Striving To Improve Your Joomla Website? 5 Security Metrics to Get It Done

 Hackers are everywhere. But nothing to fear! All it takes is a few steps to strengthen your security and turn your Joomla website into a fortress. Infact, for all good reasons, more than 2.5 percent of websites are running on this CMS despite businesses of all sizes.

As the admin you have the daunting task of ensuring your CMS is properly patched. Here we shall show you how to guard against the most common exploits and hacks that this open source CMS faces.

1. Nothing More Critical Than Hosting and Servers

Many a server errors can be attributed to unpatched servers. So,

• Make sure you are using a well-known secure host and that you stay current with your server patches.

• Host your site on a server that runs PHP 5.2 or better

• Ensure that you are using the latest Apache version and that your Apache configuration doesn't allow browsing/indexing.

2. Enable and Use the htaccess File:

Even though the htaccess file is not in use, ensure you rename it from “.htaccess.txt” to “.htaccess”

3. Consider an Incident Management Plan

"Back up early and often"- this takes a lot of the pressure off your shoulders when your site be hacked to ensure you can restore your site without significant downtime or loss of data.

4. Manage Third party extensions

What make Joomla CMS so wildly popular is that every extension is considered to be another item that you have to ensure is updated / patched.

5. Use SSL Certification

Induce Joomla into SSL mode for all logins. Be aware that you must have a properly configured SSL certificate for your site's domain rather than a shared SSL certificates.

Joomla security depends on a number of things that have to be maintained and updated on a regular basis. Need to stay on top? Know your site and stay current with patches and extensions, as well as cleaning things up from time to time. Good luck!

70% Customers Of Online Shoppers Walk-Off Without Buying- Guess Why?

A recent study say, one of the biggest reasons why shoppers leave an online store without buying isn’t because of price. Perhaps, you don’t get what they really want. It is not one or two but many features that assure a GENUINE seal.

Where Do We Start?

It is said increasing sales and conversions means increasing traffic volumes, which fails in this digital era. Getting visitors to your online store is really only the first step in the conversion process.

The more you evaluate and optimize your entire shopping experience before implementing and optimizing promotions, starting from server performance to site design to product descriptions to checkout can have a tremendous impact on conversion rates.

Help Your Customers Find What They’re Looking For

Two easy ways to help your customers find the right products:

• Search: one of the best ways you can increase your conversion rate is improving your product search. Your search bar should be large enough so that it’s easily visible.

• Faceted Search: This help customer narrow their searches according to various products attributes, including category, size, color, etc

Merchandise and Sell That Product

There are three simply steps to achieve this

• Using quality images featuring zooming, detail views, and even video to give customers numerous ways to view the product

• Canned or pre-written product descriptions.

• Tailor product descriptions to your specific target audience.

Never Underestimate a Fast Loading Site

Shopping experience goes for nothing because of pages that are slow to load. It’s found nearly 25% of online shoppers abandon a page after 2 to 6 seconds of wait time.

• Enable caching (including query and full-page caching)

• Clean up any inactive CMS pages and remove out-of date promotions and products

• Limit the number of concurrent promotions, and disable any functionality if kept unused

Ensure Mobile Friendliness

If your customers are waiting for image-heavy pages to load or struggling to view pages optimized for desktop or laptop screens, count that person is no more your fan. Images should be optimized for mobile so that they load quickly

• One way to optimize your site for mobile is to automatically detect mobile browsers and display a mobile-optimized version of your site.

• Another solution is to create a separate mobile app for your store that helps customers locate products more quickly, without affecting the speedy payment and checkout.

Want to maximise your success? Magento Enterprise Edition gives you the tools you need to take complete control of your online channel.

Drupal Vs. Joomla- Which One Is The Best For Online Business

Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal are the 3 most popular Content Management Systems (CMS) online. Though WordPress is basically the best suit for blogs all these three are open source and built on PHP + MySQL.

Comparing Joomla and Drupal, they vary significantly in terms of features, capability, flexibility and ease of use. This post will showcase some of the advantages and disadvantages of each of these CMS solutions to help you make a better decision.

Drupal: Pros And Cons

Drupal is considered the developer-friendly CMS and therefore data-intensive websites like Whitehouse.gov and Data.gov.uk makes it a popular choice.

Advantages

Extreme Flexibility: From simple blog site to a powerful backend that can support hundreds of thousands of pages and millions of users every month- well, Drupal can handle that. The software is all powerful and flexible.

Strong SEO Capabilities: Designed from the ground-up to be search engine friendly.

Enterprise Friendly: no wonder, as it can handle hundreds of thousands of pages of content with ease make Drupal the choice for enterprise customers.

Disadvantages

Lack of Free Plugins: In Drupal, we name them ‘modules ‘because of its enterprise-first roots and most of them are not free.

Joomla: Pros And Cons

Joomla is one of the most popular CMS solutions in the world and boasts over 30m downloads to date.

Advantages

User-Friendly: Joomla isn’t WordPress but relatively easy to use- UI polished, flexible and powerful.

Strong Developer Community: With a ton of free to use, open source plug-in library called ‘extensions’ Joomla has a strong developer community.

Content Management Capabilities: Originally designed as an enterprise-grade CMS, it’s far more capable at handling a large volume of articles.

Disadvantages Of Joomla

Learning Involved: Hoping in and installing Joomla doesn’t work if you’re not familiar with the software. It requires a steep learning curve.

Drupal is recommended for large projects where stability, scalability and power are prioritized over aesthetics. Joomla lets you to build a website with more structural stability and fairly intuitive interface. The latter one is a good option for small to mid-tier e-commerce stores but if you require more powerful for enterprise use, consider Drupal.