Secure
Make your site secure by enabling HTTPS on your website.
HTTPS helps prevent intruders from tampering with the communications between your websites and your users’ browsers. Intruders include intentionally malicious attackers, and legitimate but intrusive companies, such as ISPs or hotels that inject ads into pages.
Intruders exploit every unprotected resource that travels between your websites and your users. Images, cookies, scripts, HTML … they’re all exploitable. Intrusions can occur at any point in the network, including a user’s machine, a Wi-Fi hotspot, or a compromised ISP, just to name a few.
Github Pages
If you have your website on Github, you can enable HTTPS in the Settings section of your repository.
Let’s Encrypt
Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority which you can make use of to enable SSL for your website.
You can make use of Certbot client to automate certificate issuance and installation with no downtime.
Site Audit
It’s important to measure how your website performs in terms of performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO.
https://web.dev/measure - analyses your website and provides useful guidance
https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/ - performs audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, and more
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ - analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page faster
All of the above are tools offered by Google and use data from Lighthouse project.
Discoverable
Google Search Console
Search Console provides tools and reports help you measure your site’s Search traffic and performance, fix issues, and make your site shine in Google Search results.
You can submit your sitemap.xml to google so that it can be crawled and indexed.
Analytics
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic.
Inside the console, you need to create new analytics accounts and apps with the option of custom views.
Once you have it set up, you can track your audience and real time views. You can also set include/exclude filters for your website.
To enable analytics for your site, add below script to your webpage with the ID of your google analytics property.
<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=GA_MEASUREMENT_ID"></script>
<script>
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
gtag('js', new Date());
gtag('config', 'GA_MEASUREMENT_ID');
</script>
Monetization
Google AdSense Ads
Google AdSense is a program run by Google through which website publishers in the Google Network of content sites serve text, images, video, or interactive media advertisements that are targeted to the site content and audience.
You need to submit your site for review with Google. It will take few days to weeks to have your account activated.
Once your account is activated, you can either choose enable auto ads or create custom ad units.
I would suggest to create a custom ad unit so that you can place your ads at appropriate places without affecting the user experience.
Auto ads issue: Adsense auto ads showing on mobile but not on the desktop
Also make sure to add ads.txt file to your site at root domain level.
GDPR
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the ePrivacy Directive (ePR) affect how you as a website owner may use cookies and online tracking of visitors from the EU.
One of the most tangible requirements of the GDPR is in the definition of what constitutes a proper cookie consent, meaning, that the consent has to be:
Informed: Why, how and where is the personal data used? It must be clear for the user, what the consent is given to, and it must be possible to opt-in and opt-out of the various types of cookies.
Given by means of an affirmative, positive action that cannot be misinterpreted.
Given prior to the initial processing of the personal data.
Withdrawable. It must be easy for the user to change his or her mind and withdraw the consent.
There are several sites which offer GDPR compliant consent function for websites.
Open Graph Tags
Open graph meta tags allow you to control what content shows up when a page is shared on Facebook and Twitter.
<meta property="og:title" content="The Rock" />
<meta property="og:type" content="video.movie" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/rock.jpg" />
Proxy Filters
Lot of companies use proxy filters to restrict access to websites. Check if your website has been properly categorized to avoid being blocked.
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