Social media has grown a lot in importance over the last few years. Basically, if you don't have your profile on at least a couple of the most popular social networks, then you might as well not exist at all, right? Well, no matter if you agree with this or not, it certainly rings true for your website. In other words, if you hope to attract any kind of audience and somehow convince them to keep coming back to your website, you absolutely have to (have to!) integrate it with social media.
Luckily, WordPress lets you do this in a more or less easy-to-grasp way. Even though social media integration is not a built-in feature per se, it can still be enabled via different plugins or other mechanisms. In this chapter, you will learn all about these features. We'll cover things such as how to enable simple social media share buttons on your website, how to work with social media APIs and integrations, and how to publish your blog content to social media automatically.
But wait, that's not all! We're also going to cover podcasting (which, for some website owners is an important element of their online presence), and a relatively new topic in the WordPress realm—HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure), which is all about making your website more secure by adding an additional level of encryption to the browser-website communication. An important thing worth pointing out here is that Google now expects all websites to have HTTPS encryption enabled. If your website fails to comply, Google might decide to lower your search engine rankings, and thus make your website less visible compared to your competition.
In short, the topics we will explore in this chapter include the following:
- Integrating social media
- Podcasting
- HTTPS—what, why, and how?