Top 5 Spelling and Grammar Checkers for Your WordPress Site

4GHadmin | 23 July 2018
Grammar in website
Reading Time: 5 minutes

Grammar in websiteSome people will pay little heed to the insistence that you shouldn’t have even so much as one type or grammar mistake in the text of your website or blog. Others will disagree, suggesting that there’s a good number of viewers who’ll think less of you in as far as being an authority with your subject matter, or caring insufficiently about your marketing efforts. This is particularly true for anyone who offers a professional service of any kind and uses their website to promote themselves.

Many people choose the simplicity and up-n-running quick appeal of WordPress for creating their basic website. Like any Canadian web hosting provider, we’re sure that it’s the same way for a good many of our customers and, as the author of this blog myself, my first foray onto the web was with a WordPress blog hosted right here at 4GoodHosting.

But enough about that and back to topic, it is important to have text with words that are spelled correctly uniformly along with perfect readability for your viewers. Considering how easy it is nowadays with all of the extensions and plug-ins available to check your spelling and grammar for you, why wouldn’t you take 10 minutes or so to go over your site and make sure everything’s reading smoothly?

Yes, all browsers do include an in-built spelling check tool, but it does not check for readability or grammar. So let’s have a look at those best grammar checker plugins for your WordPress websites in below:

Grammarly

Grammarly is definitely the most well-known of them, a widely-used grammar checker plugin which is available as an add-on for popular browsers like Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Firefox. Grammarly scans over your posts’ spelling and grammar mistakes and prompts you to edit them correctly.

An indicator appears at the bottom right of editing field. Click on it and then the tool will display all the errors in your post, highlighted with a red underline. Grammarly does require you to switch your content to text editor to proofread.

Ginger

Here’s another easy-to-use grammar and spelling checker plugin, which assists with boosting your productivity and promoting your writing skills. Like Grammarly, Ginger is available as an add-on for browsers and it’s equally easy to use.

Ginger users will see a small icon appearing at the bottom right corner of entry fields for Facebook, Gmail, and WordPress’ built-in editor. It will detect errors in real time as you are typing and then highlight it with context.

Some drawbacks to Ginger though in our opinion. For starters, you have to revert to text editor in your WordPress website and you also need to manually launch the Ginger editor for proofreading with full ability.

After The Deadline

This plugin is an extension of Google Chrome, and comes with a built-in spelling checker tool along with an optional readability and grammar check display that we really like. After installing this extension in your browser, you will then need to click it on and choose options. It opens a Settings page like you’d find with any add-on, and you then select the options you are likely to use.

Clicking on the Spellcheck icon allows you to run the add-on when you are composing posts. Note that icon can be founded in the editor’s bottom right corner.

Hemingway

Hemingway is little different in that it is a web-based text editor. It doesn’t work like the other grammar checker tools that work within the WordPress post editor. It does offer a free web-based editor free of charge that shows you readability, spelling mistakes and grammar errors in your writing.

What gets Hemingway on the list though it can be a style checker as well as a grammar checker, designed to promote your posts’ readability in the means of displaying the readability score of your posts as well as offering suggestions where you can make improvements.

It’s got a simple and clean layout to help you evaluate your WordPress blog posts quickly before you publish them.

The web-based app of Hemingway also can be a paid desktop application for Mac and Windows that lets you post directly to your WordPress site.

LanguageTool

This is a free extension for major browsers and file managers like Google Chrome, Google Docs, LibreOffice, and FireFox. It’s available as a desktop app and a web-based editor.

Languages tool impresses with the fact that the extension comes with support for more than 20 languages, including English, Polish, Russian and German. Website masters running multilingual sites and having multilingual authors will find it extremely useful.

Only downside for this one is that the free edition will only check up to 20,000 characters each time.

Jetpack

The Jetpack plugin suite for WordPress lets you get off the ground quickly when reviewing your work, and what’s good about it is it comes with many useful modules. The big plus for Jetpack is that the plugin allows adding proofreading to WordPress post editor.

For advanced grammar detection, you can go to Jetpack’s Settings page and choose different style ‘rules’. Jetpack’s only drawback is that the plugin requires you have WordPress.com accounts, and some of the added features aren’t particularly useful for many people .

Now that you’re in the know, try one out and see to it your WordPress website is ‘perfect’ from front to back, and with every new blog post or guest contribution.

As a content creator, grammar and spelling errors can significantly hurt your credibility. Implementing a suitable grammar checker is not just essential for fixing typos and other mistakes, but it can also make your writing more elegant and clearer. In the context of SEO service for small business, having error-free, quality content is vital to improve your website’s visibility and ranking on search engines.

Even when you’re in a hurry to press publish, a reliable grammar checker acts as a quick proofreading tool, ensuring your content is polished and professional. However, it’s crucial to remember that a tool can’t wholly replace manual proofreading. For optimal results and refined content, especially when aiming to boost your SEO, engaging professional SEO services can make a significant difference.

If hiring a professional isn’t an option at the moment, consider asking a friend to read your text, or get another human eye to examine your writing, ensuring it’s not just error-free but also effectively tailored for SEO.

Which grammar checker do you use? How does it integrate into your writing workflow? Does it contribute to enhancing the effectiveness of your SEO efforts? Let me know in the comments below. Your insights might be valuable for others looking to enhance their content quality while balancing the needs of SEO for improved online visibility.

PCI Compliant web hosting is now available from 4GoodHosting, with the same quality, reliability, and customer service you can expect from one of Canada’s premiere web hosting providers. Merchants and service providers online now can now have their website hosted in a secure environment that will be approved by PCI scanning tests. A PCI approval scan will allow you to secure merchant accounts with your financial institution and offer customers proven-secure online processing of their credit cards.

 

0

Site Isolation from Google Promises to Repel More Malware Attacks

4GHadmin | 16 July 2018
Against malware
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Against malware

Security in the digital business world is really a challenge these days, and the world wide web is becoming as full of nefarious characters at the town of Machine, the ‘End of the Line’ as it were in the cool monochrome Western Dead Man with Johnny Depp from the ‘90s. A few months back we had detailed the big bad Spectre virus that had come onto the scene and posed major threats as regarded the insecurity of data for any type of website handling sensitive personal information.

It continues to be a ‘thing’, and in response to it Google recently enabled a new security feature in Chrome that secures users from malicious attacks like Spectre. It’s called Site Isolation, and is a new feature available with Chrome 67 on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS. Here at 4GoodHosting, we’re a Canadian web hosting provider that puts an emphasis on this for obvious reasons, always seeking to be as on top of our clients’ web hosting needs as effectively as possible.

Google’s experimentation with Site Isolation has been going on since Chrome 63, and they’ve patched a lot of issues before enabling it by default for all Chrome users on desktop.

Chrome’s multi-process architecture allows different tabs to employ different renderer processes. Site Isolation functions by limiting each renderer process to documents from a single site. Chrome then relies on the operating system, and mitigates attacks between processes and any site.

Google has stated that in Chrome 67, Site Isolation has been enabled for 99% of users on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS, according to a recent post on their company blog, stating further that ‘even if a Spectre attack were to occur in a malicious web page, data from other websites would generally not be loaded into the same process, and so there would be much less data available to the attacker. This significantly reduces the threat posed by Spectre.’

Additional known issues in Chrome for Android have been identified and are being worked on. Site Isolation for Chrome for Android should be ready with Chrome 68.

Need for Speed

Quick mention as well to Speed Update for Google Search on mobile. With this new feature the speed of pages will be a ranking factor for mobile searches. Of course, page speed has already been factoring into search engine rankings for some time now, but it was primarily based on desktop searches.

All of this is based on unsurprising finding showing people want to find answer to their searches as fast as possible, and page loading speed is an issue. Keeping that in mind, Google’s new feature for mobile users will only affect the pages that are painfully slow, and that has to be considered a good thing. Average pages should remain unaffected by and large.

We’re always happy to discuss in more detail how our web hosting service comes with the best in security and protective measures for your website when it’s hosted with us, and we also offer very competitively priced SSL certificates for Canadian websites that go a long way in securing your site reliably. Talk to us on the phone or email our support team.

0

2 Weeks To HTTPS Becoming a Necessity for Websites

4GHadmin | 10 July 2018
Reading Time: 3 minutes

It’s July 9th and two weeks from today the web is officially going with full HTTPS as requisite, and that’s a development that’s been a long time in the making. Securing traffic on the internet is an obvious priority, but of course there are people who are strongly opposed to having a secure web.

Two weeks today Google will be uniformly labeling any site loaded in Chrome without HTTPS to be not secure. Most webmasters will be on top of this and accordingly usage of HTTPS is exploding right now. In the 6 months up to a recent report, 32% growth in the use of HTTPS was seen in the top 1 million sites. Mozilla tracks anonymous telemetry via Firefox browser and recorded big growth (75% page loads) in the rate of pages being loaded over HTTPS. Chrome too, at around the same 75 percent.

We’re a Canadian web hosting provider who’s always got our thumb on the pulse of the industry, so it’s important to relate that quite a few popular sites on the web still don’t support HTTPS (or fail to redirect insecure requests) and will soon be flagged by Google. Plus, let’s clear up a few emerging myths about HTTPS:

  • It’s a Hassle
  • I Don’t Need It
  • It’s Gonna be Slow

  1. It’s A Hassle

No, it’s pretty darn simple. You can protect your site with HTTPS in a matter of seconds for FREE. Sign up for Cloudflare or using a CA such as Let’s Encrypt. We can assist you with any other web security and accessibility concerns you may have beyond https encryption of your website.

  1. I Don’t Need It

Well it turns out, you do – particularly as it relates to the safety and privacy of those visiting your site. Without HTTPS, anyone in the path between your visitor’s browser and your site or API can peer in on (or make modifications to) your content without you needing to be made aware of it. Governments, employers, and even especially internet service providers can and have been overseeing content without user consent.

If having your users receiving content unmodified and safe from maliciously injected advertisements or malware is a priority for you, you are advised to move your website to HTTPS.

Add the fact that the major browsers like Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft, are restricting functionality to only work over HTTPS. Google will soon block unencrypted mobile app connections automatically in their upcoming Android version. Apple has announced that apps must use HTTPS, but there has been no official announcement of this yet.

  1. It’s Gonna be Slow

The last common myth about HTTPS is that it’s not speedy enough. This belief is a holdover from an era when SSL/TLS might have had a negative performance impact on a site, but that’s not the way it is today at all or ever. HTTPS is also now required to enable and enjoy the performance benefits of HTTP/2.

Here’s two untruths to consider:

1) It takes incrementally more CPU power to encrypt and decrypt data; and

2) establishing a TLS session involves nothing more than 2 network round trips between the browser and the server.

HTTPS content from the edge – 10-20 milliseconds away from your users in the case of Cloudflare – SSL/TLS enabled sites are superior. And even when they are not served from an edge provider they still function at a high level. Advanced users should also consider using HSTS to instruct the browser to always load your content over HTTPS, saving it a round trip (plus page load time) on following requests.

0

Improving Site Security with WordPress User Roles

4GHadmin | 03 July 2018
Reading Time: 4 minutes

WordPress continues to be the most popular choice when choosing a vehicle for building a basic website. Those of you who are a single individual running such a website likely haven’t given much thought to WordPress user roles. In the event that you ever want to allow someone else access to your site then it’s helpful to know how to use these user roles. With them you can give people access to certain areas of your site, but only to certain areas of the site where they’ll be doing what you’ve requested them to do.

Enabling everyday folks to be more in command of their digital presence is a part of what’s made 4GoodHosting a leading Canadian web hosting provider and, while we prefer websites that are much more dynamic, we understand that WordPress is intuitive to use and works perfectly well for a good many of you.

So, today we’ll discuss what WordPress user roles are, have a look a their importance, and share some tips on how to use them the right way to improve overall site security.

Defining WordPress User Roles

WordPress features a role management system that enables you to specify what actions users can or can’t undertake on your site. As your site expands, knowing how to use these roles is a very valuable bit of knowledge. Each role can be specified based on certain capacities, and one example would be enabling one use to publish a post while allowing another to update plugins and themes. Here are 6 default user roles that can be taken on separately to improve security for the website.

  1. The Administrator Role

This is almost certainly one you’re already very familiar with, given the fact it’s the role you’re assigned when you create your site. There is commonly only one administrator role and it gives access to everything related to your site. Given this role is all powerful, you should be very leery of giving anyone this high-level access to your site.

  1. The Super Admin Role

Note as well that there is one user role that’s technically a step higher than the admin role – the super admin role. The super admin role will only exist when you have a network of connected WordPress sites working in conjunction via WordPress’ multisite installation. This role is responsible for the entire network of sites, and comes with the same privileges as an admin extending out across the entire network of sites. Having a super admin role diminishes the capacity of the standard admin role. He or she can will no longer be able to modify or install plugins and themes, or make changes to user information.

  1. The Editor Role

This individual will, not surprisingly, have pretty high-level access to your site. They’ll be responsible for content management – which is huge – and they’ll be responsible for creating and editing pages and posts, plus moderating comments and changing categories. Access to plugins or themes won’t be possible for the editor, but everything related to publishing content is dictated by them.

  1. The Author Role

Not much to be concerned about there. The author will be able to create, edit, and publish posts, but not much more than that. They won’t have access to any pages, nor any level of administrative access.

  1. The Contributor Role

The contributor role has even less access than the author role, and worthy of even less concern accordingly. Contributors will be able to read the posts on the site, edit them and delete their posts. Not much more than that. They will not be able to post publishings or upload media files.

  1. The Subscriber Role

This role is typically used for subscription-based sites. Subscribers usually have access to a diminished WordPress dashboard, where they’ll be limited to managing their own profiles. This role can be useful if your aim in having users sign up is to have them gain access to specific content.

Why User Roles Matter

As a website grows and your backend features multiple people working on your site, a way to manage these users without getting overwhelmed is definitely required. User roles are important for two reasons. The first is that they can simplify your workflow, and especially when you have a developer maintaining plugins and themes, a team of writers, and an editor making sure content is accurate and visually appealing.

The best choice is to assign them specific roles based upon the jobs they been instructed to take on. This will make their jobs easier, as well as preventing them from accessing parts of the site not related to their work. Secondly, they make your site more secure. Defining user roles makes it so that you’re giving people access to limited portions of your site. That’s recommended at all times.

How to Use WordPress User Roles to Improve Security

Assigning different roles to different users based on how they’ll be using your site will help to beef up your overall security. Giving every single site user an admin role means you are essentially giving them full site access. Even though you might trust these individuals, there are possible scenarios where the security of your site can be compromised. A poorly chosen weak password is a good example. Next, you never know if another person’s computer is infected, and in truth they might not even know themselves. Their computer could have malware or another virus installed, and if you give them admin access instead of a defined user role, your site will be at risk.

In conclusion, by specifying user roles you enhance site security and help to safeguard it against any user errors. Defining and utilizing user roles exclusively within themselves will not only improve your overall workflow, but will also improve overall site security.

0