Google PageSpeed Insights: Scoring 100/100 with WordPress

Google PageSpeed Insights is a well known tool to assess the performance of your website, both on desktop and mobile. After analyzing your site you get two scores: one for mobile and one for desktop. Read on for our tips & trick to attain a great PageSpeed score with your WordPress blog! As a general rule you should upload your images in the smallest resolution possible, while keeping a crisp image on a desktop PC (with eg. a Retina screen). …

Enabling SSL – HTTPS on a CDN (HTTPS Everywhere Series – Part 6)

When serving your site over https, you need to make sure that all resources used by your HTML are also served via HTTPS. (eg. Images, javascript, stylesheets). When you’re using a CDN to host your resources, you’ll need to configure the SSL settings in your CDN Account. We’re going to show you how you can enable HTTPS on a KeyCDN server. The process will be similar for eg. MaxCDN For setting up a CDN on a KeyCDN server: The settings we …

SSL Labs A+ HTTPS grade

Getting an A+ grade on SSLLabs.com (HTTPS Everywhere Series – Part 5)

The SSL Analyzer at SSLLabs analyzes your https setup. You’ll get a security score and a detailed report of your SSL configuration:   To get an A+ score the default nginx SSL configuration described in our https nginx configuration is not enough. More likely you’ll receive one or more of the following warnings: Let’s tune the https configuration in the next sections! Actually you should not be receiving this error, as we previously combined all the intermediate certificates with our domain …

Configuring nginx for SSL HTTPS (HTTPS Everywhere series Part 4)

In Part 3 of our HTTPS Everywhere series we explained how to choose and buy a certificate for your website domain. We’ll now show you how you can install and configure the certificate you’ve downloaded in the nginx webserver. First we will combine our domain certificate with all the intermediary certificates (except the root CA certificate). We do this for the following reasons: Note: In general a combined SSL certificate with less intermediary CAs will be a little bit better …

How to buy a HTTPS SSL certificate (HTTPS Everywhere – Part 3)

In Part 2 of our HTTPS Everywhere series we explained the differences between the different types of certificates. In this part we’ll explain how you can buy a certificate from a Certificate authority. You should choose a Certificate Authority which is trusted by both current and older browsers/operating systems for maximum compatibility. These include, but are not limited to: You can view daily updated reports of the market shares of the leading Certificate Authorities at http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/ssl_certificate/all Because of better pricing …

Web hosting providers – Analyse performance and price

Choosing the best web hosting provider for your website is not an easy task. In this section we look at the performance, stability and the price point of web hosting providers and how to make an informed decision. Performance Based Considerations Latency and Bandwidth: Two Key Concepts To Understand Before we start with our performance based considerations we need to explain two key concepts related to website performance: latency and bandwidth.   Latency is the amount of time it takes for a request from …

Different types of web hosting

Types Of Web Hosting

To run a website, you’ll need to install the necessary web server software on a server machine. Web hosts generally offer different types of web hosting. We’ll explain the pro’s/contra’s of each. Shared Web Hosting Shared hosting is the cheapest kind of hosting. Shared hosting means that the webhost has setup a (physical) server and let it host a lot of different sites from different customers on that server. (into the hundreds) The cost of the server is thus spread to all customers …