SpeedHost.in Blog Hosted on WordPress

WordPress is a pretty awesome Content Management System and we can say this with conviction because our blog runs on the very same platform. The only complain that we have with WordPress is, by default it’s very slow to load.

Page load time is become so important today that you can find your website at the bottom of search engine results, if your page isn’t quick to load. People don’t appreciate slow loading websites and you can easily lose most of your visitors for a few extra milliseconds of page load time. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything to change it. We’ve compiled a list of tips that you can use to speed up your WordPress Website. Let’s take a look.

1] Use a good Theme/FrameWork: If you’re building your WordPress website by using a theme or framework as a base, then you need to ensure that you have the best one. Look out for themes or frameworks that are simple and have a clean code. If the core of your website functions smoothly then the effect of it will definitely show in your website’s performance. We recommend ‘Thesis Theme Framework’ for your WordPress website but there are many similar options available that you can choose from.

2] Use a caching plugin: Caching can improve the load times of your website considerably. It ‘s a process where parts of your website are saved on the visitor’s browser so that it only needs to be loaded once instead of every time a visitor lands on your website. This works brilliantly for your regular visitors. We recommend W3 Total Cache plugin, which will help you achieve the caching capabilities on your website.

3] Optimize images: Images are a very important part of content and that’s one reason why you will find many websites with images. This can add considerable amount of load to the website resulting in pathetic page load times. Optimizing all images without losing quality is possible but to do this manually for each and every image is going to be a real task. Fortunately you can use a plugin called WP Smush.it that can automatically optimize all the images on your website. The plugin performs this magic of optimizing images by stripping the unused colors from indexed images and metadata from Jpegs.

4] Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): If you’ve never heard what CDN does, it takes all your static files like images, Css, etc on your website and makes it available to users through a server closer to them. This ensures that your visitors around the world will be able to load your website in the quickest possible time. Most CDN services are available for a price but if you’re short on budget, we recommend using CloudFlare.

5] Invest in good hosting: Don’t look for the best price, rather look for great quality. Hosting plays an important role to ensure your website is always up. Free hosting may look attractive but a regularly offline website is going to drive your traffic away. Also Shared hosting might be a good alternative to start off with but as your site grows it’s advisable to move to better types of hosting like VPS hosting. This will ensure that you can entertain more traffic on your website without the fear of your website slowing down or crashing.

We hope these tips work wonders and makes your website snappier. We would love to hear some of your secrets on how you speed up your WordPress website, so feel free to leave a comment below.

Whenever you’re setting up your WordPress website, the default username is always admin. In the excitement of getting started we ignore making any changes to the username and complete the installation. Unfortunately, this makes it easier for a Hacker to run a brute force attack as he now only needs to work on finding the password to get to your website’s admin dashboard. If you’ve committed this innocent mistake then it’s time to rectify it for the safety of your own WordPress website.

How to change WordPress ADMIN username

• First you need to login to your website’s admin dashboard.
• Hover over Users [left hand menu] and click on Add New.
• You will need to fill in all the fields that include username, email, first name; last name, password etc [Choose a good username and a strong password]. Before clicking on Add New User don’t forget to change the role to Administrator.
• You will now find the new user created in the Users section. You’ll then need to logout from the admin dashboard.
• Now login again into your Admin dashboard with the new username and password.
• Click on Users on the left the hand Menu and then click on Delete just below the old admin user. *We recommend taking a backup of your WordPress Website before you delete the old admin user*
• You will now be taken to a screen where you will need to attribute all posts of the old user to the new one that you just created. Ensure you check the radio button Attribute all posts to and then select the new username from the dropdown Then click on Confirm deletion button. [If you don’t do this correctly, all posts that were attributed to the old username will be lost.]
• You will now see that the old user has been deleted.

That’s how simple it is to fortify your WordPress security from a Brute force attack. Hackers will now have a tough time trying to guess the username and the password of your website.

When you are powering 1 out of every 5 websites in the world, there is no doubt that you are pretty awesome. We are referring to the most popular Content Management System – WordPress. Ease of use, thousands of available plugins & themes and abundance of online support has contributed to its thumping success. There is no doubt that you can setup your WordPress site in minutes, but maintaining it is a different ball game all together. In this post, we are going to share some ways to ensure that your WordPress site is running in top shape and at all times.

1] Never miss any updates: WordPress is an open source platform hence bugs and security flaws will always be at its tail. Occasional as they may be, updates available for WordPress are a great way to counter any issue and at times to improve the overall experience of using your website dashboard. Avoiding these updates will only leave you exposed to security threats and put all of your hard work at risk of being lost. Similarly, plugins and themes need to be updated to the latest version to avoid creating a gateway for security threats and also to ensure compatibility with the latest WordPress build.

[Note: If your website is on the latest version like 3.9, then your website will automatically update for all minor and maintenance releases.]

2] Delete unwanted Themes: There are a lot of themes out there but eventually you are going to just use one for your website. Though the rest are deactivated, they can still pose a security threat if they are not updated. Also we noticed a strange lag while browsing through all saved themes, which somehow miraculously changed when we got rid of all the unwanted themes on a demo site 😉 . All themes that are not in use must go except for one default theme for backup. You can always reinstall themes whenever you need them so deleting them won’t really pinch. Also look out for themes that are light weight and don’t put stress on your resources.

3] Delete unwanted plugins: Plugins definitely add functionality to your website but at the same time it utilizes resources allotted to your website. In such a situation, you will need to ask yourself a question, can you live without this plugin? If the answer is a yes, throw that plugin out. Also get rid of any deactivated plugins on your website, since if you don’t update them, then you are creating loopholes for any kind of security threat. Don’t fall for the all in one type of plugins where you get loads of functionality. If you are only going to use one or two functions out of the ten, then the rest is of the code is simply waste of resources. You might as well look for plugins that focus on the functions that you are actually going to use.

4] Take backups: There are times while making a few changes or trying to add new features we might end up messing our WordPress website. Sometimes it becomes very difficult to undo these mistakes and that’s when we need to take help of our trusty old backups. They also come in handy when your website has been a victim to a security threat. We recommend regular backups and you can try BackUpWordPress plugin to do that for you. Trust us when we say that this is one thing you just can’t ignore.

5] Enable Caching:  Whenever you load a website, there are files that are saved in the Cache which is in your computer’s hard drive. So whenever you revisit the same website again, the browser uses the files in the cache rather than the server to display the page. This process is called caching and ensures that less system resources are utilized and pages load quicker for all your visitors. You can use WP Fastest Cache WordPress plugin to configure caching for your website with just a few clicks.

Try all of the above recommendations and you will definitely keep your WordPress website in great shape. You will need to keep maintaining your website as much as you can. Even if you have a single page website, login to your dashboard and ensure that every element is updated to the latest version. Remember to treat your website like a baby that continuously needs love and care.

We all know that we can install WordPress on our personal computer for learning or testing purposes. There are quite a lot of popular methods, through which you can setup the local server environment and install WordPress on it. Unfortunately most of these methods are very lengthy and enough to deter you from completing all the steps. Fortunately we found a way to quickly and most importantly, easily install WordPress Locally, using ServerPress.

Now ServerPress is a local server application that is built specifically for developing WordPress, bbPress and BuddyPress websites. It comes with the feature that allows you to install WordPress quicker than any of the conventional methods. It is available for Windows and OSX. You can Grab the installer here, and follow the below instructions.

[Note: You need to install Apache and MySQL in the computer for this application to work]

1] To create a new WordPress project, select Create a new development website.

2] Give a site name, and select the WordPress version you would like to install. In the Site Root section, you will know where the files of your website will be saved, which can also be changed.

3] After you click next, ServerPress will automatically setup everything for you. In the end you just have to create an Admin user for your site.

That’s it. With just three easy steps you have your WordPress site working off your computer, ready for all your experiments. If you want to avoid all the messy ways to setups WordPress on your local drive then this is definitely the way to go.

Do drop a comment below to let us know your experience with this software.

If you are on WordPress blog, you would have alreade seen the “WordPress 2.9 is available! Please update now.” sign on the top. This new update has brought in some very cool features.

1. Global undo/”trash” feature.
2. Built-in image editor.
3. Batch plugin update and compatibility check.
4. Easier video embeds. And more…

Watch this video to get a sense of it.