Like most good hosting support folks, security tops the list of my priorities. While a good firewall, and true Web Application Firewall are the best means for helping with this, sometimes shared hosting services will not change the configurations they have in place to support the necessary security for a Wordpress website. In steps the iThemes Security plugin. iThemes acts like a WAF, in that it can detect (via a vast network) bad bots, known hackers, and most known vulnerabilities in Wordpress. I will lay out what I use on all of the sites I manage hosting for (note, this number as of today, is in the thousands), as well as enabling the necessary configuration needed to allow iThemes to do it's thing when you… Read More
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By: Kevin On: July 1, 2016
Posted In: CSS Design Development Hosting Mobile First PHP Plugins Security Theme Development Updates Wordpress caching compression css design practices development javascript mobile first mobile friendly php speed up the web wordpress wordpress performance
In part I, I walked you through my server setup to achieve a 1 second load time for my site. It is a Wordpress site, with a custom theme I developed. I gandered at the possibility of by-passing Wordpress's front-end engine, however, I found myself needing some of the built-in functionality Wordpress offers. Items like custom posts, pages, and even posts are simple sql queries, however; widgets, shortcodes, and most plugins then become unavailable. So, I delved into the realm of research and found Wordpress core functionality offered the functionality I required, with very little performance hit; so I decided to simply extend some memcached functionality when pulling my pages/posts/widget/etc... The only thing I found that I lost was time, and in the end drastically improved the… Read MoreBy: Kevin On: July 2, 2014
Posted In: Development Hosting MySQL PHP Plugins Theme Development Updates Wordpress design practices development php speed up the web web development wordpress wordpress performance
Post revisions This is a weakness of WordPress. On this site there are over 30,000 revisions for the 14,000 posts. That makes the table bigger and it's slower to search in it. WordPress users realized this three years ago. Tip #1 We backed up the the wp_posts table and then used a simple MySQL command to remove old post revisions. This decreased the table size from 400MB to 120MB: DELETE FROM `wp_posts` WHERE post_type = 'revision' AND post_date NOT LIKE '2012-%' Long-term solution There are WordPress plugins which can limit the number of revisions per post. We think that the WordPress code should be improved and the revisions should be stored in a different table to maximize speed. You can support this on WordPress bug… Read More