Over the weekend, thousands of websites around the world, including the UK’s NHS and ICO and the US Government Court system, were compromised, and caused visitors to mine crypto-coins – generating money for the miscreants. These sites were using a popular plugin called Browsealoud. Their support software “adds speech, reading, and translation to websites facilitating access and participation for people with Dyslexia, Low...

It’s an ongoing debate – users do not like videos to autoplay (apart from YouTube), and designers want their website to feature their video and audio immediately on visiting the page. In the distant past, this has often been ‘solved’ by using Adobe Flash to play videos. Browsers soon caught up to this madness, and added ‘click to play’, forcing users to click to view Adobe Flash players. Since the replacement...

Often, the choice of which payment provider to use is a case of which offers the lowest cost, or which offers the functionality that’s required for your business. Once past these limitations, many payment providers are the same; offering either an on-page or external redirection site to take payment, and returning a secure callback to verify that payment has been taken. Some of the best payment providers are simply because of their new...

Whilst designing new websites, it’s common to use an off-the-shelf theme as basis for a new site. However, making changes to a theme or plugin can cause problems when it comes to upgrading. When making changes to plugin or theme code, it’s important to be aware that when these plugins or themes are upgraded – your changes will be lost. There are often two very different schools of thought on this. If you’re developing...

Mozilla have put together a tool for testing many areas of SSL security. We’ve recently discussed using the free Let’s Encrypt service to secure your site, but it is also important to ensure the security settings are up to date. “While we’d love to say that any site that scores an A+ on the Observatory is perfectly secure, there’s a lot more that goes making a website secure than what we can test.” It may not...

Probably the most tedious part of running a website is the constant maintenance and updates. Continuing our previous post on WordPress, we’ve put together a quick guide of routine checks and changes for both Magento 1.x and 2.x. A poorly maintained website can be a security nightmare, or even impact on your website appearance and search position with potential attacks and spam. Backups Always always keep a backup – but more...