10 Ways to Speed Up and Secure your WP Site
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The document provides tips for speeding up and securing WordPress blogs, emphasizing the importance of updating software, limiting logins, and optimizing images. It highlights that site speed affects search rankings and recommends tools for performance analysis and caching. Additionally, it suggests selecting reliable hosting services to enhance security and performance.
10 Ways to Speed Up and Secure your WP Site
- 1. B Y J E N N I F E R G R A D D Y 10 Ways to Speed Up & Secure Your Blog
- 2. About Me — I have a diverse career of 20+ years in digital marketing, website development, project management and software development. — My currents gigs are: ¡ Community Connections Marketing: an Orlando digital marketing consultancy focused on helping businesses achieve brand loyalty through building online community relationships. ¡ CO&P Integrated Marketing: Marketing firm in Atlanta when I oversee the digital marketing department ¡ Blogging: Orlando Connections and Orlando Canine Connections — I specialize in WordPress website development, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), social media marketing, Analytics and project management.
- 3. A Few Hacking Stats — On average, over 30,000 websites are hacked per day. — WordPress sites can be easy targets for attacks because of plugin vulnerabilities, weak passwords and obsolete software.
- 4. Tips to Secure Your Site 1. Get rid of the default ‘admin’ user id. Just do it right now! This is one of the easiest ways to hack into a site. 2. Keep WordPress, as well as your theme and all your plugins, up to date. They release updates to software for a reason, either increase in functionality, bug fix or security issues. 3. Delete any plugins you are not using.
- 5. Tips to Secure Your Site 4. Only download plugins and themes from a well- known source. Almost all of my themes and plugins come from: ÷ Themeforest.net ÷ Elegantthemes.com
- 6. Tips to Secure Your Site 5. Limit logins: The brute force attack is #1 tactic for hackers. They will just keep trying to login to your site until they crack your password. There are plugins that offer this feature, as well as a bunch of other features: ÷ iThemes Security ÷ Sucuri Security
- 7. Favorite Security Plugin ¡ Brute Force Protection ¡ File Change Detection ¡ Strong Password Reinforcement ¡ Lock Out Bad Users ¡ Away Mode ¡ Hide Login and Admin ¡ Two Factor Authentication • iThemes Security Pro • Free and a paid versions offer the following options, among others:
- 8. Tips on How to Speed Up Your Blog
- 9. Tips to Speed Up Your Site — Everyone, including Google, loves a fast website, but how do you optimize your site? — In 2010, Google confirmed that site speed is one of the 200 indicators that impacts search rankings. — If your load time is more than 3 seconds or you page is 2MB, then you might have issues. — There are several free tools such WebPage Test, Gtmetrix, Google PageSpeed, and Pingdom.
- 10. Tips to Speed Up Your Site 1. Optimize Your Images: Images are the main culprit for slowing a website. Optimize your images before you upload them with tools such as Photoshop. 2. Enable Caching: Use tools such as W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache or WP Fastest Cache for page caching, database caching and object caching.
- 11. Tips to Speed Up Your Site 3. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): A CDN is a distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the internet. ÷ CloudFlare is a free CDN and MaxCDN is not free, but an affordable option.
- 12. Tips to Speed Up Your Site 4. Choose the Right File Type ÷ Use JPG as the default because it is the smallest and loads the fastest. ÷ Use PNG only for images with text (JPG rasterizes text which can make it blurry) or you need a transparent background. ÷ Minimize or even eliminate heavy GIF files because they can drastically slow down your site.
- 13. Last Thought 5. One tactic that will secure AND speed up your site is to choose the best host you can afford. ÷ 41% of WordPress sites were hacked due to security vulnerability on the host. ÷ Most hosting companies apply limitations to their shared hosting plans and host hundreds of sites per server. ÷ A few great WP hosts with solid track records are WP Engine, Pagely and Siteground.
- 14. Thanks for Your Time! Jennifer Graddy Email: jgraddy@commconnmkg.com Twitter: @jennifergraddy Pinterest: www.Pinterest.com/jgraddy Instagram: www.instagram.com/OrlandoConnect www.commconnmkg.com/FLBlogCon