It’s no secret WordPress as a core can have its security ups and downs, but usually the WordPress development team are fast to fix these problems. The more important problems often lie with third party plugins that we all love to install on our WordPress sites – sure, they are why we love WordPress so much and provide us with endless cool functionality extensions – but they can also be a security problem.

Why are WordPress plugins a security risk?

It’s by no means true that ALL plugins are a security risk – however, the fact that many of the most popular plugins we all use are developed by one person or a small team and given to us to use for free can, rarely, mean that things are overlooked. When you don’t have a huge highly qualified team with endless funding, its no wonder that little weaknesses may exist in some plugins.

Here are a couple of great simple and powerful WordPress plugins you can install to give your site some protection from unwanted attention:

1) WordPress Firewall 2

This plugin works to protect your site from a variety of attack angles, although the reason I use it is to protect from MySQL attacks through a WordPress installation’s database. Setup is easy, simply install and activate and its stock settings should take care of the rest. Here’s a full list of what it does:

• Detect, intecept, and log suspicious-looking parameters — and prevent them compromising WordPress.
• Also protect most WordPress plugins from the same attacks.
• Respond with an innocuous-looking 404, or a home page redirect.
• Optionally send an email to you with a useful dump of information upon blocking a potential attack.
• Turn on or off directory traversal attack detection.
• Turn on or off SQL injection attack detection.
• Turn on or off WordPress-specific SQL injection attack detection.
• Turn on or off blocking executable file uploads.
• Turn on or off remote arbitrary code injection detection.
• Add whitelisted IPs.
• Add additional whitelisted pages and/or fields to allow pages/plugins/etc to get through when desirable.
• Optionally configure as the first plugin to load for maximum security.

2) Better WP Security

Commonly regarded the number 1 plugin for WordPress security, this plugin takes care of your site from pretty much head to toe. Simply install, activate and follow the hints it gives you to protect the bits that it detects as needing protection. It uses some really simple but clever tips and tricks to help protect against all sort of WordPress hacking techniques. Not only does it protect, it also obscures parts of your blog that the public shouldn’t need to access, detects nasty attempts to get at your site and can backup/restore your database.

You can see a configuration guide video below – I highly recommend this plugin!

BONUS*

I often get asked what I use as a backup tool. There’s loads of expensive membership services that offer to backup your site for you – I personally use WordPress Backup to Dropbox. This simple free plugin is installed on all my client’s sites and makes sure regular backups are deposited in my Dropbox, along with a database backup. You can choose how regularly to backup and any files you don’t want to backup. Easy!

*WARNING – if you decide to use Better WP Security AND WordPress Backup to Dropbox together, you will have to make sure the ‘Turn off file editor in WordPress Back-end’ option of Better WP Security is NOT ticked, otherwise the menu option for WordPress Backup to Dropbox will not be visible. This can be found by going to Security –> System Tweaks – it is the bottom option. This is just a plugin clash that will hopefully soon be fixed.

Get in touch if you have any questions.

In 2 months I travelled over 9000km through Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, taking in some of the wonders of the world whilst relaxing and taking a welcome break from the British winter and the computer.

It’s back to reality now though – I want to say thanks to the many loyal clients who were kind enough to wait for me whilst I was away. I’m fortunate to enjoy my work as much as I do and the clients I work with contribute enormously to this.

Having been away for so long I have quite a build up of clients pulling me in many different directions, so I apologise if I take time to reply to emails or have to turn down work over the coming month (although I always try my best not to!)

Here’s two little tricks to get around the blackout page for those of you who really need to!

1) As a Wikipedia page is loading, simply hit your ‘Escape’ key (‘esc’), and the page you are trying to view will load instead of the blackout page.

The reason this works is because the Escape key effectively disconnects your browser from the Wikipedia server just before it has a chance to redirect you to the blackout page. You will need to do this for each page that you load, but still, its better than nothing!

2) Turn off Javascript in your browser.

The blackout implementation uses Javascript. Turning off Javascript therefore equals no blackout. Easy!
“How do I turn off Javascript in my browser?”, I hear you all ask. Let me help – Click HERE!

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The most amazing bit for me is how it leaves my 27 inch iMac behind. Even this is only 4 months old, yet my Macbook Air beats it in terms of speed at nearly all the tasks I use it for. Why? The SSD.

For those of you that don’t know, SSD stands for Solid State Drive. Most computers still use the standard hard drive containing a spinning disk. As well as being much quicker, SSD’s have no moving parts. This means they are silent, more energy efficient and have much longer life spans. As with most things, the fewer moving parts there are, the less there is that can go wrong! Downside? SSD’s are a fair bit more expensive at the moment, but the prices are getting ever more competitive.

Running some fairly intensive design and development software mainly from the Adobe Creative Suite, the speed of the SSD in the Macbook Air is really noticeable – most of these programs run much faster on my Macbook Air than my iMac.

Verdict? Favourite Apple product so far!

1) I’m all Mac based now. Not a practical solution for everyone I know, but this definitely tops my list for streamlining workflow and making life much easier! I’ve built my own Windows PC’s since I was 13 years old, yet I still couldn’t find a setup that was cost effective and most importantly stress free. Sure, Mac’s aren’t 100% problem free but I definitely don’t miss the quirky and often incurable illnesses my PC’s used to suffer!

2) I also use a few really helpful programs to manage areas of my work. Number one is an application called Billings by MarketCircle. This is great for managing projects and invoicing – I use it particularly for keeping a log of how long I spend working on a project and then sending clients invoices at the click of a button using a custom template that you can design yourself.

Another software tool I use is iBank by IGG Software. iBank keeps track of my bank accounts for me – with its built in web browser it allows me to log in to my internet banking account with my bank and download my latest statements, with the ability to assign a category to each transaction and then automatically generate really helpful reports of almost every kind based on the information. This was particularly helpful when I first began working freelance and only had one personal bank account – trying to keep track of what was business income and what was personal would have been really hard without iBank!

The last great little application I must add is Dropbox. I’d be surprised if you haven’t heard of it by now, but for someone that owns two computers (an iMac and a Macbook Air), Dropbox really simplifies file management. Setting off with my laptop only to realise I’ve left files I need behind on my iMac is really frustrating and unfortunately can still happen, but I try to make sure I’ve Dropboxed anything important that I think I will need, meaning I can access it from anywhere with an internet connection.

I also use Dropbox to sync both Billings and iBank between my two computers, as updating the two individually would be near impossible and really time consuming. By dropping a few files from each into my Dropbox, any changes I make in Billings or iBank will be updated on my other computer by the time I’ve turned it on! This method is a bit fiddly to setup and I must add I’m really looking forward to the launch of Apple’s iCloud service, but for now it certainly saves me some time!

Let me know if you have any questions, I’d be happy to try and help. Hopefully next week I’ll have a post on some of the hardware I use to make my life easier!

Sometimes it feels like I spend most of my day just responding to emails, backing up files and managing my accounts and never get a chance to do any designing or building. I use a few great software tools to help me manage these areas, particularly my accounting and invoicing.

Over the coming weeks I’m planning to write a few more blog posts on how I try and keep things streamlined and efficient using a variety of both software and hardware tools. I’m by no means a seasoned pro but you never know, you might learn something!

I’m going to try and keep this new blog up to date too, not only about my work but also anything to do with the internet, web design and SEO that’s interesting (at least to me anyway).

I’ve had a lot of lessons taught to me the hard way in the few years I’ve been doing this, so I thought I might as well share some of them with you here too! Watch this space!