Category Archives: Blog - Page 3

Tips on how to find a free WordPress theme

Posted by on June 10, 2013 Comments Off on Tips on how to find a free WordPress theme

Choosing a free WordPress theme can be a tough job, especially if you’re a beginner. While an attractive free theme might have caught your eye, be aware that it can contain malicious codes which can ultimately make your blog, website and web server become part of a zombie army of machines participating in an attack on some other website.

  1. Always select themes through the WordPress Free Themes Directory
  2. Visit the developer’s site. You can also check on the WordPress.org forums to know that developer’s reputation.
  3. Once you have the theme installed, install/activate the WordPress Exploit Scanner plug-in . This plug-in will search through your website’s files and database tables and notifies you of any suspicious code. It also examines your active plugins for unusual filenames.

Other useful plugins:

  • TAC (Theme Authenticity Checker) – this plug-in searches the source files of installed themes on your blog for signs of malicious code.
  • WordPress AntiVirus – this plug-in scans your theme directory to look for a WordPress permalink back door, which is a very malicious malware.
  • Login Lockdown WordPress Security – this plug-in helps brute force password discovery by recording the IP address and timestamp of every failed WordPress login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, the login function will be disabled.

General precautionary measures:

  • Always have your WordPress software and WordPress plugins updated to the latest version
  • Delete any unused themes and/or plugins installed but not activated
  • Always have a strong password.
  • Back up your WordPress database on a regular basis. You can also use these plug-ins to help you backup your blog.

Further/advanced reading:

Latest version of WordPress 3.5.1 is now available

Posted by on January 30, 2013 Comments Off on Latest version of WordPress 3.5.1 is now available

WordPress has just released its latest update, version 3.5.1. This update is mainly for maintenance and security purposes. Check out this blog post from official WordPress web page which lists the issues that this update addresses.

It is extremely important for you to keep your WordPress website updated to avoid security holes. To update, you can login to your WordPress dashboard and click the “Please update now” on top of the admin panel. Or, contact us by submitting a support ticket or live chat with us if you can’t locate the update button.

10 ways to speed up WordPress load times

Posted by on January 24, 2013 Comments Off on 10 ways to speed up WordPress load times

The reason why you choose WordPress to build your website is because it is easy to use and you do not need any HTML background knowledge to create your website. So, when your website is done and completed, you work very hard to create more posts and content everyday. Your website traffic picks up and it starts to grow. To enhance your readers browsing experiences, you start using more WordPress plugins so that your website can have a few extra features (i.e. Social Media Share button, different language translators, etc). However, you start to realize that the more plugins and posts you make, the longer load time your website experiences. What should you do now?

Nobody likes slow websites. Nobody likes to wait around for websites to load every minute. Your (potential) readers will leave your website when it does not load for 10 seconds which means it is very important to optimize the load time of your WordPress website. Therefore, we have prepared a list with 10 easy tips to speed up your website.

1. Caching Plugin

Caching plugin helps your website improve its load speed because the plugin caches every aspect of your website. As a result, this will significantly reduce the download time. Among the different caching plugins available online, we recommend W3 Total Cache because it is very simple to use (and it’s FREE)!

2. Optimizing Image

Image file sizes are much larger than text files. If your website is image-oriented, it will take a much longer time to load your website. There is a free plugin called WP-Smushlt which can automatically help you reduce the file sizes of your website but does not reduce the quality of the image. Definitely check this out!

3. Another Image-related plugin: LazyLoad

This plugin will not only speed up your website load time but will also help your website lower the bandwidth by loading less data for your viewers who do not scroll down your website. For example, if your website is vertically long and requires readers to scroll down in order to view your entire page, with LazyLoad, the images on the lower side on your website will NOT load until your readers scroll down.

4. Optimizing databases

There are three plugins that we would like to recommend for optimizing your WordPress databases. The first one is WP-Optimize. This plugin, as the name suggests, optimizes your database by reducing the overhead of spams, drafts, tables, etc. Second, you can also consider installing WP-DBManger to help you schedule dates for database optimization.

Last, Revision Control is another great tool that can help you optimize your database. This plugin enables you to set the numbers of revisions you make for each post. WordPress, by default, stores all of your drafts indefinitely. By installing this powerful plugin, your database will be very lightweight compared to other websites without this plugin.

5. Removing unused plugins

The title says it all. If there are plugins that you do not use, simply delete them. Give it a try! Your site will load faster for sure!

6. Optimizing your home page

Your home page is the most important part that requires a quick load speed among all of your other pages because this is where your readers normally enter first. Here are a few tips to optimize your home page

  • – Show excerpts of your posts.
  • – Set fewer number of posts displayed on your home page (we recommend 5 posts)
  • – Set the Social Media Share plugins to only display on the actual post page instead of the home page.

Remember the key: less is MORE!!

7. Enabling hotlink protection

Hotlinking happens when external websites direct a link to the images on your websites making your server load increase. In cPanel, there is a function called “HotLink Protection”. Once you enable the protection, you can eliminate this form of “bandwidth theft”.

8. cPanel “Optimize Website” Feature

Another great feature of cPanel! There is a feature under “Software/Services” in cPanel which is called “Optimize Website”. By enabling this feature, cPanel tweaks the way Apache will handle requests and will compress content before sending it to the visitor’s browsers.

9. Making use of Google PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights, developed by Google, is a tool that analyzes the content of a web page and provides suggestions to make that page load faster. Check out their official page for full details.

10. Good web hosting service company

A good web host can provide not only stable uptime and connection but also professional solutions and support when needed. At Doteasy, our in-house Customer Support agents are resourceful web technicians and experts. We can provide speedy solutions for WordPress and other website builder programs. It’s our goal to keep our customers up-to-date with the latest web hosting trends through our blog, our Scripts Library, and our how-to video tutorials on the YouTube channel.

Lack of time to complete all these tips?

It takes a great amount of time to secure a website and maintain a quick load time. Therefore, we strongly recommend our customers to perform all of the above tips on your own. But, we understand that many of you do not have the time to do these tasks on your website. In this case, we can suggest to you our Managed Hosting plan which is an ideal solution for customers who need some extra help in maintaining their websites. Our Managed Hosting plan includes automated website backup as well as import, export, and optimization of your MySQL databases. To learn more, check out our Managed Hosting service feature page.

WordPress Security 101

Posted by on October 29, 2012 Comments Off on WordPress Security 101

WordPress is an open source software and sometimes hackers may use security exploits to compromise your site. Here are some things that you can do to better protect your site.

1. Always be up to date and use the latest version of WordPress. Older versions of WordPress are not maintained with security updates.

2. Make sure your plugins/themes are always updated. Also, if you are not using a specific plugin/theme, delete it from the system.

3. Use an admin ID other than 'admin' in new WordPress installations. If you are already using 'admin' as your admin ID, you can create a new one and remove the old 'admin' ID.  To setup a new Admin and remove the old Admin:

a) Go to WordPress admin panel.
b) Click on “Users” to add a new user, and set its role to administrator.
c) Remove the 'admin' user after the new user is created.

4. Many vulnerabilities can be avoided with good security habits. A strong password is an important aspect of this.

5. Make backups of your site and database on regular basis.

For the more advanced users, we also suggest the following changes:

i. File permissions: Allowing write access to your files can potentially be dangerous. It is best to lock down your file permissions as much as possible and to loosen those restrictions only when needed.

Folder: 755
php/html, and other files: 644
wp-config.php: 600

ii. Secure the wp-admin folder: It can be done through password protection inside cPanel.

https://kb.doteasy.com/questions/435/How+to+password+protect+a+directory

iii. Disable File Editing: The WordPress Dashboard by default allows administrators to edit PHP files, such as plugin and theme files. This is often the first tool that an attacker will use since it allows code execution. You can disable editing from the Dashboard. Placing this line in the wp-config.php file is the equivalent to removing the 'edit_themes', 'edit_plugins' and 'edit_files' capabilities for all users:

define('DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT', true);

This will not prevent an attacker from uploading malicious files to your site, but it will stop some attacks.

You can download the wp-config.php file through FTP, use a text editor to add the code to the very bottom of the file, save it, and then publish it to the server. Make sure you set the permission of the file to 600 after the upload.

If you have any problems making any of our suggested changes, please do not hesitate to contact our Customer Service Support Team.

http://www.doteasy.com/support/

Featured Script: Pixelpost

Posted by on October 15, 2012 Comments Off on Featured Script: Pixelpost
Pixelpost
 

Who: New parents, soon-to-be brides & grooms, photo-bloggers, photographers planning to start up their personal blog, people who want to share their pictures on the internet with NO coding background and tight budget

What: Pixelpost is an open source photoblog web hosting application powered by PHP and MySQL, developed for publishing photos on a chronological base.

When: Instant Install

Where: Softaculous under the category “Image Galleries”

Why: A picture is worth a thousand words. While some online bloggers like writing, others may choose to take pictures to capture their memorable moments! Pixelpost features:

  • – Multilingual capability
  • – Comment, categories, and tagging functions
  • – Exif-support (a file format standard that specifies the formats for images, sound, and ancillary tags used by digital cameras, scanners, and other systems handling images)
  • – Theme-support (change the outlook of the website in just a few clicks)
  • – Plugin-support (improves SEO, commenting and other features)
  • – RSS-support (must-have function for blogs. RSS feed allows online users to subscribe to your website and receive updates)
  • – Space for providing basic photo information (very important for viewers to learn more about how to duplicate the shots)
  • – Spam filtering

How: Pixelpost (and 250 more web applications) are already included in Softaculous for FREE. Subscribe to our Unlimited Hosting plan to install this powerful open source web application! To view the demo page, please click the image below!