Imagine for a moment you have setup a shop in a busy downtown city street.  Lots of foot traffic.  Your thinking is, as long as you get enough people walking in your shop they will convert into customers right?  However your shop has not had a paint job in 10 years, the windows are cracked, there is dust on the shelves and the shop assistant is an abrupt person that is not too interested in serving customers.  What results would you expect to get from a shop like this?

It is a really easy answer – bad results, or results that are not as good as they could be if spruced things up.  Of course the odd desperate customer will come in and buy something but only if they have to.

Is your website the same as this old store?  Old and run down and in desperate need of some TLC?  The next question is, when you want to buy something from a business do you check out their website?  The answer is yes for a lot of people.  Your website very often is the first impression that your potential customers are getting about your business and if it is old and dated there is a high chance that you may be losing customers as they judge your business from your website, just like you judge other businesses from their website.

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CyberHub develops WordPress websites because it is the easiest CMS to use for every day users like you.  To update a page, you simply login and click update, then you are presented a page that you can update, if you can use a word processor you can update your own website.  With WordPress you have the ability to quickly learn and update your website with attractive and professional themes .

WordPress is so attractive, in large part, due to the wide availability of free and paid ‘Plug-Ins’. These are small pre-built code functions that are designed to do one thing. Let’s look at 5 of these plug-in’s that CyberHub use on almost all of their WordPress website setups: Read more >>

Currently there is a massive brute force attack happening to WordPress websites at the moment.  The way the attack is working, it is assuming the administrator login username is admin and then the password is brute forced attacked.

Once the WordPress account password is guessed the site is then setup as part of a botnet and used to attack more sites creating an avalanche or hockey stick effect.

How to protect your WordPress website from this attack

The first thing that you can do to prevent your WordPress from being hacked is change admin user login to another secure login other than admin.  An email address or another username bigger than 8 characters should be sufficient.  Then you can update your password, once you have done this login to the user account and choose a different display name than your login.

Once you done this, install the plugin login lockdown and configure it with a maximum of 10 login attempts before the IP address is blocked.

If you do these two things it will greatly reduce the chances of your WordPress website being brute force hacked.

For additional security steps you can take see our article How to Secure your WordPress website.

You can never be too careful when it comes to securing your WordPress website. Attacks can happen within seconds and months worth of work can be gone before you even realise what has happened.

Here are a few tips to help prevent this from occurring.

Strong WordPress Passwords:

Creating a strong password is an important first step to protecting your WordPress website. Using a password that is a combination of both upper and lower case letters, mixed with some numbers, is an effective way to prevent hackers from using software programs to access your site.

Try not to use dictionary words or personal details, such as names or birthdays.

Changing your password every few months is also highly recommended. Read more >>

Search engines like Google will begin a search request from one of its users by scanning the online websites for the most relevant information based on what is typed into the browser.   Relevancy is largely determined by the “keywords” that the user types into the browser.

The Basics of SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques are essentially methods employed by website owners to enhance Google ‘s ability to find their websites by strategically placing these SEO Keywords into the content of their web pages.   The goal is that Google will easily scan, locate, and submit their website to online users who will benefit the most from its content based on these keywords.

As more and more people find your website, and as more and more people consistently come back to your site, these search engines begin to view your online information as useful to its users.  If Google’s customers, for example, do not like the search results that Google offers them, then they might just go to another search engine, such as Yahoo or Bing, perhaps.

Therefore, these giant search engine has a vested interest in determining the relevancy of all online content based on these SEO Keywords prior to sending it to their customers as a higher ranking web page.   As your site is viewed by Google to be of service to their users, your rankings will increase.  Everybody wins.  As such, Google provides some tools to help you choose your keywords. Read more >>