WP89 WordPress Tutorials

It is surprising to see most of the WordPress website or blog owners do not know much about their weak security. In case of a crash or being hacked, they may lose all they have because they don't have a timely periodical backup or disaster recovery plan.

For beginners or old timers, the WordPress plugin "Better WP Security" is a must for most websites.
Installation is easy: just from your Dashboard, go to Plugins and Click Add New and type in "Better WP Security" to search and install. Then under Settings on the left, you will find "Security" Menu and you may click Dashboard to set up and enable the basic security features. Be careful of what you are doing, if you are not sure, you may want to call a "WordPress" professional to help you test it on a sandbox and then do it on your production website, which you may not want to let it down one minute at the important moment. This plugin has a great feature to set up database backup and email it to your mailbox (if your database is not too big for your inbox. Otherwise, a zipped database file over 100mb may blow up your mailbox.)

Talking about WordPress Backup, you may want to install another great plugin called "Online Backup for WordPress", which offer you to backup all your WordPress files along with database.  You can directly download the whole backup file after the backup is completed. In case of the crash or even when your website is gone, you may choose another web server and upload the files and recreate the database with the dump file and your web site will be up within 30 minutes.

Here's some detailed description about Better WP Security:

#1 WORDPRESS SECURITY PLUGIN

Better WP Security takes the best WordPress security features and techniques and combines them in a single plugin thereby ensuring that as many security holes as possible are patched without having to worry about conflicting features or the possibility of missing anything on your site.

With one-click activation for most features as well as advanced features for experienced users Better WP Security can help protect any site.

Someone has been trying to hack WP89.com! How did I know?
I've installed a WP plug-in called "Limit Login Attempts" and got warning email messages 3 times with 10 days saying someone from some IP address trying to log in as "admin" but failed many time and was blocked for 24 hours.

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If you search for "Last user attempted: admin IP was blocked for 24 hours", you'll know how often a hacker tries to hack with user name:admin. Unfortunately, WordPress's default admin user name is "admin" and it doesn't make it easy for you to rename it.

A quick and easy way I can think of is: 1)create a new user and set it as administrator 2)and then (carefully) remove the user "admin" This works fine if you didn't created any posts and pages with the user "admin".

One other thing to make hacking harder is to change "Nickname" in your admin user profile page yourdomain.com/../wp-admin/profile.php to someone popular but use a hard to guess user name. And then change the "Display name publicly as" to that Nickname.

One simple and important thing to improve security is to upgrade your WordPress as soon as a new version (usually includes security patches) comes out. Hackers hacked into one of my popular sites and one of my friend's and embedded some "Viagra" sales contents to show up Google search results (it only shows the hacked contents to the search engine robots (especially to Google) but hide the content to regular visitors include site owners through a web browser so it is very hard to notice. More often, you will only notice after Google sends you a notice saying your site is removed from their index and won't show up in their search research. If you have this problem, we can help you to solve it. Please contact us.