You have started a blog to share your opinion with the World Wide Web. Someone stumbles upon one of your articles. He likes it, and posts it on Digg. Now it gets everyone's attention. Visitors come pouring into your site. Your revenue starts to go up. Definitely good news! But now there is a catch. You are now the target of the 'bad crowd' of the Internet, spammers, hackers and leechers. It's time to toughen up your innocent little Wordpress site. The .htaccess file is the easiest and the cheapest (actually it's free!) solution to secure a Wordpress blog. What is a .htaccess File? The .htaccess file is a configuration file for use on web servers running the Apache Web Server software. When a .htaccess file is placed in a directory which is in turn "loaded via the Apache Web Server", then the .htaccess file is detected and executed by the Apache Web Server software. It is often used to specify the security restrictions for the particular directory. In this article I'm going to show you how to strengthen your site's security by adding/changing a few lines in this file. Before you make any changes, it might be a good idea to take a backup ...

I have been pretty busy with the WordPress plugin development lately, so didn't get a chance to write any posts for a few weeks. I think it's about time I share a simple but effective website performance improvement trick with the readers of this site that I have been using on all my sites. If you haven't read the WordPress site optimization tips and tricks already then you should read that first. This trick involves changing some of the dynamic wordpress queries to static ones which in turn reduces the number of database queries and improves site performance. This does require a little bit of PHP knowledge but it's really basic stuff. In your WordPress theme's header and footer you will see many statements similar to the following: bloginfo('home') This queries WordPress for the home URL of your blog (eg. http://www.your-site.com). Now, how often do you think your home URL is going to change? Most likely never! So why not replace it with the static information which is "http://www.your-site.com" and make one less database query? Saving one database query may not sound very convincing but you probably have many statements like the following that can also be replaced: bloginfo('html_type') bloginfo('charset') bloginfo('name') bloginfo('version') bloginfo('stylesheet_url') bloginfo('rss2_url') bloginfo('template_directory') bloginfo('home') Now multiply that by every page load per ...

Few weeks ago I wrote on how to optimize your WordPress site for better performance which has some tips and tricks on how to speed up a WordPress Site. I received a few requests to elaborate on some of the points as not all of them are obvious changes. In this article I have explained how you can add far future expiry header to your image, css and javascript files to speed up your site. Adding expires headers do not affect the site load time for a first time visitor but you will be surprised how much the page load time decreases (faster page load) for subsequent page views/return visits from that visitor. Expires header specifies a time far enough in the future so that browsers won't try to re-fetch images, CSS, javascript etc files that haven't changed (this reduces the number of HTTP requests) and hence the performance improvement on subsequent page views. If your server is Apache (most web servers), you can use the 'ExpiresDefault' directive to set an expiration date relative to the current date. ExpiresDefault "access plus 2 months" This sets the expiry date of the file 2 months into the future from the current time. The following values can ...

Is your Wordpress blog performing at it's best? How quickly does the page load? Is it sluggish? Your website's performance is one of the key factors in ensuring that the visitors are having a good experience with your site. So I personally think it is worthwhile to spend some time tuning/optimizing the site for performance. In this article I have listed various tips and tricks on how to speed up a WordPress Site. Before diving into the optimization tips and tricks I recommend measuring the current performance of the site so you have some benchmarking figures to compare against after you make the changes and see how it has affected the performance. How to Measure the Performance of a Site 1. I use YSlow Firefox addon to measure the page load time of a site. YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug web development tool. So to use YSlow you will have to get the Firebug addon and then install the YSlow addon. The site in question takes about 23 secons to load which is not a very good page ...