9 things you can do to secure your WordPress website by Bob Stovall

WordPress is the most popular website CMS (Content Management System) in the world, currently powering over 71 million websites, 15.8% of all the site on the web and 53.8% of all sites using a CMS. That level of popularity is great, but also make WordPress a target for hackers and other online ne’er-do-wells. You can (and should) take steps to secure your WordPress installation and avoid the pain and expense of being hacked. Here are 9 ways you can better secure your WordPress website. Update WordPress regularly – The most basic security step that you can take is to be sure that your WordPress installation is up-to-date. Update your plugins and themes – Also be sure that your plugins and themes are updated. The image below shows where to check in the Admin area to see if your WordPress, plugins and themes are up to date. Remove the admin account – When you install WordPress using Fantastico, you usually have a choice of the admin username and password. Don’t use “admin” – that gives a hacker one less thing to deal with. Make it harder on them and choose something more difficult for a hacker to guess. If you use [...]

From a post at: Dominate Your Local Market! - Local Business Marketing Strategies for WordPress, Facebook, Twitter and more

Security plugins help identify and repair WordPress hack vulnerabilities by Bob Stovall

I recently took on a new client whose WordPress installation had been hacked. It took a lot of time and effort to throughly clean up and install fresh versions of the WordPress installation, theme, plugins and the database. It rapidly became clear to me that preventing such attacks in the first place would be less expensive and less time-consuming than cleaning up after them. There is never a 100% guarantee of security against hacker attacks on WordPress, but tipping the odds more in our favor is a “no-brainer.” There are some plugins that make the job of securing and monitoring your WordPress installation easier. The one I would start with is WP Security Scan. Once you install and activate the WP Security Scan plugin, it instantly scans your site for known vulnerabilities and alerts you to them so you can make the corrections. In the case of the site I ran this scan on, you can see that it runs a number of checks on various items. It quickly found two vulnerabilities. The first was the use of the standard “wp_” prefix in the database. Using the default prefix makes it easier for hackers to use SQL injection to add [...]

From a post at: Dominate Your Local Market! - Local Business Marketing Strategies for WordPress, Facebook, Twitter and more

1. New WordPress Plugin Videos on OrangeCat.info Two new videos were added today to the OrangeCat.info website....
2. Email issues with WordPress plugins Have you ever gotten this warning on your WordPress-powered website...
3. Low-cost WordPress Installation I thought you might find this interesting. A couple of...

Are you playing with fire? by Bob Stovall

Today’s blog post is not so much about how to market online as it is about preserving your precious marketing data from loss. Yesterday, I had a call from a client whose hard drive hard recently crashed and had to be replaced. In addition to all of the time-consuming chores associated with a hard drive replacement, she had some very important emails that were now missing. Crucial emails, I should say. Needless to say, she had never backed-up her data and now those crucial emails and the potential business they contained were lost. A recent study from Gartner, Inc., found that 90 percent of companies that experience data loss go out of business within two years. I’m guessing they mean TOTAL data loss, not just a few emails, but you get the point. I tell my clients over and over again about the importance of backing-up data, but sometimes it just falls on deaf ears. But please understand one very important point – ALL hard drives eventually fail. In fact, a common stat for hard drives (available as part of their tech details) is their MTBF number. MTBF means Mean Time Between Failures and it is a measure of the [...]

From a post at: Dominate Your Local Market! - Local Business Marketing Strategies for WordPress, Facebook, Twitter and more

123456 or Just Hack Me by Bob Stovall

The other day an article appeared in the Technology section of the New York Times dealing with passwords that are just too popular to be secure...

From a post at: Dominate Your Local Market! - Local Business Marketing Strategies for WordPress, Facebook, Twitter and more