Wordpress Websites Hacking

6 Must-Have WP Plugins For Each New WordPress Website

There are countless WordPress Plugins available that WordPress developers utilize to improve the functionality of their WP website. However, it turns out to be beneficial in several ways, but it can also make you confuse to choose the right one.

Although the niche of your website determines the plugins must use on your website, here are some plugins categorized to install for each new WP website that you can’t afford to ignore.

1. Speed Optimization Plugins

A website that takes too long time to load will result in losing your customers. There could be several reasons before slow loading websites. And to deal with all slow loading causing issues, there are three plugins to use:

• W3 Total Cache consists of several features such as CDN support, database caching, browser caching, object caching, minification functionality and lot more that is needed for improving page load time.
• WP Smush helps to compress and optimize the images without affecting the quality. Additionally, it can optimize all kinds of image files, including JPEG, PNG and GIF formats.
• WP-Optimize is one of the best tools to automatically clean your WordPress database to make it run efficiently.

2. SEO Plugins

Yoast SEO is the most popular SEO plugin used for WordPress websites. It comes with several features, including meta description, SEO optimized breadcrumbs, ability to add XML sitemaps, generates an SEO score on your pages and gets suggestions to improve the quality of your content or boost your website performance.

3. Social Media Plugins

Several social media plugins help you perform many activities right from social sharing to content distribution. Installing some of these plugins can help improve the popularity of your website. These plugins are:

• Blog2Social will automatically share, re-publish, auto post, re-post and schedule blogs on various social media networks, including Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter or more.
• Social Metrics Tracker tracks the performance of your content across popular social media platforms. You will have a dashboard where you can see the number of shares that your post receives.

4. Backup Plugins

BackupBuddy is the premium WordPress backup plugin. Using this, you can schedule daily, weekly or monthly backups. Moreover, it can automatically store your backups Rackspace Cloud, Amazon S3, Dropbox, Stash, FTP and even email it to yourself.

5. Security Plugins

When it comes to the security of your website, the Wordfence plugin is the prominent choice of people as it offers enterprise-level security. It continuously tracks what is happening on your site and alerts you if anything shady takes place on your website. Its features include firewall protection, blocking, malware scan, login security, traffic monitoring and more.

6. Analytics Plugins

Google Analyticator is a plugin that enables you to add your Google analytics code and provide you with an easy way of stopping logged in users from being tracked. It also includes a wide range of widgets to show the analytics data in the admin and on your blog.

These are some of the essential plugins that can be effective in their way, but this is by no means an exhaustive list of all useful plugin. At WireTree, our team of professional web developers in Toronto is familiar with all the plugins that play a significant role in improving your site performance and harden its security. We have designed and developed feature-rich WordPress websites for many businesses, and next could be you. Feel free to call us and discuss your project details with our professionals.

WordPress Websites Hacking: Causes and Solutions

Security of your website is one of the most important tasks. Taking your WordPress security lightly is likely to invite the hackers to damage your website data. Additionally, the hacking is also a result of ignoring the warnings to update your computer software. Some developers think that being not too large in size, the WordPress site could not be the target for hackers. However, providing a high level of security for your website ensure with confidence to its security.

Reasons For WordPress Website Hacking

• Target Your Visitors

  The eCommerce site is affected badly by hacking. The main purpose of hackers is to collect the site visitors credit card details. There are chances of losing your estore customer which result in low revenue. Thus, your site traffic will become low as well as negative reviews will attack your business.

• Damage Your Website Data

  If you have established a successful online business, having competitors will be an obvious act. Your rivals or competitors can hack your site to damage the whole data and to harm your business reputation. On the other side, they may think that your site hacking could be the only way of revenge for being unsuccessful in online business.

• Just For Fun

  Some hackers just hack for fun, especially the youngsters do it for the enjoyment. They don’t have any specific reason for hacking. In case, your WordPress site has the vulnerabilities then it has a chance to be found easily by the automated hacking tools.

WordPress Vulnerabilities

Mostly, the WordPress attacks happen due to a known vulnerability in the software. So, one should know about the common WordPress vulnerabilities, such as:

• Wrong Password Attempts Limit

  WordPress does not provide any limit to wrong password attempts. Thus, an automated brute force attack can easily crack your password and get the control on your WordPress website.

• Manually Updates Installation

  WordPress doesn’t install the updates automatically to its core software, plugins and themes. If you don’t update them on time, it could deprive your website of essential security patches provided through the upgrades.

• Not Approval Policy For Store

  There is no strong approval policy on the themes or plugins store. Unlike app stores, the WordPress does not offer any guidelines on what type of plugins or themes should be utilized via this platform. It gives ease to the developers who used to insecure, unstable and poorly maintained code. Once the themes and plugin set on the website, hackers will not take a long time to exploit it and use the malicious code into your website and visitors’ device via your site.

  Moreover, if your website doesn’t have any apparent vulnerability on WordPress installation, your site could be the target of hackers through a website located on your shared hosting server.

WordPress Attack Types And Solutions

Surely, getting your WordPress website hacked could happen in many ways. But, a hacked website gives you a reason to detect and fix the WordPress website vulnerabilities, so that, it could not happen next time. On the other hand, taking a lesson from the hacked websites, you can have a knowledge of how to design a secure website eliminating all doors for hackers. In order to improve your website security, you have the below things to know and prevent your site getting hacked.

• Vulnerabilities In WP Core, Plugins And Themes

  It is too easy for the attackers to check the version of your WordPress installation, plugins and themes to get a list of vulnerabilities. These three are the common vulnerable software components of any WordPress website. The only solution to protect them from hacking is to never ignore their update warnings. The process of updates hardly takes 30 seconds or if you have multiple admins, you can schedule one update per day. Set up of automatic updates for all plugin and themes can also turn out to be beneficial in saving your time.

• Weak Passwords

  The most common mistake of any website is a weak password. A simple and one for all passwords can easily be attacked by hackers or your competitors. This can even damage your other admin accounts. Give a strong password using the alphanumeric characters and symbols. Moreover, provide a limit to your password attempts.

• Cheap Hosting

  When creating a website for the very first time, some bloggers opt for the shared hosting as it seems cheap. But, you may never know that it comes with the risk of bad effects. If the hackers attack your website that is sharing your server resources, it could affect your website to take it down. The cheap web hosting will not add the features like security services. The thumb rule to purchase the web hosting service is it will too good to be true.

The best solution to keep your website secure and protect it from hackers, you should hire professional web designers and developers. So, feel free to contact Wiretree as we are renowned for best-in-class digital marketing services in Toronto. We ensure to keep your website secure from the hackers and grow your online business.

All You Need To Know About New WordPress 4.7

4.7 is a major WordPress release that brings a lot of amazing improvements and several bug fixes. This feature-packed version of WP will make your website even more better. Make sure you perform a full website backup before updating WordPress 4.7. It is also advisable to check if your theme or plugin providers have mentioned anything specific about WP 4.7 support.

In this article, we will discuss about what’s new in WordPress 4.7 and what features you must try after updating the website.

Twenty Seventeen – A New Default Theme

When you expect an update, you also expect a new default theme and here it comes. Twenty Seventeen is a beautiful theme that is apt for business websites. It has the much desired flexibility and crisp, which looks great on all screens.

Video Header Support

Video header support allows developers to add full screen videos. Users can now upload their own videos in mp4 format or even add a YouTube video.

Starter Content Support for Themes

Starter content support is a great help for users to set up a site with dummy content that they can edit later to meet their own needs. User just have to visit the theme customizer to save the starter content.

PDF Previews

WordPress 4.7 provides a feature that will generate thumbnail previews for PDF files and display them in media library. This feature will create an image of the first page of PDF file that is stored in different sizes and can be viewed in media library.

Edit Shortcuts in Customizer Preview

WordPress 4.7 brings an exciting feature that will help new users to edit an item with ease. With ‘Edit Shortcuts’ in customizer preview that is placed on editable items. Since, it is a new feature, it might not be available with your current theme.

Add Custom CSS in Live Preview

WordPress 4.7 allows you to quickly add custom CSS with the help of Customizer and view live preview of the changes done. This feature can surely save a lot of time and efforts of developers.

Admin Language Control

Now, you can easily switch the admin area language with WP 4.7. However, you will still have to install the languages so users can switch them.

Editor Improvements in WordPress 4.7

WordPress 4.7 brings some major changes to the editor. Now, you can see keyboard shortcuts in tooltips and drop-down menus. The paragraph and heading selector menu can also be seen in the top bar.

With this new version, users get a plethora of exciting features. If you want to know more about this latest version, feel free to contact our expert WordPress developers in Toronto.

Why Use WordPress – How WordPress Scores Above its Peers

WordPress is the leader when it comes to making websites that click with the customers. Not only does it lead the corporate website design industry but it also finds firm footing in the e-commerce sector. Having been around since 2003, it is also very popular in the blogging sector. This CMS has many advantages over its peers. So, why is it so popular among the web designers of today.

Let’s go into the details.

Ease of Use

WordPress offers an intuitive interface that makes it easier to use. You can easily build pages with visual composer. Creating new pages, adding images, posting blogs etc. are a breeze on this platform. Formatting time is reduced greatly here as well.

Manage Your Website from Any Computer

This CMS helps you login from any where in the world and manage your website’s processes in an interactive online way. It is browser-based and not machine based.

Zero HTML Editing

You don’t need no extensive HTML knowledge. There is also no requirement of FTP software. It is a self-contained setup that you can use to post, edit, upload and do so much more.

Best Option for SEO

When it comes to SEO, WordPress rules over others. Search engines love this CMS since it is easy to index. The simple and clean outlook makes it easy for the engines to scroll through the website’s content. The meta tags, keywords and other aspects are well taken care of in WordPress.

More Control in Your Hands

WordPress is open source, which means there is more control over the various aspects of website. You can change anything and fiddle with various functionalities as per your wish which is not possible in other platforms or is limited.

100 Percent Customizable

You can customize your website any which way you want. When you choose WP, you can offers a unique experience to your visitors.

Ready to Use

Here, you can start from the word go! Originally, meant as a blogging platform, it has become the right choice for setting up websites as well. You can quickly launch your website, add RSS, commenting and many more functionalities.

Multiple Plugins

Plugins are perhaps the best feature of WordPress. There are tons of plugins for a wide range of functions. You can search the plugins and find many that can serve your purpose.

There are many more advantages of moving onto WordPress. Once you go WP, there is no coming back because it’s just so much better its peers.

Looking to make a WordPress website? Talk to our Toronto based WordPress developers for more information on responsive WP websites.