Tag: Usability & Conversion

Live website reviews: lessons learned

Michiel Heijmans

Live website reviews: lessons learnedJust the other day, I was at this local event where we did some live reviews for small business owners. It’s always a lot of fun to experience live reactions to some of the statements we make. People start frowning, most of the times.

In this post, I will share the things that caught my attention during the live website reviews. The things that were so obvious that made the live website review ‘customer’ facepalm the most.

What’s the purpose of your website?

It’s amazing to see how little small business owners have thought about the main purpose of their website. “My website is to inform potential customers of all the things I can do for them.” I call BS on that. We have Wikipedia for that. As a small business owner, the sole purpose of 99% of the websites is to get people to contact you or directly order your products. It has to do with some kind of online interaction that leads to a delivery of goods or services.

During a live website review, we try to tell the person across the table as much as possible, in a way that they understand what we mean. No difficult technical stuff, no to-do list for a web developer, but things they can do themselves within WordPress (most of the times). In this particular live website review, the business owner sold Cesar Therapy. Cesar Therapy is a therapy to improve posture and movement, most commonly known to help with chronic lower back pain. It’s a matter of trust, of course. The purpose of the website is to establish trust and get the visitor to contact the website owner. My advice:

  • Add a picture of yourself to the homepage. There were nice, friendly photos on other pages, but not on the homepage. This increases the feeling of being welcome, and trust.
  • Add your phone number in the header of your website. This makes it easy to contact you. People will be delighted that they don’t have to search for your contact details in the footer or on a contact page. Make it easy to contact you.
  • Add a contact form. Contact forms allow for easy contact via email without the need for an email application. Although most of us carry our email with us on our phones, I still very much like filling out a form instead of being redirected to my email app. Show your email address in a visible place as well though, for users who prefer that.

Evaluate your current pages and menu items

One of the sites we did a live website review for, had a menu item stating ‘When’. So my statement was, that this was clearly for opening hours. It was the third of eight menu items, so I knew it wouldn’t be that simple. The person across the table sighed and said: “I get what you mean.” The page was about ‘when to contact me and what I can do for you’. “When” just wasn’t the right menu item name for that. It should be something like ‘products’, ‘treatments’ or ‘services’, and preferably even more specific.

We clicked that link and found a page that had a list of all kinds of things that this company could help a customer with. It was a bullet list containing 15 items, and the customer told me that they were currently not in Google for any of these items. To rank for a keyword, you need to optimize a page for that. We have told you that before, and will keep on telling you that. All of the 15 keywords on that page were only listed on that page. I gave the customer 15 ideas for new pages that would help them rank better :)

Why you shouldn’t use large headers

One of the websites we did a live website review for, was a site for a health coach. It was clearly about food and exercise, but a huge header image with raspberries (actually a slider,) blocked all information on my 13″ MacBook. Just showing these things helps a lot. Back in the old days, when I built websites myself, I always took a step back from my desk and stared at the design I just set up. Just for a minute. It should be obvious and immediately clear what the website is about and preferably what you can do for your customer.

A large header could prevent the user from seeing all the good information that is right below it. If you insist on using a header image, be sure to set the height to a number of pixels that will allow the visitor to see the information.

How long are your reading lines?

Another thing to consider when it comes to readability is the length of your text lines. You can find a couple of studies about this online, but there doesn’t seem to be a default solution for this. It all depends on the font type used, and the size of your font.

In Readability: the Optimal Line Length, Christian Holt mentions multiple suggested text line lengths, stating these should be 50 to 65 or 75 characters. We prefer to talk about a certain number of words per line. Ilene Strizver even takes text alignment into account in her article Line Length & Column Width. She states that non-justified text should be 9 to 12 words per line, and justified text should be 12 to 15 words. From our experience, 10 to 15 words is indeed a good read. Is that exact science? No, definitely not. It’s our experience from reading and reviewing over 1,000 websites.

Now over to you

For me, the issues mentioned in this article are some of the first things that come to mind when (re)viewing a website:

  • a website should have a clear purpose;
  • the main pages and menu have to be valuable for a visitor;
  • you shouldn’t use large headers, but present the main content immediately;
  • keep your reading lines short for better on-screen reading.

These are my pet peeves. What are the things you find most annoying when visiting a website? Looking forward to your comments!

This post first appeared as Live website reviews: lessons learned on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

Creating loyal customers

Thijs de Valk

Getting customers is step one, but keeping these customers really is a totally different ball game. You may annoy people with too many newsletters, or spend too little time on social media engaging to them. There’s more than one reason your once so good customer might abandon your ship to go shop elsewhere.

Engagement, and creating loyal customers, is a part of eCommerce optimization that is easily overlooked or even forgotten. And it really shouldn’t be. It’s a lot harder to convince people to buy your products for the first time than it is to welcome them back for a second purchase.

In this post, we’ll go over the question “how to get people who have already bought something from you to buy something again?” In other words, how do you create loyal customers?

Improve the sharing experience of your products on social media with the Yoast WooCommerce plugin! »

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Keep in touch

The first thing you have to do to make sure people will keep buying your products, even after they’ve already bought one (or a few) is to let them know you’re still alive. The best way to do this is simply to actively engage with past customers. Most online shops will have a lot going on at any time, so all they have to do is to show what they’re doing. A very easy way to do this is by maintaining a blog. Launching a new product? Let your audience know in a blog post. Did you change any product features? Let your customers know! Tell them about anything you’re currently busy with.

The best thing is, these posts will also allow you to become more active on other platforms than your website as well. You can share your news on social media. And you can also feature that blog post in your weekly newsletter. So in one easy go, not just your website, but also your social media and your newsletter have become more active.

By being so active, you’ll be in the forefront of people’s mind! It’s why we keep sharing news and knowledge on an almost daily basis, via our blog and platforms like Facebook and our newsletter. This will generate traffic and sales from the audience you love most: your loyal customers.

The one example that immediately comes to mind is the release of our first eBook back in 2014. We launched a new product and promoted that via our default promotional channels:

  • Our SEO blog;
  • Twitter;
  • Facebook;
  • and our newsletter

Sales for the eBook skyrocketed the first days after release. People that knew us from our plugins and consultancy, wanted to know what else we could do for them. They knew we were good for insightful information.

There might be an extra effect here, we realized later. As we give loads of that knowledge, as well as our Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin, away for free. We’ve had quite the number of people telling they were glad to be able to purchase the eBook, to support the development of the plugin. Thank you for that.

Similar things happen after a software release by the way. We see spikes in traffic and sales after a release. The plugin directory is in this case, not per se deliberately, another channel for us to keep in touch. Our 3.3 release of June is a nice example of that:

Release spike

Have great support

Customer experience is probably one of the main reasons (next to your product, obviously) that your customers keep buying from you. Support is an important aspect of that customer experience. If you want people to keep coming back, make sure you give them the support they deserve. Happy customers are loyal customers. Loyalty translates into more revenue for your business, with 7 out of 10 Americans willing to spend about 13% more, if they believe your customer service is top notch (American Express press release, 2011). Of course, for Dutch people this is probably about half that, but that’s because we’re cheap.

If you search the internet, you’ll find a variety of opinions on how to create the best customer service possible. In our opinion, a couple of things matter for sure:

  • Relate to the customer’s problem and guide him towards a solution. Keep him in the loop and be honest about your findings.
  • The goal should be to answer any ticket within 24 hours or less. At Yoast, our support system (HelpScout) shows that almost half of our support is actually answered by a member of our global support team within the hour.
  • Have a clear refund policy. If you’re not able to solve the issue with your customer to your own satisfaction, and this kills the user experience of the customer, a refund might ‘solve’ the issue. It’s better to lose that customer (but maintain a happy relationship) than to maintain an angry customer.
  • One extra thing we are working on is a clear overview of all the licenses a customer has for the customer. We all know how frustrating it can be to find that one license or license key in your archived email messages. As mentioned, we are working on that and really feel this will improve both the support and the customer experience.

Perks of being a customer

A third way to create (more) loyal customers is reciprocity. First of all, let me explain what reciprocity actually is. Simply put, reciprocity means you repay kind actions with kind actions (obviously the word ‘kind’ can be replaced by a less positive word). It’s a construct from the social psychology that actually plays a big role in all of our daily lives.

By using reciprocity, you’ll make your loyal customers feel special. And apart from that, they actually do get something out of it. They’ll feel valued for being your customer. At Yoast, we’ve been doing this by for instance giving our newsletter subscribers or Facebook followers specials deals or discounts.

You can do this even more targeted if you have a online shop where people have to create accounts. You can specifically target the people that have bought multiple items in the past 2 weeks, for instance. Or you can target especially those people that haven’t bought an item in a while, trying to get them active within your company again. My first response was to go for the second one, but that would have been a mistake, as mentioned at the beginning of this post. Loyal customers are just way more important, and way more lucrative. In fact, this 2013 article mentions 80% of your future profit will come from just 20% of your customers. After reading this post, I’m sure you can see where these numbers are coming from.

Start valuing your loyal customers!

The point we’re trying to make in this article is that you shouldn’t just focus on how to get your next new visitors and customers. You should also think about how you can make your current customers more loyal. How you can make sure they love your products even more. Just by doing that, you’ll probably even see they’ll generate a lot of new traffic and customers all by themselves.

Now doesn’t that sound awesome?

Read more: ‘The basics of email marketing’ »

 

Shopping cart abandonment

Thijs de Valk

We optimize our checkout process continually. To do so, we keep track of our shopping cart abandonment. Why won’t people complete their purchase, even after they have already added your products to their shopping carts? That’s what we’ll discuss in this article.

Shopping cart abandonment

Some of the reasons for shopping cart abandonment are so obvious, that you would almost forget to take these into account when optimizing your checkout process. You see, a lot of the focus on shopping cart abandonment is on why people would abandon a shopping cart, and how to prevent it. However, we think there’s one step to take into account before abandonment.

Use of shopping cart

Research by Close and Kukar-Kinney (2010) states that at first, it’s not about why people abandon a shopping cart. It’s about why they’re using the shopping cart in the first place! You’d think the main reason for putting products in a shopping cart is to purchase your stuff, right? That might not be entirely true. It’s actually a pretty big assumption when you think of it!

Close and Kukar-Kinney actually found that a significant number of people also used the shopping cart as a sort of wish list or to simply check out the total price. The reason for the latter could be that the user, for instance, wants to check for any hidden costs you might add later on in the checkout process.

It’s mentioned in at least one other study by Kaufman-Scarborough and Lindquist (2002) that people might use the shopping cart for other purposes than just buying directly. What does that mean in terms of shopping cart abandonment? Quite a lot. The Kaufman-Scarborough and Lindquist study states:

Perhaps the notion of “abandonment” is an oversimplification. Some consumers may simply use shopping carts to investigate and tally possible future purchases, with no intent to purchase at the specific time that they are online.

Online window shopping

A woman’s perspective by Marieke

Although hard to imagine for some, shopping is not solely a functional activity for everyone. Some people just love to shop, even without buying anything. These so-called window shoppers take pleasure just in the shopping activity; regardless of them actually buying anything. In most cases, these people don’t have the budget to ever buy the stuff they’re looking at.

I would expect there to be window shoppers on the internet as well. They’ll pick out stuff and put it in their baskets, without any intention to buy (all of it). Putting stuff in their baskets is just good fun for these window shoppers. Their shopping needs are met solely by filling their baskets. Shopping cart abandonment could thus be partly explained by online window shopping.

They might just be right. People aren’t abandoning a cart at all if they use it as a wish list. They might just be setting the cart aside and go for a nice cup of joe. Only to come back later and purchase all the things in that cart anyway. Calling it abandonment is in itself an assumption. It would be better to call it shopping cart use. Understanding how and why people use your shopping cart is quite important.

On a side note: think about what this means if your session time-out is set to one hour or so. That simply means that all these people using your cart as a wish list see their wish list emptied, while they might want to buy everything this evening. Or even purchase all tomorrow. A nice reason for longer session cookie expiration times, right?

Complications

It’s not an easy job to find out why people are abandoning your shopping cart, let alone how people are using your shopping cart. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to do. When we first published this article in 2014, we mentioned that it would be great if more companies would try to be of assistance in this. Every customer is different; perhaps that’s what makes this very complicated. But that’s just me thinking out loud.

Up to today, it’s mostly reading or doing studies and funneling/enhanced eCommerce in Google Analytics that will give you some insights. Enhanced eCommerce will tell you at which point people abandon your cart and with what product in that cart. There is some filtering that can be done here as well; it might be worth your while to dig into this, actually.
It will also pay off to simply ask your visitors why they abandon your website. That can be done by e.g. creating a so-called exit intent survey. That survey will only pop up if a visitor is moving his cursor to close the window. If you ask people at this point in time why they’re leaving, it could give you some very useful insights.

Baymard Institute has compiled 24 different studies and found that the average shopping cart abandonment is a whopping 68.63% (January 14, 2016). That’s a lot. It shows that you want to be sure you’ve looked at it from every possible angle.

Want to learn how to improve the conversion on your website? Get our UX and Conversion eBook! »

Shopping cart abandonment

Even if a vast number of your visitors uses your cart as a wish list or for later purchase, there still are people that actually abandon your shopping cart. They all have their reasons. Results from surveys asking customers why they abandoned the shopping cart give useful additional insights:

Statista: Shopping Cart Abandonment US (2015)

This chart by Statista shows that people browse eCommerce sites and simply add products to the cart just to be able to decide later if it’s worth buying. As always, you need to be aware that methods of doing such research, especially in surveys, can lead to some discrepancies. A 2014 study by comScore showed that “not being ready to purchase” or “saving the items for later” were the biggest factors. I can totally see that being true today as well. It aligns with the ‘wanted to wait for it to go on sale’ in the Statista chart as well.

Mobile cart abandonment

Abandonment can be caused by a lot of factors. Ventureburn recently listed seven more reasons that apply to mobile shopping carts that make perfect sense to me:

  1. Long checkout process
  2. Poor design
  3. Bad loading speed
  4. Not interruption-proof
  5. Registration forms
  6. Limited payment methods
  7. No A/B testing – no conversion improvements

I like the fourth one a lot. Especially when surfing a website on a mobile device, interruption is always a factor. I totally agree with that last one as well: keep on testing, monitoring and improving. Find more details in the article by Ventureburn itself: 7 reasons why customers are abandoning your mobile shopping cart.

Improvements

Being clear about your prices and additional costs is just one of the things we mentioned as an improvement for your checkout page or shopping cart. There are many things you can do to keep people from abandoning or ‘misusing’ your shopping cart. After reading this post, one of them must seem quite obvious: offer people the wish list we mentioned earlier. Amazon is the obvious example for this. It’s an effective way to reduce the ‘noise’ in your statistics from alternate uses of your shopping carts.

Being clear seems to be a common thread in the advice:

  • Clearly state prices.
  • Clearly state any additional (f.i. shipping) costs.
  • Clearly state your payment options.
  • Clearly state the number of steps in your checkout process.

Just to name a few.

Over to you

What about your shopping cart? Do you monitor abandonment? Do you already provide that wish list? Or does that make no sense at all for your website? I trust this post will give you some food for thought for your own website!

Read more: ‘How we built a checkout page we’re proud of’ »

500 Website Reviews, what we’ve learned!

Joost de Valk

Over the last 3 years, we’ve sold & delivered 500 website reviews, selling our 500th today. I’m incredibly proud of this and wanted to share some of our learnings in this post, as well as announce some changes.

Some stats on our website reviews

I started doing these website reviews in 2010, finishing 42 of them in that year. In 2011, we finished 99 website reviews, in 2012 it grew to 329. You can see this line is going up, and quite fast. These site reviews weren’t all for the same type of site, 370 of the 500 were WordPress sites, 60 were Magento, and 50 were other eCommerce sites, some of which were WordPress as well. The remainder were other types of sites, including Drupal and Joomla installs.

The Yoast Website Review team, from left to right: Michiel, Joost and ThijsThese numbers, to me, are mind blowing. I’d never have thought I’d sell so many of these reviews and that I’d need a team around me, as I do today, to do them. The “funny” thing: I’m absolutely certain that the quality of our site reviews has gone up just as much over time. We’ve become better and faster at analyzing problems and proposing simple and to the point solutions. Also, every site gets seen by at least two people now, almost always three, which makes sure that we don’t miss important things.

SEO: Penguin & Panda

Google is good for our business in many ways. We often get called upon to help people understand why they’d suffer from Penguin or Panda type drops of traffic. I can honestly say that sites almost invariably deserved the “slap” they got from either of these updates, and I say that knowing that we’ve seen more than 200 now. Sometimes it’s tough, as the sites that “win” because of a site losing might be even worse, but I’ll stand by what I said: the sites I have reviewed that got hit, deserved it.

There were two exceptions I can remember were instead of reviewing the site, I forwarded people on to Google and asked Google to fix the false positive. Of course there have been some minor errors, but overall, forcing these people to improve their sites is “a good thing”.

Some of the other things most sites get wrong

I thought it’d be fun to dive in a bit and see what kind of issues we talk about the most, as every word in a review is decided upon by the reviewer, this isn’t as easy as it may seem as it meant I had to do some textual analysis here and there. But, I’ve compiled a small list of topics that we often address in these reviews. These were not, in most cases the most important things to fix in those sites, it’s just that a lot of people seem to be doing them wrong.

  1. 404 pages
    It baffles me in how many reviews this came up, so few people spend time making a proper 404 page… I’ve written about this quite extensively, this post about 404s for WordPress is probably the best / most interesting, even when you’re not on WordPress.
  2. Subscription options
    This is probably due to us reviewing a lot of WordPress sites / blogs, but we very often find that people are missing out on lots of subscribers by not having good subscribe widgets or even altogether lacking an email newsletter.
  3. Responsive websites
    If you’re serious about being on the web, whether to make money or to inform, you need to think about the different devices people will use to access your site, your content, your products. Rarely over the last few years did we find a site that had done this really well. Which is funny, especially for WordPress sites, because with good themes like a lot of the Genesis based themes around, having a responsive site doesn’t need to be expensive.
  4. Internal Search
    Internal search often left a lot to be desired on the websites we reviewed. In a way, this isn’t that surprising: WordPress internal search just plain sucks (this old article from me on making it suck less is still relevant) and most other CMSes, including Magento, don’t exactly shine in that area. On the other hand: setting up a Google Custom Search Engine is not that hard…
  5. Keyword usage and internal linking
    The last thing that I find we often make remarks about is the usage of keywords. Now these remarks go in all directions, but one thing is clear: simple principles like the Cornerstone Content principle are often misunderstood. Quite a number of the sites we made remarks about in this area had the keyword they wanted to rank for in the title of over a dozen pages. Think to yourself: how would Google decide which of these pages to show as the top result? Are you making that clear?
  6. Call to Action
    Very often we find sites that do, in fact, rank rather well for certain terms, but make hardly any money from that fact. This is often true because they lack a clear call to action. Michiel’s article about the call to action on your homepage is a good example of the kind of advice we tend to give.

As you can see, the range of topics we discuss is quite broad, covering UX, design, SEO, conversion rate optimization and more. Over time, we’ve been spending more time on these reviews – even though our analysis of individual issues became faster – just because the breadth and depth of our reviews increased. Which is why I’m announcing the following:

Website Review price going up Feb 1st

We’ve decided to raise the price of our website review service to €749, up €154 from our current €595 price point, effective February 1st. The reason for this is simple: we’re spending more and more time on these reviews and the follow-up questions, and feel the price isn’t justifying that anymore. Because we know that a lot of people plan on these, we wanted to give you a bit of notice.

I realize this might mean that we sell quite a few reviews in the coming week and a half. As these reviews are a very manual process, this means we’ll need a bit more time than usual to get through them. Currently we take 3 to 4 weeks, this might become a bit longer even if we sell a lot, as I’m sure you’ll understand.

500 Website Reviews, what we’ve learned! is a post by on Yoast - Website Optimization. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

WordPress SSL setup tips & tricks

Joost de Valk

WordPress SSL SetupAs we’re now running a plugin shop here on yoast.com, selling our Video SEO plugin, Tag optimizer and soon more, we also have a checkout page. I wanted that checkout page to run on https, for obvious reasons: people fill out their email and, depending on their payment method, their credit card details there. That deserves more security. It turned out not to be as simple as I wanted it to be, but I fixed it. This posts documents my mistakes and issues with my WordPress SSL setup in the hope of preventing you from making them.

You might think: couldn’t I just always load that image over SSL? Yes you could, but that’d be slower, which is why I chose not to do it.

Getting an SSL certificate on your server

This is by far the geekiest bit of this entire process, and not something I want to explain completely. In fact, I didn’t even do this myself. Just like all other VPS.net customers, you can get a free Comodo SSL certificate, all you have to do is file a support request for your VPS. It’s one of the reasons why I think VPS.net delivers the best WordPress hosting out there. BTW, they’re running a special at VPS.net, giving away Amazon gift cards for new VPSes, so if you’ve been thinking about switching, now’s a better time than any to switch to VPS.net.

I had already set up the free certificate a while back, as I wanted to run my WordPress admin over https, but I decided to go for a Extended Validation certificate today. This is a certificate that doesn’t just show an SSL icon in the browsers location bar but actually gives a green background for it and adds the company’s name, like so:

extended validation SSL certificate

Of course this isn’t needed for every site, but I think it’s worth testing if you sell products. It provides just that bit of extra trust that can be so needed for online transactions.

Next: forcing SSL on that one page

There are plugins that can do this for you, most notably WordPress HTTPS, but as I wanted a bit more control and understanding of what was happening, I decided to code it manually. The code consists of two bits, this bit forces the checkout page to be on https all the time and at the same time redirects all pages that do not need to be SSL to an http URL:

function yst_ssl_template_redirect() {
	if ( is_page( 123 ) && ! is_ssl() ) {
		if ( 0 === strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], 'http') ) {
			wp_redirect(preg_replace('|^http://|', 'https://', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']), 301 );
			exit();
		} else {
			wp_redirect('https://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], 301 );
			exit();
		}
	} else if ( !is_page( 123 ) && is_ssl() && !is_admin() ) {
		if ( 0 === strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], 'http') ) {
			wp_redirect(preg_replace('|^https://|', 'http://', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']), 301 );
			exit();
		} else {
			wp_redirect('http://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], 301 );
			exit();
		}
	}
}
add_action( 'template_redirect', 'yst_ssl_template_redirect', 1 );

If you’re sure the URL will always be “clean”, as in, without parameters, this can be even simpler, but in this case I needed it to work with the URL parameters that Easy Digital Downloads uses. The number 123 is the ID of the checkout page, you should of course replace with your own page ID if you use this code.

Now we also want get_permalink to return the right URL, so let’s filter its output:

function yst_checkout_page_ssl( $permalink, $post, $leavename ) {
	if ( 123 == $post->ID )
		return preg_replace( '|^http://|', 'https://', $permalink );
	return $permalink;
}
add_filter( 'pre_post_link', 'yst_checkout_page_ssl', 10, 3 );

This way if something links to the checkout page, the redirect isn’t even needed as the link is already an https link.

MaxCDN, W3 Total Cache & SSL: a golden trio

My favourite WordPress CDN provider MaxCDN, works great with W3 Total Cache. It does so even with SSL, if you know how to set it up. It’s very bloody simple too once you know it: for each CNAME, you enter not just the CNAME, but you follow it by a comma, and then enter the SSL version. For me, this looks like this (click for larger version):

WordPress SSL Setup: W3TC MacCDN SSL settings

This settings makes W3 Total Cache use the first hostname for http requests, and the second one for https. With a rather image heavy site like this one that’s a golden thing.

Broken SSL: fixing links in theme files

broken SSLIf you load a page over SSL, all the other files that are loaded on that page should also be loaded over SSL for it to not be “broken”. This means that every single image, javascript file, stylesheet etc. needs to be loaded over SSL. WordPress will fix a lot of this for you, but you’ll probably encounter some issues, as did I, causing a broken SSL icon in the location bar, as shown above here.

In my case, within my theme’s stylesheet, I was loading a google web font file. That shouldn’t be an issue, of course, but I was loading that font file over http, instead of using what’s called a protocol relative link. Every time you’re embedding images, javascript or CSS files, you should be using a protocol relative link. Instead of linking to:

http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Source+Sans+Pro:400,600

I’m now linking to:

//fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Source+Sans+Pro:400,600

As you can see, I left out the http:, this will make the browser use the current protocol to fetch that file. This means that when a user is on plain http, it’ll use that, which is faster, but if the user is on https, it’ll use the safe https link.

Bonus: WordPress SSL setup for the admin panel

Now that you’ve set all this up, you might as well use that SSL certificate for your admin too. That part is actually pretty easy. Just drop this in the wp-config.php:

define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true);

That’ll force the entire admin over SSL, which is what you want in most cases. If that is too slow for you though, you could also decide to just force the login page over SSL:

define('FORCE_SSL_LOGIN', true);

This will force the login and registration pages to be SSL. I think you should go for the first option though, and run your entire admin over SSL.

Conclusion: WordPress SSL setup is easy, do it!

With all these tips, there’s really no reason anymore why you couldn’t run any page where a user submits private data on SSL. So, just do it!

WordPress SSL setup tips & tricks is a post by on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!