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What is SSL and why do you need it? On today's tutorial series, we'll focus on getting down to the bottom this small but mighty detail. SSL (Secure Sockets Layers) is a set of encryption protocols used to secure users' information and ensures that the data transmitted to a website remains encrypted. Major search engines (such as Google) recommend all sites to have an SSL certificate and favours sites that do by ranking them higher in searches. Now you can probably imagine just how beneficial having an SSL certificate on your site is. Not only would it increase the security on your site, but it would potentially create more visitors because of your higher Google search listing.

On top of this, providing visitors and customers peace of mind when submitting personal information and buying products on your site allows for more trust, less buyer's remorse, and happier clientele. If you have a website that accepts payments, such as an online store, then having an SSL certificate is an absolute must. Typically, you can purchase an SSL certificate via your host provider or from an SSL authority. Here are a few options that you can use to get you started: Symantec, Comodo, and Let’s Encrypt.

As part of our on-going foundational tutorials, we'll be explaining how to manually get out of WordPress' maintenance mode in the event that your site gets stuck in it. You may be wondering what it is and why it happens. Well anytime you update your themes or plugins, WordPress' maintenance mode kicks in, displaying a message that your site is briefly unavailable. Usually the updates only take a few seconds and are too brief to even notice.

But sometimes the process gets interrupted midway. The hiccup can come from server connection errors, or perhaps a browser or page was accidentally closed during the updating process. Whatever the case, there is usually an easy fix for it, and we have 2 possible solutions for you to get rid of that pesky message fast.

Welcome back to our tutorial series. In this edition, we'll be sharing how to save and recover specific parts or entire layouts of a page. If you've ever spent loads of time working on a page, only for an accident to change it in a way you're not happy with, you'll know that retrieving an old layout can be a huge time saver!

Themify offers a free standalone page builder for use on any third-party WordPress theme, so we'll be using the Themify Builder for this. The Builder relies on its intuitive drag-and-drop functionality, and has a revision feature, allowing you to recover previous versions of a page layout you've been working on.

You have two options of retrieving old layouts: either recover a full layout or only a specific section. Recovering a specific section of a layout is useful if you have created a great design but only want to use a part of it for another page.