About this popular editor:
Since WordPress first appeared, it has been estimated by W3Techs that around 35.3% of all world sites are using it, and for good reasons! WordPress has made accessible to everyone the design and modification of a website. Gone are the days where you needed to have a great deal of knowledge of web programming languages in order to create a site. With just a few clicks, it is now possible to have your own online site simply thanks to the WordPress graphic editor.
With the rapid growth of WordPress, several small problems began to surface. Being the most popular content manager software (CMS), WordPress quickly became the target of many hackers. The most targeted WordPress sites are the one that have not been updated or have not been adequately secured.
On the bright side, WordPress has attracted the attention of many programmers. Some being very savvy and have created high-quality extensions in order to add very practical functionalities while other novice programmers, although having had very good ideas of what they want to archives, will have a lower programming quality that will often affects the overall performance of WordPress, making the sites increasingly slower.
How to prevent the disadvantages of a WordPress?
WordPress wouldn’t be so popular if one couldn’t maintain a good performance to kept sites fast and secure. It usually only takes a few simple steps to keep a site healthy.
First, it is recommended that updates be made on a regular basis. Unfortunately, it sometimes happens that the site theme or certain extensions used are not compatible with the latest updates available. It is therefore necessary to be vigilant and, in some cases, it is even necessary to call on an experienced programmer to patch the themes and extensions.
Then, we should always eliminate themes and extensions that are not necessary or that are not used. Ideally, also replace the extensions that caused problems on the site with faster one that offer similar functionality. Outdated extensions that are no longer supported by their manufacturer should be avoided as much as possible.
After some time, we’ll realize that, although WordPress site are simple to create, it requires certain skills to maintain, and above all, we must take the time to keep it up to date so that it remains fast and safe.
Our Astral 360 – WordPress turnkey package
We are receiving more and more calls from people who need help maintaining their WordPress site or for removing malware that has successfully encrusted itself as a result of an unresolved vulnerability. It is based on those demands that we’ve decided to create a package that could meet the needs of WordPress site owners who do not always have the time or expertise to carry out regular maintenance of their site.
Our package therefore targets the two most important aspects of a website, security and performance.
The Security Aspect
To make your WordPress site as secure as possible, when purchasing the Astral 360 – WordPress package, one of our technicians will carry out the following checks and modifications:
Hide the administration page:
The default WordPress administration login page is known to everyone, upon installation, it’s always the same. Therefore, it’s the perfect place for hackers to attack using robots and try to find your administrator access. Once your access is found, your site can be used without leaving any visible trace to feed a zombie, spam or phishing network.
We’ll change the default WordPress administration login page so that only you know where it is. This simple change will help to keep most hackers away from your site. We will also disable XML-RPC communication protocols (if they are not used by the site) because they are often used by hackers in cryptanalysis to attempts to recover password hundreds of times per seconds using “brute force” type attacks.
Contact Forms protection:
All forms on a website can be used for the wrong purpose. This is why it’s important to protect them against robots. Without adequate protection, a robot could use the forms and send thousands of spams. Sending spam from a website will reduce the website’s credibility with search engines, but also with various email providers such as Hotmail, Gmail and others. Effective protection consists in installing a countermeasure called “Captcha”, intended to differentiate data submissions made by humans from robots.
Implementation of an SSL security certificate:
A website security certificate helps protect the identity of your customers, even if you don’t have an online store. In addition, search engines give more value to a site with a security certificate; higher search engine rankings usually mean more customers.
Firewall installation:
Pirates are becoming more and more ingenious. We must therefore be increasingly careful. To make life more difficult for hackers, we will place your site behind three firewalls, each of which will be dedicated to checking specific items.
- CloudFlare : The first line of defense is through the CloudFlare firewall. The latter uses artificial intelligence to perform advanced analyzes of the behavior of robots and Internet users on the network. (in 2018, it was calculated that around 10% of all web traffic was passing through CloudFlare networks).
- Physical firewall, All traffic to and from your site will be filtered by one of our physical firewalls which can filter up to 10 GB/s of data each. The physical firewall makes it possible to limit the number of doors available to access your site. It will also offer protection against DoS1 attacks. And in addition, have more than 6000 rules specific to website hosting. Some of which have been written by our technicians specially for WordPress sites.
- Software firewall: The last protection before reaching your site is a marriage of very specialized software allowing to check in real time each demand, file and request sent to your site and block known viruses as well as a panoply of injection attacks 2.
WordPress Updates:
On a monthly basis, we’ll safely update your WordPress installation (basic software, themes, extensions, etc.). During which, if one of our technicians notices an anomaly or any problems, he’ll provide you with a detailed report as well as different solutions to overcome the problem. At any time, you will be able to contact us to apply the appropriate solutions to resolve the problems.
The Performance Aspect
Once the site is secure, it is important to keep it fast not to lose the visitor’s interest. They don’t want to wait for pages to load on your site. The second part of the WordPress package will focuses on ways to make your site more efficient and faster. Here are different methodologies that we’ll use to optimize the performance of your site.
Image Optimization:
One of the factors that slows websites down a lot is the number of bytes that a browser must download to display a page. The more the page is optimized, the faster the page will be displayed. We’ll verify whether it is possible to reduce the size of each image without losing quality, thus reduce the time required for downloading a page.
WordPress Query Optimization
Each page in a WordPress site requires hundreds of server requests before it can be displayed. These requests are a mix of database calls and file requests. All those requests are multiplied by the number of extensions present on the site. The more extensions you have, the more requests the page will required, making the page loading time even slower. To remedy this situation, we’ll install a specialized extension which allows you to create a static version of your pages that will be ready to be served to your visitors. It’s as if this specialized extension eliminates all the requests normally required to load your other extensions, without losing their functionality.
Server-side Cache Configuration:
Astral Internet has developed a Website Accelerator that greatly increases the speed at which a page is served. We’ve seen improvement of up to 15x faster on some websites once the cache was activated. With the WordPress package, the website accelerator will be configured by the module developer themselves to archive maximum performance.
Distribution of your site everywhere on the globe:
Even with the best optimizations, the fact remains that a visitor from Europe or Australia will still have to download your from the other side of the ocean. This necessarily adds a delay known as “latency”. This is why we are adding your site to the CloudFlare content delivery network (CDN). With more than 194 data centers in 90 countries, your site will be quickly accessible, no matter where it is viewed.
The final Word
Being entrepreneurs ourselves, we understand very well that we are all experts in our respective field. That’s why we place our web expertise at your disposal so you may devote yourself to your business.
You’ll no longer have to worry about securing, optimizing or updating your site since we’ll take care of it every month for so you can focus on your own growth.
Not yet convinced or on the contrary, you want to join our turnkey Astral 360 – WordPress package? Nothing simpler in order to subscribe.
- Denial of Service attack. The attacker will send huge amount request (could be real or malformed request) to your site in order to prevent internet user from seeing your site.
- Injection attacks are a roundabout way of forcing your site to execute malicious code. The objective of an injection attack is often aimed at remotely controlling your site by robots. Thus, stealing information contained in a database or even simply for vandalism, like erasing all the site data.
