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How to Protect Your WordPress Website From Hackers

By on September 25, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Protect Your WordPress Website From Hackers

It’s a nightmare scenario. You go to your website only to find a nasty message from a hacker bragging about hacking your site. And nothing else. As far as you can tell your content is gone and you can’t even find a way to log into your WordPress dashboard.

Would your business survive your website being shut down, even temporarily?

It Happens

That’s exactly the situation that my friend of mine found herself in recently.

Fortunately we were able to help her out, rescue (most of) her files and get her back up and running relatively quickly. But that isn’t always the case.

Turns out she could have done some things to better protect herself. Fortunately she learned her lesson well and she’s in much better shape today than she was before the attack.

Have You Really Been Hacked?

A lot of times people come to me saying, “”My site’s been hacked,”” when it really hasn’t. With WordPress sometimes plugin conflicts can cause issues that seem to the user like a hacker has messed with something. This is most common when upgrading to a new version of WordPress if a plugin hasn’t been made compatible with the new version yet.

While that can cause your site to crash, it’s not caused by hackers.

Not only that, but most of the sites I’ve seen that have been hacked weren’t just taken down by them. Most of the malicious hacks I’ve seen involved injecting some code into the site, usually with the end goal to redirect site traffic to some other website.

The Symptoms

Without going into the gory details, my friend’s case was a little different. Her site actually showed an all white screen with an error message along the lines that a plugin conflict might produce and the hacker just wanted to crash her site. Turns out he was into stealing something else.

When I did some troubleshooting I was able to get her site back up and running in fairly short order. In her words:

I must add here, that it only took Chris 45 minutes to decipher and fix what was a rather sophisticated hack!

While I’d never promise to be able to recover a hacked site that quickly, I do have a good track record recovering hacked WordPress sites.

Protecting Yourself

Here are some things you can do to minimize the chances you’ll end up getting hacked and maximize the chances to fully recover quickly should your site crash (for whatever reason).

1. Use Strong Passwords.

I honestly think this was my friend’s biggest mistake. Again in her words,

This is what got me – I just used numbers and letters and the password was – well – kinda obvious.

Make your passwords not only hard to guess, but make them more difficult for sophisticated hackers to break as well. Randomly mix in special characters (found on the number keys with the shift button) as well as numbers and upper and lower case letters. Strong passwords make a huge difference.

Both WordPress and cPanel will tell you how strong your password is. Stronger passwords offer better protection.

The trouble is, having strong passwords also makes them harder to type in. That’s why I use 1Password to manage my passwords on my Macs. I can use really strong passwords and I don’t have to remember them or type them in. 1Password will auto fill web forms for me. It’s the best of both worlds: good security & user friendly.

2. Keep Your WordPress Updated.

One of the most common ways WordPress websites get hacked is because their owners don’t keep their software up to date. What happens is that older versions of WordPress can have known security weaknesses. These weaknesses are fixed by newer releases of the software.

But if you don’t update your software, you leave yourself exposed.

This also holds true with plugins and themes. Besides, the newer versions of WordPress make keeping everything up to date remarkably easy. There’s not much of an excuse to keep you from updating things.

3. Backup Regularly and Often.

A good backup can cover for a ton of other issues by making it possible to revert back to how things were before your site crashed. When it comes to WordPress you need to back up your

Database
Theme Files
Plugins
Media Uploads

There are several different plugins and services to handle backups of your WordPress site.

But the point is backup early and backup often!

Bottom Line

I don’t believe any site is completely “”hack proof.”” A determined hacker with enough resources can break into most anything. Just watch an episode of NCIS!

But if you do these three things you will greatly reduce your risk of being hacked and make it much easier to recover if you do run into a problem.

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WordPress PLugins For Site Flippers

By on May 13, 2011 in Randy Roedl

Want to know a little secret? We basically use the same WordPress plugins on ALL the sites we flip and we want to share them with you for free! Here is a list and a brief description of all the plugins we use. * Add To Any Enables website visitors the ability to post links to tons of social networks * All In One AdSense and YPN The best AdSense plugin ever! Never used it for YPN * All In One SEO Pack Impress buyers with SEO functionality * Contact Form 7 This makes a contact form * Exclude Pages Hide pages from the main navigation menu (useful for hiding download ebook pages) * Google Analyticator Add Analytics to the site to prove traffic * Order Categories Pages have Order to change the order in the menu, Categories need this plugin * Page Links To Make any page or post link to another URL (useful for Facebook Fan Pages) * Simple Google Sitemap Automatically make a Google compliant XML sitemap * Twitter Tools Automatically tweets a post when you publish it * WP Follow Me Adds a little Follow Me badge to the side of the website * WP Limit Posts Automatically Instead of displaying the entire post contents on the homepage, this plugin can limit the amount of text by word or character (makes the site look a lot nicer!) Download the plugins here: flippingawesome.com

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Getting-traffic-to-your-site

By on April 23, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Getting traffic to your site

Getting traffic is not something impossible. If you have time to spend online for your sites, then you’ll be getting traffic free of charge. First of all, you should make the habit of reading blogs regularly. This will make you comment on posts. This in turn, will give backlinks and traffic to your sites. This is just one of the many ways to get free traffic to your sites.

I know you’ll be having a lot of other methods in your minds. But don’t go for spamming – it’s not good in the long run – it can even create a bad impression on your sites as well. Why should you be doing all those spamming works, if you can get traffic easily, the natural way. Online communities can bring in a lot of traffic to your sites. People have a natural tendency to visit others sites. And this is something which we should make use of. You should be staying active in various online communities helping others and interacting with others. You won’t be feeling as if you are doing these things for driving traffic to your site. But it’ll be easy and fun for you.

After you create a good reputation over online communities, then slowly you can start to promote your sites. Again, don’t go for spamming online communities. Why can’t you do things the right way? There will be places to enter your website urls – enter at just those places! Yeah, doing just that, won’t bring you decent traffic – you should find some other ways as well. If you have accounts in forums, then you would have come across signatures and other such stuffs. Promote your website links using the signature spots.

You can try orkut, facebook, myspace and other such online communities as well. Once you join these sites, you’ll surely be meeting people like you – who have registered there with the primary aim of promoting their sites. After staying active at these sites for a week or two, you’ll start learning their tricks and tips without they even telling you. So, don’t bother to ask them personally, you’ll come to know about them automatically. Just wait and see.

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