed automatically when mobile users visit your website.

Installing AMP is important for growing your search presence.

Additional benefits of the AMP WordPress plugin include:

• Develop components that are compatible with AMP.
• Auto-generate AMP markup for your website screens. This will allow you to markup your website for AMP without changing your standard workflow.
• Take advantage of mobile redirection and AMP-AMP linking.

2. Smush 

Smush is the most popular image compression plugin in the WordPress plugin marketplace. This plugin can bulk compress images, automatically compress new images, and enable lazy loading. Smush comes with both free and paid plans. The free plan allows you to compress all the new images you upload. It can also bulk compress existing images, but there is a limit to the number of images you can compress in one go. The tool works in the background to take care of all your website’s artwork. Smush can also resize website images and look for incorrectly sized pictures.

More benefits of using Smush for your WordPress website:

• Compress images without losing quality. Smush strips away redundant data from images without hurting their quality.
• Deferred rendering of off-screen images with lazy loading.
• Bulk compress existing images on your WordPress website. You can also compress images that are not in your media library.
• Optimize as many images as you like with the free plan. You can only compress images that are below 5 MB in size.

3. WP Rocket 

WP Rocket is a premium plugin and is not available for free in the WordPress marketplace. You’ll have to purchase WP Rocket, download the plugin, and install it on your WordPress website. Once the plugin is active, you can choose from a variety of performance practices to speed up your website. This includes caching, image compression, minification, gzip compression, and more. The tool is specially designed for WordPress websites. 

Features as part of the plugin:

• Cache your website pages in no time to get an optimized load time.
• Compress website assets on your server and decompress them on the website to improve server response time.
• Cache website assets which include HTML, CSS, and JS files.
• Integrate a CDN to your website to make sure it loads fast anywhere in the world.
• Clean up redundant data in your website server like spam comments, pingbacks, and more.

4. W3 Total Cache 

With W3 Total Cache you can use the plugin to cache your website assets and reduce load time.

You can also integrate a CDN to your website using W3 Total Cache to shave off more seconds from your load time. The plugin improves your website server’s response time, enabling you to manage more visitors to your site with greater ease.

Advantages of using W3 Total Cache:

• Minification of JS, CSS and HTML files with the plugin can help you save 80% of your server bandwidth
• Support for AMP to make mobile viewing faster and easier.
• Compatible with shared, managed, and dedicated website hosts.
• Caching of minified and compressed CSS and JS files in memory, disk, or CDN.
• Caching of website assets like categories, search results, tags, comments, and more.
• Lazy loading functionality to defer loading of off-screen images.
• Security mechanisms to bring the site up to standard security levels.
• Data that details caching metrics, and the performance of other enabled features.

5. Cloudflare 

Cloudflare is the most trusted solution out there for website security and performance optimization. Once your website is connected, Cloudflare can instantly shore up your site speed with Automatical Performance Optimization (APO).

APO enables you to host your website on Cloudflare’s cutting-edge servers, allowing you to deliver fast speeds to users anywhere in the world. Even without APO, you can still get automated cache purge features for your website. Your visitors will always see the updated static content when they arrive on your website.

Additional benefits of using Cloudflare:

• Manage your CloudFlare account settings within your website’s admin panel. You can choose from options to purge cache, manage security levels, optimize images, and more.
• Support for HTTP2.
• CDN integration to ensure your website runs fast everywhere in the world.
• Best-in-class security standards with WAF rules.

6. WP Optimize 

WP Optimize is a powerful plugin that caches your website and streamlines your database. This is to make your website fast and SEO-friendly. This feature alone comes loaded with functionality like pre-loaded cache, device-responsive caching, gzip compression, and more.

Other functionalities of the plugin include database optimization and image compression. 

More reasons to use WP Optimize:

• Remove redundant data from your WordPress database like pingbacks, trackbacks, spam comments, and more.
• Defragment SQL tables on your server.
• Automatic database cleanups.
• Bulk compression of your website’s images. You can restore your compressed images to their original quality as well.
• Multi-pass lossy compression algorithm to double your compression rate without losing as much in quality.
• Advanced caching rules to choose which website assets you wish to cache.

Start building a website with these plugins today! Call 248.528.3600.

The post Top 6 Plugins to Speed Up Your WordPress Website appeared first on Miller Media, Digital Marketing Agency, PPC, Industrial Web Design, WordPress.

The Attack:

The attack mostly came from data centers during a change from residential network Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to cloud compute ISPs. It was launched from a botnet with approximately 6,00 unique bots. It originated from 112 countries with almost 15% of the attack traffic originated from Indonesia, followed by Russia, Brazil, India, Colombia, and the United States. Within these countries, over 1,300 different networks including the German provider Hetzner Online GmbH (Autonomous System Number 24940), Azteca Comunicaciones Colombia (ASN 262186), OVH in France (ASN 16276), and more were used. 

 How this attack was automatically detected and mitigated: 

Cloudflare built and operates software-defined systems that run autonomously to detect and mitigate DDoS attacks across your entire network without human intervention. The system starts off by sampling traffic, analyzes the samples, and applies mitigations when needed. During sampling, traffic is routed through the Internet via BGP Anycast to the nearest Cloudflare data centers located in over 270 cities around the world. Once the traffic reaches the data center, the DDoS systems sample it asynchronously allowing for out-of-path analysis of traffic without introducing latency penalties. Then, once analysis is done using data streaming algorithms, HTTP request samples are compared to conditional fingerprints. Multiple real-time signatures are created based on dynamic masking of various request fields and metadata. Each time another request matches one of the signatures, a counter is increased. When the activation threshold is reached for a given signature, a mitigation rule is compiled and pushed inline. The mitigation rule includes the real-time signature and the mitigation action, e.g. block.

Protect your HTTPS today. Call 248.528.3600

The post Cloudflare blocks 15M rps HTTPS DDoS attack appeared first on Miller Media, Digital Marketing Agency, PPC, Industrial Web Design, WordPress.

How did the scammers get your postal address? They got your address from public records, or a “contact” form you put in on your website. We absolutely DO NOT share your address with them. We have also received fake notices and are taking the time to alert everyone now. 

What should you do if you did receive this fake invoice? First and most important DO NOT pay this fake company or any company that sends you an unsolicited invoice for search engine services. Secondly, pass the warning on to your accounting department or person in charge of your invoices to sure they are aware that it is fake. Finally, if you are in the United States, file a complaint with the FTC and/or your state’s Attorney’s General. 

Question? Call 248.528.3600

The post Domain Listings Billing Scam appeared first on Miller Media, Digital Marketing Agency, PPC, Industrial Web Design, WordPress.

Why do we continue to use this CMS over others? Because these scary data points are well documented and constantly being fixed by WordPress’ open-source development style. Here at Miller Media, we offer website redesign and web maintenance services that can help you keep your website safe and updated so that hackers can’t compromise your website. We also offer SEO services with SEO experts keeping track of safe-to-use SEO plugins that help instead of hindering search marketing efforts. 

Start keeping your website safe today. Call 248.528.3600

The post Keep Your WordPress Website Safe! appeared first on Miller Media, Digital Marketing Agency, PPC, Industrial Web Design, WordPress.

Starting off prices are reasonable. The average WordPress developer usually charges $50 per hour. $1,000 is what a person usually pays for a full site design when starting out their business. However, custom-built WordPress websites can cost anything between $1,000 and $100,000. This gives your business room to grow without sacrificing the budget from other areas of your business. WordPress has a plethora of free to low-cost Plugins to help cut costs when needed. This helps freelance businesses still run smoothly no matter the economic state in your area. 

Start your freelance career today with a WordPress website. Call 248.528.3600

The post WordPress Websites are Perfect for Freelancers appeared first on Miller Media, Digital Marketing Agency, PPC, Industrial Web Design, WordPress.

• Major versions of WordPress get released every 152 days on the average. 
• WordPress gets the most of its downloads on Wednesdays, while Fridays are the least popular. 
• 22% of WordPress sites are running on the latest version of WordPress. 
• WordPress 5.2 has been downloaded nearly 37 million times already. 
• WordPress 5.x is used by 58.3% of all WordPress websites, while WordPress 4.x is still used by 39.2%.
• 56 – the number of official translations of WordPress. 
• WordPress 4.1 features 394,243 lines of code (96,924 of those lines are comments.). In comparison with the previous major release, 17,599 lines were added. 
• Around 21% of the whole WordPress code are comments. 

Struggling to update your WordPress site? We can help! Call 248.528.3600

The post WordPress Development is Constantly Keeping Up to Date appeared first on Miller Media, Digital Marketing Agency, PPC, Industrial Web Design, WordPress.

Start your WordPress website today! Call 248.528.3600

The post WordPress Builds Community appeared first on Miller Media, Digital Marketing Agency, PPC, Industrial Web Design, WordPress.

Get started now by calling 248.528.3600

The post Web Design: Choose a Theme appeared first on Miller Media, Digital Marketing Agency, PPC, Industrial Web Design, WordPress.