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How To Make Your WordPress Site Compliant With Accessibility Regulations

Everyone deserves the right to navigate the internet, unrestrained by poor design choices, bad layouts, or inaccessible sites. In a world where over one billion people live with some form of disability, with this figure increasing every day, it’s time we all stopped to think about internet accessibility.

Web accessibility is about creating equal access online, allowing all users to navigate all the sites they want. While leaps have been taken in the past several years, with WordPress having a wide range of accessibility support pages, the uptake still isn’t moving fast enough.

In this article, we’ll discuss exactly why you should incorporate accessibility into your WordPress site, as well as demonstrate three easy ways of doing so. By the end of this, you’ll be an expert in digital accessibility regulations.

What Are Online Accessibility Standards?

Otherwise, known as WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are currently the global standard when it comes to creating an accessible website. These standards are created and imposed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is made up of an international selection of disability experts.

As suggested on their regulations page, the WCAG has the end goal of “Providing a shared standard for web content accessibility” that aims to “meet the needs of individuals, organizations, and governments internationally”. In short, they’re trying to create a fairer world of internet access for everyone.

In today’s world, smartphones are, perhaps, a necessity and not a luxury anymore. Unsurprisingly, the feasible and handy phones have outnumbered desktops when it comes to online searching. Various statistics show ever-increasing use of mobile devices for searching for different content.

In a recent survey, Global Stats analyzed the worldwide market share of mobiles, desktop, and tablets. The results show that nearly 52% of searches come from mobile, 45% from desktops and only 4% from tablets.

The data translates into the fact that your website has to be optimized for mobile phones. If that’s not the case with your WordPress site, then you are likely to lose half of the online traffic worldwide.

Significance of Mobile SEO

WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems (CMS) in the market. Certainly, it is an effective CMS for SEO and enhancing your search rankings. Perhaps, you have also built a WordPress site for your business.

Thanks to the worldwide increase in mobile usage, Google made some noteworthy changes and released Pigeon Update in 2015. The aim was to provide mobile-optimized websites for higher search rankings. In case you don’t know, for determining a website’s ranking in the search engine, Google has now shifted to Mobile-first indexing.

If the mobile version of your WordPress site is poorly optimized, your site will have a low ranking in SERPs. So, the better your WordPress site is structured, the higher your search rankings; it is also essential for better usability.

Now that you know the importance of mobile optimization, let’s find out how to audit your WordPress Mobile SEO.

SEO 101 Guide

How to scale your SEO, by yourself, with super limited or no budget at all?

Let’s dive in!

SEO (Search Engine Optimization), such as SEO services Brisbane, is much cheaper than purchasing Google ads or Facebook ads, while content has an amazing ROI. You can check out this Damon Burton SEO book author for some top SEO strategies to grow your site or blog!

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the first steps small business owners should take to improve their website visibility. It makes the website easier to find and understand for users (and if those activities are successful, they can turn into potential customers). Check out the Ultimate Guide To SEO for Small Business here for more info!

SEO can also drive evergreen traffic, which means that even old pages are bringing visitors to your site. So, let’s focus what are top SEO strategies to grow your site or blog with no or very little budget.

google_search_snippets

Featured snippets can increase organic traffic to a page by up to 516%, as found in a study by Search Engine Land. While many webmasters focus solely on ranking in the regular search results, featured snippets create a new opportunity to surpass the competition.

Ahead, you are going to learn how to optimize your content and SEO to achieve featured snippets in Google, and ultimately generate more organic traffic.

What are Featured Snippets?

Every marketer aspires to achieve the #1 rank in Google, but how about position #0? This is what many are starting to call featured snippets, as they appear higher than other search results.

Featured snippets are specially selected answers that are placed in a block below any ads but above the other organic results. You’ve most likely seen them before, and they look like this:

Security Plugins for WordPress

Unknown too many, there are quite a few ways in which your site could encounter a security breach. One way this can happen is by using unsupported or outdated plugins and themes.

Therefore, it is crucial to keep an eye on security, primarily when working on a platform such as WordPress as they have a vast audience and hence potentially a significant amount of security breaches.

Below is a list of essential security plugins for WordPress websites. The list includes both free and paid plugins, as well as well-known popular plugins with contrasting lesser-known plugins all of which can help provide your WordPress website with varying levels of security.

Website Builder

So, you intend to build a website, and you’ve decided to use a website builder. Perhaps you don’t know any coding and don’t want to hire someone to do it, or perhaps you just want to spend as little time as possible on the setup phase. Regardless, your mind is set.

But which website builder is right for you? You want to rank as well as possible and get a lot of organic search traffic, but you’re not sure which option to choose. There are plenty of options out there, and the features are all broadly similar. It’s tough to tell how they differ for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

In this piece, we’re going to look at the technical elements that affect SEO, look at how some major website builders compare, and identify the best option website builder for the typical user.

Plugins are there to make our lives easier, and I, for one, make the most of them. There are thousands available to add extra functionality to your WordPress site, covering everything from extra security measures and site backups to image galleries and social media. The best thing about these app-style add-ons is how easy they are to install and you don’t need much experience to use them.

With all this in mind, it’s easy to get carried away browsing the plugin libraries. Instead of creating a bloated user experience on a slow-moving site, consider a “less is more” approach. I tend to keep a tight ship on how many plugins I use. My WordPress-based site isn’t jam-packed with them; if they don’t serve a real purpose or aren’t necessary as a stand-alone download, they’re out.

Chances are, many of your site features and elements are or will be powered by plugins. They are an asset to any successful WordPress website. Keep in mind that adding plugins isn’t like collecting Pokemon. Just because there is a plugin for pretty much every function or feature you can think of doesn’t mean you should indulge in adding them all. Using too many can eat up disk space on your site’s server, make plugin management cumbersome or slow down the performance of your site. Worst case scenario – they can open your site up to being hacked.

Limiting the type and number of plugins you use is a great first step to improving your website. In this article, I’m going to give you a list of only mandatory WordPress plugins you need to use on your WordPress site. This includes plugins that improve security, SEO, user experience and backing up your content, as well as saving time and improving conversions.

If you don’t have these 12 WordPress plugins already, you should install them now to keep your site ticking along nicely.

One of the biggest crimes in this age – and certainly one of the most dangerous for businesses – is cybercrime and cyber-attacks. The digital age has allowed for limitless connectivity with virtually anyone anywhere in the world, and while this is a good thing for connecting with peers on a personal level and with customers for businesses, this also means that, at any time, people online are at risk of falling victim to various cybercrimes like data theft and phishing.

The dangers of the digital realm are nothing short of new in this age. There are always reports of people being compromised online, whether in the form of stolen personal data unwittingly entered in what seemed like a legitimate website at the time, being baited into scams by entities disguising themselves as trustworthy people, cyberextortion, unwarranted surveillance (such as in the case of laptop webcams being used unknowingly by the owners as a tool against their privacy), etc. Many individuals have fallen prey to these attacks, but they are not the only ones susceptible to such.

Even large corporations have experienced this kind of digital horror, and they have larger things at stake for their lack of digital security. Just this year, HBO was compromised when about 1TB of its data was stolen from its online database and the hackers have threatened to release certain personal information about the staff and actors involved with the company, as well as the episodes of the anticipated Season 7 of its tentpole series “Game of Thrones”, which was airing at the time. Even Yahoo!, in 2013, was deeply affected by the hacking.

Despite these widespread incidents, however, 73% of WordPress sites still remain vulnerable to being attacked – and this is alarming as it clearly means that a good portion of WordPress users are vulnerable to having their data stolen. This data can range from simple, non-intrusive ones that can be replaced immediately without repercussions on its loss, to highly-sensitive ones that might not only risk the company but its clientele as well.

At the forefront of WordPress protection is the WordPress firewall, which can deliver more than just protect your website against potential cyber attacks. Devsecops vulnerability management is a critical element to this security posture.

Learn more about WordPress firewalls with this infographic by NewtLabs.

How To Make Your WordPress Site Compliant With Accessibility Regulations

What Are Online Accessibility Standards?

A Full-Scale Mobile WordPress SEO Audit in 5 Simple Steps

Significance of Mobile SEO

SEO 101 – A Step-by-Step Guide to Doing SEO Yourself in 2019

How to Optimize Your Website for Featured Snippets

What are Featured Snippets?

20 Essential Security Plugins for WordPress Websites

Digital DIY: Which Website Builder is Really the Best for SEO?

The 14 Best WordPress Plugins You Need Right Now

The What, Why and How of WordPress Firewalls (Infographic)