We’re closing in on 500 articles here in our blog (this is number 498), and a fair share of these have been articles that are useful to webmasters (including bloggers). Therefore, here is a selection of our best and most useful articles written with webmasters in mind.
We’ve divided them into the following groups for your viewing pleasure:
- About hosting quality and reliability
- The importance of minimizing website downtime
- The importance of a fast-loading website
- Website usability and error pages
- Website security
- Webmaster tools and references
We hope you will find this article collection useful!
About hosting quality and reliability
- 6 gotchas about web hosting quality and reliability – If you’re not used to thinking in terms of website availability and reliability, this article will give you a greater understanding of the factors you should keep in mind when selecting a quality hosting company.
- Keep track of your shared hosting performance – Learn about common performance culprits in shared hosting.
The importance of minimizing website downtime
- Online launch troubles and how to avoid them – Lists some real-world website launch troubles from 2008 and what you can do to avoid similar problems with your own website or product launch.
- How downtime can kill all your SEO efforts – A look at how Google punishes you for having an unstable website, and what you can do to avoid it.
- There is no “in the middle of the night” on the web – Some food for thought before the next time you perform maintenance on your international website.
- Mashups easily (s)mashed – Mashups have made the Web a more interesting place, but such a large and complex beast as the Internet doesn’t always behave well, something mashups are extra sensitive to. This article looks into mashup availability issues and what can be done to minimize any problems.
The importance of a fast-loading website
- Load size analysis of the top 100 blogs – This is a survey we made of how large (in download size) the top blogs are, including an analysis of the results which includes tips about getting pages to load faster (and why it’s important). This article is relevant not just to bloggers.
- Why having a slow website will hurt your blogging income – Why a slow blog (or website) is a very bad thing if you’re trying to make a living from it, and how to keep on top of things. You will find out about ill side effects you may not have been aware of. Again, this article is useful not just to bloggers.
- Speed up your website by optimizing files and images – A quick primer to help you get started with making your website both smaller and faster.
Website usability and error pages
- New SSL policy in Firefox hurting tens of thousands of sites – How the strict SSL policies in new web browsers like FF3 hurt a lot of websites from a usability standpoint.
- Are there 219,000 websites with expired SSL certificates? – Just in case you didn’t think that many websites are affected by the article above…
- 17 brilliant 404 pages and why they are cool – Good error pages are part of the user experience. Get some excellent inspiration here.
- Having fun with 404 error pages – More 404 inspiration.
- 24 fun and inspiring Web 2.0 error pages – And even more 404 inspiration. And yes, we end the article with tips on what to keep in mind when designing your own error pages.
Website security
- Don’t let Google find your secrets – Google is actually a great tool for hackers. Learn how it works and what you should look out for to protect your own website.
Webmaster tools and references
- A handy uptime and downtime conversion cheat sheet – This is, just as the title implies, a cheat sheet that you can use to easily convert between uptime percentages to downtime. There is even a printable PDF version.
- 12 great iPhone applications for sysadmins and webmasters – Love your new iPhone? Put it to good use as a webmaster tool with these nifty applications.
- 14 useful and FREE online tools for DNS and network troubleshooting – Again, the title says it all. 🙂
Thank you for reading!
