10 simple ways to improve #WordPress security — even if you’re non-technical

10 simple ways to improve WordPress security — even if you're non-technical Listed below are 10 simple ways you can improve WordPress security, even if you're a non-technical website owner. 1. Use strong, unique passwords and a password manager. The most simple website security measure you can take is to use strong, unique ... read more10 Steps to a Secure WordPress Website Last week, in preparation for an interview about my work at Copyblogger's managed WordPress hosting division, I chicken-scratched a top 10 list of tips for keeping your WordPress website(s) secure. Why all the security ... you on simple steps you can ... read more

4 Powerful Ways to Improve WordPress Search So It Doesn't Suck The search function built in to WordPress core has come a long way over the past few years. However, if you have a large, complex site you still probably aren't very satisfied with the results it produces. Fortunately, there are lots of ways to improve it. read more10 Ways to Speed Up Your WordPress Sites According to the WordPress.org ... software conflicts and even cause the blog to crash. The solution is simple. Only use what's absolutely necessary and delete the rest. Also, make sure you keep your plugins up to date. 10. Adjust Your Front Page. read moreThe Simple Guide to Moving Your WordPress Site to a New Domain Today, I'm going to walk you through moving a site from an old domain to a new domain—from a non-technical point of view. Download this step by step guide to moving your WordPress ... s easy to obsess over all the small details of a website. Even ... read moreHow to Increase Website Speed and Make Your Blog Load Faster You can dramatically speed up your WordPress site in easy ways. One tool that ... your Google Analytics? You can even check your blog speed on your Alexa ranking page. However, it does not give you any suggestion to improve the site speed. read moreSecurity and Hacking: The State of WordPress Blogs Even so, each is using a unique combination of WordPress Plugins and Theme code that could make it vulnerable to security issues if you aren't upgrading or paying attention. This doesn't mean WordPress is safe from hackers. Many WordPress blogs were ... read more3 Easy Ways To Market Yourself as a Software Developer An easy way to get started is to use a shared hosting plan, like the one I am currently using at BlueHost, to create a simple WordPress site very ... Get it here: How to Market Yourself as a Software Developer. read moreWordPress Themes That Are Sure To Wow Your Clients It's a striking WordPress theme which can improve your web pages ... irrespective of their skills level. For the non-technical users, installation and configuration can be handled by developers. It comes packed with lots of helpful features, and ... read morePractical Tips From Top WordPress Pros If you're working with WordPress' core and with plugins and themes, then you should be extending by making use of all of the hooks available. Adam Brown maintains a list of all of the hooks 10 that have ... so that anyone, even non-technical users ... read more

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A Beginner’s Guide to Load Testing WordPress Sites

Though WordPress is an increasingly bulletproof solution out of the box, there's a huge difference between merrily clicking around in a local development environment, and how your site actually performs when people start hammering your servers for real.

The time to start worrying about how your site will perform is well before it goes live, rather than when it suddenly and unexpectedly goes viral, or simply falls apart under even moderate load. For non-technical site owners or inexperienced developers, working out how to address this can present something of a conundrum, but luckily it's relatively easily solved these days.

In this piece, we'll step through the basics of load testing your WordPress site by covering how to sensibly prepare for testing, open source options for taking a DIY route, and commercial solutions where someone else is taking care of the heavy lifting.

Let's kick things off by clarifying some terms.

What Are We Talking About When We Say Load Testing?

We'll get into available options shortly, but it's important to clarify what we actually mean by load testing up front. Wikipedia provides a pretty serviceable basic definition:

"Load testing is the process of putting demand on a software system or computing device and measuring its response. Load testing is performed to determine a system's behavior under both normal and anticipated peak load conditions."

"Normal" and "anticipated" are the two key words above. We're not simply trying to throw things at our site until it breaks – that falls under the domain of stress testing. Instead, we're looking to simulate ramping up the use of our site, by an increasing number of users over a specific time period and up to some sort of appropriate limit.

The question then naturally arises, how do you work out what normal use and an appropriate limit are? This is a virtually impossible one to give a universal answer to, so the key is really establishing sensible expectations for your own particular set of circumstances. There's no point comparing yourself to The New York Times if you're just launching your blog, for example.

Tools like Alexa help you establish realistic expectations.

If you're dealing with an existing site, make sure you've got a clear understanding of previous trends in terms of both average use and spikes around times such as Black Friday. If it's a greenfield project, analyze similar sites in your space to the best of your abilities – tools such as SimilarWeb and Alexa can help out here.

Before you actually throw machines at a site, you also want to make sure the various houses in your overall stack are in order. Let's briefly touch on that now, starting with the front end.

Check Your WordPress And Front End Setup Before Testing

On both the front end and the back end, there's a huge number of known optimizations out there that you should be stepping through before you start any sort of load testing. Rather than go too far down the rabbit hole, we'll simply suggest you work through the following two items in your own time:

Check out general current performance using tools such as GTMetrix and PageSpeed Insights, and implement their recommendations.

Use the P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) plugin to isolate potentially problematic WordPress plugins on your site.

The P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) helps you knock off some low-hanging performance fruit.

Stepping through the suggestions above will do wonders for user experience generally, and also hopefully surface some potential showstoppers before you even hit them in testing. Let's now consider the wider back end stack.

Document And Tune Your Back End Stack

When it comes to actual load on your site, it's the back end that'll be doing the heavy lifting – this is what you'll really be putting through its paces when testing, and there's a huge amount of moving parts which will be getting a workout. With that in mind, three things are critically important before you begin:

Understand your hardware: Whether you have direct control over it or not, it's crucial that you understand what the actual specs of the machine or machines your site is running on are.

Document your stack: You need every main component of your server setup identified and documented. Major targets here the operating system, database, and web server, but factors such as which version of PHP you're running are also going to play a significant role. As part of this process, you need to be certain that errors are actually being captured and logged throughout the stack.

Take care of initial tuning: This is a potentially vast area, but it's well worth getting the basics of things like MySQL tuning, Apache optimization, and PHP tuning out of the way before you pull the trigger on full testing.

Ok, with all of that out of the way, you're in a good place to start actually testing. It's worth pointing out that you ideally want to be running tests against an identical staging version of your site rather than the live one if at all possible. You've got a wide set of options available to you, but they boil down to a choice between rolling your own solution using open source tools or paying someone else to do it. Let's look at those in turn.

Exploring DIY Load Testing Options

If you're a non-technical site owner and looking to tackle this in a hurry, doing it yourself is almost certainly not the way to go – a world of potential pain and confusion awaits. If, on the other hand, you're a relatively experienced developer with some reasonable sysadmin chops, a range of solid solutions are available to play with.

Here's a quick breakdown of three of the most popular:

Tsung: Authored in Erlang, Tsung is an "open-source multi-protocol distributed load testing tool". It's a long way from being the most user-friendly in terms of documentation and setup, but it's a genuinely powerful solution. Jenni McKinnon over at WPMU DEV has done a fantastic job of explaining exactly how to get up and running with it in the context of WordPress load testing.

Siege: Siege is another popular load testing solution with a substantially easier learning curve. There's a solid guide to getting started with it over at Linode, and Mike Schroder's WordCamp presentation provides both an excellent overview of its capabilities and a great introduction to load testing, benchmarking, and stress testing generally.

JMeter: Apache JMeter is another popular solution if you're setting things up yourself and, as you'd expect from the project's creators, it's particularly well-suited to handling standard LAMP setups. Digital Ocean's two-part guide to its use is an excellent starting point if you're using the tool for the first time.

Go With A Commercial Load Testing Solution

Recent years have seen the emergence of a whole slew of fully-featured commercial load testing solutions. If you're prepared to unchain the wallet, the services below are huge time savers and can be tailored to virtually any setup.

Services such as Load Impact are worth springing for if you've got the budget.

Blitz.io: Blitz.io is an excellent solution for both non-technical users and developers. A few simple clicks is all you really need to start running tests. Full integration and customization options are also there if you want to dive deeper.

Load Impact: Load Impact is another solid contender for your testing dollar. You'll find comprehensive load testing solutions among their wider offerings, and impressively thorough documentation to boot. Chris Lema's piece on load testing WooCommerce using their services is also worth a read.

BlazeMeter: Rounding out our selection, BlazeMeter is much more a developers-only affair, but offers a pretty impressive set of functionality, and plays nicely with open source solutions such as JMeter mentioned above.

Conclusion

Load testing is a genuinely enormous topic to tackle, and we're really only scratching the surface above – even as a developer, you'll want to ease yourself into this world gently. The basic areas we've covered will get you a long way towards a robust setup, however. Let's step through them one more time:

Start by getting obvious WordPress and front end optimizations out of the way.

Get serious about documenting the moving parts of your overall back end stack, and take care of basic tuning early.

Experiment with open source load testing solutions such as Siege and JMeter, and make the switch to paid services such as Load Impact and BlazeMeter if the budget is actually there.

Have you already dived into the murky waters of WordPress load testing and got some valuable insight to share? Get in touch via the comments below and let us know!

Featured image: Unsplash

John Hughes

John is a blogging addict, WordPress fanatic, and a staff writer for WordCandy.

Source: A Beginner's Guide to Load Testing WordPress Sites

Doc Pop’s #WordPress #News Drop: #Website Weekend LA

Doc Pop's WordPress News Drop: Website Weekend LA Website Weekend LA is a two-day event where designers and developers get together and build custom websites for nonprofits. Love WordPress News, but hate reading? This is Doc Pop's News Drop. Running a nonprofit is already a challenging business. read moreCorrections & Clarifications To report corrections & clarifications ... melanias-speech-blames-reaction-clinton/87282068/ News: The times given in the following video shared on Facebook misstated the time zone for Baton Rouge, La. https://www.facebook.com/usatoday/videos ... read more

Clinton Foundation Sinks Into Deeper Trouble, Economic Update and Gold, Iran/US Middle East War Update Greg is the producer and creator of USAWatchdog.com. The site's slogan is "analyzing the news to give you a clear picture of what's really going on." The site will keep an eye on the government, your financial interests and cut through the media spin. read moreKetosis and Athletic Performance: More Than Fat Loss The above video is a presentation by Peter Attia, M.D. His talk is somewhat technical, but I always write blog posts hoping 20,000 people will *love* them, not that 1,000,000 will *like* them. In this presentation, you will learn (in my words, not Pete's ... read moreMedical Marijuana for Migraine & Headache Disorders In your research, check both official statutes and news articles. The official statutes provide the legal framework, while the news stories tell you how the law is being implemented. Whatever the laws, it's better to investigate exactly what issues you ... read moreTom Sanford Releases Exclusive Archival Pigment Print Of Lil Wayne NOWhere Limited have announced an exclusive release of a Lil Wayne painting that was created by New York-based artist Tom Sanford. Only 100 of these signed archival pigment prints, which are approximately 22 x 17 inches, have been made. They are printed on ... read moreMakerspaces, Participatory Learning, and Libraries The concept of libraries as makerspaces first hit my radar last November when I read about the Fayetteville Free Library's FabLab. As I began hearing more buzz about libraries and makerspaces the first few months of this year, I decided that learning ... read moreNetflix Explains Why It Doesn't Always Have That Film Or TV Show You Really Want To See (Video) Earlier today, in my post on the 6 films from Spike Lee's list of 86 essentials that are currently streaming on Netflix, I mentioned that the ridiculously low number of titles available for streaming, spoke to ongoing complaints voiced by many Netflix ... read moreI Went Paleo and Now I Hate Everything. Recently, I went pseudo Paleo. I say pseudo, because, like most things in my life, I've jumped in headfirst without putting any thought or research into it (this is also how I ended up taking a workout class called "Insanity." Afterwards, I was ... read moreNBA Bans Donald Sterling 'For Life' After Racist Rant NBA Commissioner Adam Silver handed down the unprecedented punishment of banning Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling from his team ... "I am banning Mr. Sterling for life," Silver said at a news conference in New York. He said the lifetime ... read more

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Prior to purchasing i-staxx.com I was informed by a 'happiness engineer' that WordPress could support several features that were critical to the site's success.

1. a scrolling ticker for stock updates2. the ticker could be updated every 5 minutes with market data3. Import an rss feed from Market watch….among other features.

After establishing the site and putting many man-hours into building it I was unable to adopt any of the features necessary. The best I could do was to add a twitter feed.I would like a full refund of all purchases related to i-staxx.com.

Respectfully,Nicholas Hallas

The blog I need help with is istaxxdotcom.wordpress.com.

Source: Refund for all purchases related to i-staxx.com

Cannot connect #WordPress site to #Domain

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A Comprehensive Guide with Top Ways to Create Free Website/ Blog For example, some free web hosting services do not allow you to use you own domain name ... which you cannot do with the free version of WP. Other than that the same restrictions apply. The site address is still a subdomain (mysite.tumblr.com) and you ... read moreStarting a New Blog? How To Choose the Blogging Platform That Is Right for You Hosting and domain costs can run you anywhere from $5/month on up. The platform is free and includes hosting. However, to get a custom domain name you need to get a WordPress.com ... also permitted. You cannot sell ads on your site. If you upgrade to ... read moreHow to Install Google Analytics Code on a WordPress Site - A beginner's Guide We are talking about the WordPress website hosted on your paid hosting, registered with your unique domain name. Next, navigate using your username and password. From the Admin Panel on the left, click appearance, and then click the Editor link to open the ... read moreTesting WordPress Website Backups to Avoid Future Disasters If you don't see this option, that means your new database wasn't selected in the menu before clicking the link ... real domain. Replace that with localhost and save the file. You can go ahead and check out your site locally to test your WordPress ... read moreHow to connect a domain to your WordPress website If your website cannot be reached via the new domain after adjusting with WP-CLI, you will have to replace the old domain with the new domain in your website's wp-config.php. It's that easy: Connect your webspace with a FTP client such as FileZilla via ... read moreHow To Start A Blog In 2016: Become A Blogging Superstar No matter what's driving you, you're here because you're excited to start a blog ... hosted WordPress. Your domain name is your permanent address on the Internet. It's where people will always be able to find you. And it's also the link between ... read moreArt Blog Checkoff List Here are some questions that will help you decide on your domain name. It is easy to find if a domain name is available. You can go to HostGator and click on the link ... WordPress for my platforms from now on. If you are building an art business with your ... read moreSecuring WordPress Websites Against Brute Force Attacks I cannot tell you how many times I have scrolled through my website logs, finding failed brute ... easy target for hackers because they know that a WordPress dashboard can be accessed by this route i.e. Domain.com/wp-admin/ and at Domain/wp-login.php. read more

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Top 10 WordPress themes #6

The best WordPress Templates at ZIM Templates.

CloudHost – Responsive Hosting WordPress Template

CloudHost is an Elegant WordPress Premium Theme, It's fully compatible with WHMCS-Bridge plugin which connect between WordPress and WHMCS, CloudHost is suitable for Hosting websites aswell as Company, Agency or Organization.

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2. Industrial Business WordPress Template

Offshore is a well designed Industrial Website Theme with HTML5 and Responsive design. Industrial Website Theme is also suitable for any kind of businesses and its crafted for corporate services & industry services.

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3. Pizza House – Restaurant / Cafe / Bistro Theme

Pizza House is what you really need to make an impressive online presentation of your restaurant, cafe, pizzeria, bistro, bar, bakery, brewery, etc..

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4. BurgerHouse — Restaurant WordPress Template

BURGERHOUSE Easy-to-use Responsive Restaurant WordPress Theme. It can also be used as restaurants, bakeries, bars, coffee or any other Food Related Website. OpenTable reservations or galleries are just a few clicks away.

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5. Jack – Stylish Blog/Portfolio WordPress Template

Jack is a stylish and unique template, ideal for any creative people or those who love to blog.

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6. Eduharvard – Multi-Concept Education & Courses WordPress Theme

Eduharvard is a Modern, Creative, Responsive & Multipurpose WordPress Theme. It is suitable for Educational Institutions like Universities and Colleges, Online Courses / Online Learning and Events.. This WordPress Education theme has been developed based on the #1 LMS plugin on the official WordPress Plugins directory LearnPress(also developed by ThimPress).

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7. Anora – Business & Corporate WordPress Theme

Anora is a premium WordPress Theme designed for your modern business! Elegant and well structured you can also use it to create your own unique styles for different needs and purposes. It comes with a powerful but user-frendly Theme Options Panel and a Visual Layout Builder so that you can create pages in minutes without dealing with code. It has two pre-defined styles and is integrated with a complete shop design.

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8. Casual Footwear WooCommerce Theme

This theme with amazing neon buttons is suitable for sport footwear, youth clothing, fashion and beauty stores. WordPress Live Customizer will make the process of your website customization super easy. Because this is the tool that gives you the possibility to view the changes you are making to your website's design in action before saving them. It will help you avoid mistakes. But that's not all: you get rid of the need to turn on the maintenance mode.

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9. Vetcare Veterinarian Medical Pet Care WordPress Theme

Vetcare – A Veterinerian Medical Pet Care WordPress theme built for professional businesses running a pet care institute, an animal clinic or veterinarian center. It comes with a very modern design driven by large impressive pictures outlining the different veterinary services. It is also suitable for regular doctors, medical centers, clinics, etc.

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10. Architekt – WP Business Theme

An exquisite WordPress business theme perfect for a website that is looking for a more corporate feel with a touch of style and refinement.

All our themes are very customizable and easy to use, and Architekt is no exception. You can change colors, backgrounds and much more directly from the WordPress admin, in a matter of clicks.

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Source: Top 10 WordPress themes #6

New #WordPress Install – 20 Things You Must Do [Checklist]

New WordPress Install – 20 Things You Must Do [Checklist] Every time we do a new WordPress install there are a number of important tasks we should complete. Miss out on these and you will miss out on a lot of traffic and success and income. Even if you are familiar with some of the tasks in this New WordPress ... read moreEssential Web Skills Every Modern Entrepreneur Must Have And if you're on the business/marketing side of things, I can understand why ... your site may only require changing one line of code or installing a free WordPress plugin. If you know how to do this yourself, you'll have a much easier time managing ... read more

A to Z of WordPress Terminology for Beginners to Advanced Attachment is a post type in WordPress: it's one of the post types that comes with WordPress out of the box. A capability lets a user perform a given action, such as editing posts (edit_posts) or installing ... new custom post types that you register ... read moreSkyrocket Your WordPress Website's SEO Immediately Using These 15 Tips While some small businesses in niches with no competition might see some solid SEO results running WordPress out of the box, there are some things you really ... spend $20 to have a freelancer alter a plugin to better suit your website. 3. Install a ... read more20 Latest Interior Design WordPress Themes That Will Make You Feel At Home in 2016 Have you ever lived through home remodeling? If yes, you must know it ... With the ease of installation, customization. Template jestświetnie made, lightweight, simple, readable. Very easy to edit. Creo Furniture is a WordPress theme to use for an ... read moreGet Your WordPress Theme How You Want It: Introduction To WordPress Customization Whether it's changing colours or fonts, or adding a logo, these things ... tutorial showing you the basics; it looks complicated but is relatively easy to pick up. You can install the plugin by heading to Plugins → Add New on the WordPress Dashboard ... read moreReal Talk: How Much Should You Invest in a Business Website? Otherwise, you could end up wasting money on things that are inessential or inadequate for accomplishing your objectives. Before you get to the breakdown of the site-building costs, you must first ... include an easy WordPress installation app within ... read moreWPCasa Review: Best Solution For WordPress Real Estate Websites You must have heard this word multiple times ... To get started with WPCasa, you'll need to install their free WordPress plugin. Once you activate it, you'll see two new options in your WordPress admin sidebar: I'll show you the settings under ... read moreWhat to Expect from a WordPress Security Solution/Provider The security provider must take regular snapshots of the entire WordPress installation (core files and database ... in this kind of forensic security work. One of the best things you can do to stay secure always stays up to date. Keep the plugins, themes ... read more6 Things You Must Do To Get Your First Job After College But Dan Schawbel, Forbes contributor and founder of Millennial Branding, a one-man research and consulting firm that focuses on so-called Millennials or Generation Y, aged 18-29, the new generation ... and then installing WordPress on the site you have ... read more

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