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WordPress security tips (part 2) – Keep your blog secure

ashish — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:41:34 +0000

There are some excellent resources available on how to keep your WordPress installation secure. One of these resources is one called “WordPress Security Whitepaper”, and is available in the form of a PDF that one can read and then implement the desired solution (link to page).
Now, even though this is a report that is updated last on April 2008, there is still a lot of information available on the site that will be of use to you. However, keep in mind that usage of these tips are more relevant to those people who are more technically oriented, but even if you are not confident enough to make these changes yourself, you should still read the whitepaper if you own a WordPress Blog.
Some of the contents of the whitepaper are:
“Create a new limited access user 7
Hardening your WP Install 9
Restricting wp-content & wp-includes 9
Restricting wp-admin 9
Block all except your IP 9
Password Required – .htpasswd 10
The .htaccess file 10
The .htpasswd file 10
SPAM 11
Blog Encryption 12″
For reading the report, you will have to go the site (link)

WordPress security tips (part 1) – Keep your blog secure

ashish — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:20:11 +0000

There are a lot of steps you can take to keep your WordPress installation secure, but the number one step you need to take is to make sure that you will need to spend some time on a regular basis. You need to keep upto date with information that floats around on the internet, as well as search for such information. This may seem less important if you have an unimportant blog, but as your blog becomes more popular, it will become more important for you and will also become the target for more hackers. Hence, you need to invest the time to learn more about how to make your WordPress installation more secure. Based on what I have learned over the past some years, I have a series of articles in which I write about to make WordPress more secure, but I will keep each article fairly short rather than posting one long article:
1. Make sure that your WordPress installation is updated. When you log into your self-hosted WordPress account, in the dashboard you will see your current version number as well as whether you need to update your account. New WordPress versions also include fixes for security problems that keep on getting discovered, and it makes sense for you to make sure that your blog becomes less vulnerable by adopting the latest version.
2. Keep upto date with what is happening on the WordPress site in terms of security. The location to check up is http://wordpress.org/development/category/security/. You can have a feed for the WordPress Development site at this location (link).

Optimizing your WordPress account – 2

ashish — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:09:48 +0000

A few weeks back, I had written about how to take some basic steps towards optimizing your WordPress account. Imagine what would happen if more people started promoting your WordPress Blog, or wonders of wonders, it appears on the front page of Digg or Slashdot. In such cases, unless you have optimized your WordPress configuration already, you can be pretty much sure that your account will get to a state where the server is not able to handle the load, and will shut down; further if your account is on a shared server, you might have some uncomfortable queries from your host.
So, here are some points on how to optimize your account:
1. Since WordPress works on a database system, it pulls every bit of content from the server. If there are a large number of requests for your blog, your server has to make that many DB queries to fetch the content. This puts a lot of stress on your server. User a Super Cache plugin to Cache some of the load and serve static HTML files instead of querying the DB (link to plugin, and page).
2. When you serve various files such as binaries, videos, images, scripts, etc from your server, it becomes slow. Place them on other servers, so that the load on your server is reduced. For example, you can get videos from Youtube and Photos from Flickr, and also, you can even hire some hosting space on another server or on a service such as Amazon S3 for this purpose.
3. If you are more advanced, look at your server logs; it may be possible to determine multiple requests from a bot or script that is of no good, blocking these may make your server behave a bit better
4. Look to get stats on how your web page is loading. If it takes a lot of time to load your page, there may be a lot of plugins working, or scripts loading, and so on. Some tools you can use for this purpose are – LiveHTTPHeaders (link, displays the HTTP headers), Firebug (link, Look at loading times for various artifacts on a page),
5. Inside your wp-config.php file, remove some of the DB calls that are not necessary. For example, hard-code your Template Path, Stylesheet path (link to relevant site). You will get some improvements.
6. Review your themes. Some themes call a lot of graphics, and overall call a lot of files. If your CSS files are divided into multiple files, combine them. Replace graphics wherever possible with text.
7. Review the plugins your are using to see whether they are required. Plugins can make your site much slower, especially if they do a lot of DB access and inefficient. If you are advanced technically, monitor the performance of your plugins.
8. Refer to this quick cheat sheet for DB optimization (link to cheat sheet)
9. Reduce the number of posts on the front page of your blog. Typically, WordPress gives you 10 posts on your front page, you should reduce this to 3-4.
10. Use WP’s Built in Object Cache as described on this page (link). From the same site, refer to the MySQL Query Cache.
11. For some detailed technical analysis of what can be done (link)
12. Clean Options (Finds orphaned options and allows for their removal from the wp_ options table) – Get it from this page
13. The combating comment spam page on WordPress.org (link). If you have a good blog which is getting popular, increase in spam is only to be expected. Akismet filters out most comment spam, but just getting it into the junk spam list also adds some load to your server.
14. Page with 5 tips for making your Blog Digg / Slashdot proof (link)
15. High Traffic Tips For WordPress on WordPress.org Codex (link)

If you know more ways beyond this, please do let me know.

Getting some quick information on your site – Analytics

ashish — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:54:23 +0000

When you run a site, getting accurate information and statistics about your sites viewers is very important, and people use a combination of measures such as installing the Google Analytics Program, or using a conter program such as Sitemeter.com. Such information helps them to find out where people are visiting their site from (their users geographic location), which section of the sites are more popular, what are the top referrers that people use to find their site (through search engines, through links on other sites, and so on). I regularly use these programs to ferret out such information and have learned much. As an example:
- I discovered that Google Search is absolutely essential in order to get viewers to your site
- A number of referrers to my sites have been through email programs, which essentially means that people are forwarding the subscription mails they receive when a new post is made, and encourages me to get effective subscription tools in place
- I often get surprised about which posts are most popular, and this helps determine that users think differently from what we expect, and also reinforces the belief that using such analytics tools is a necessary part of running a site

Apart from these tools, I also use another tool for generating information about how popular the site is on several parameters:
- How has the performance of the site been in getting number of users over the last few months (have more people started visiting, vs. have a lower number of people started visiting)
- How many sites link to this site (important for generating a better result in search engine results)
- Identifying keywords (very important in terms of defining which keywords should be emphaized in posts)

So, which is this tool that I use ? It is a site, called siteinfo on Alexa, at the following link : http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo. Suppose you have a site about Indian politics called Indiapoliticalblog.com, and you wanted to find out its result on Alexa, you just need to add the site URL (without the http: //), so that you end up with the following URL: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/indiapoliticalblog.com