How To

First, let’s see why Autoptimize is a great plugin and why you should use it with Hide My WP Ghost.

1. The free version of Autoptimize has all the features you need to optimize the WordPress site speed.
2. Autoptimize is strictly an optimization plugin and not a security plugin that works great with the Hide My WP Ghost plugin.
3. Autoptimize has the option to combine all CSS and JS files and also the inline styles.
4. Autoptimize has over 1 million active installs in the WordPress repository and is consistently updated with new features.

With a bit of setup, Autoptimize + Hide My WP Ghost will help you hide the plugins and themes from all Themes Detectors.

To hide all CSS and JSS you need to follow the steps to combine the JS and CSS files into one file. Let’s see how you can do this with the Autoptimize plugin.

Autoptimize – Combine JS Files

Autoptimize plugin comes with the option to Aggregate/Combine the JS Files into one file. As we tested the plugin this is working really well with Change Paths in Cache Files option in Hide My WP Ghost.

Aggregate JS Files

Autoptimize’s “aggregate JS files” option will combine all of your JavaScript files into a single file.

Aggregating CSS and JS files will still result in a speed bump for certain types of WordPress sites, so we recommend testing your page speed with this option enabled and disabled.

Note! To hide the plugins’ JS URLs, make sure you activate the option “Aggregate JS-files” in Autoptimize and let Hide My WP Ghost change the paths in the cached file.

Also Aggregate Inline JS

The “also aggregate inline JS” option extracts inline JS in your HTML, and combines it with Autoptimize’s optimized JS file. Since this option can cause a rapid increase in Autoptimize’s cache size, we recommend keeping this option disabled unless you have a specific reason to enable it.

Autoptimize – Combine CSS Files

Autoptimize plugin also comes with the option to Aggregate/Combine the CSS Files into one file.

Aggregate CSS Files

Autoptimize’s “aggregate CSS files” option will combine all of your CSS files into a single file.

Note! To hide all the plugins’ css files you need to activate the option “Aggregate CSS files” in Autoptimize and let Hide My WP Ghost change the paths in the cached file.

Also Aggregate Inline CSS

This option will move inline CSS to Autoptimize’s CSS file. While moving inline CSS to a browser-cacheable CSS file can reduce page size, we recommend leaving this option disabled in most cases.

Hide Autoptimize cache path

Now that all the CSS and JS are combined, these files are present in the cache directory.

By default, the cache path is /core/cache/autoptimize/ which pretty much says that you are using Autoptimize plugin.

To fix this, simply map the URL with a custom name like in the below example from Hide My WP > Mapping > URL Mapping:

Read more about URL Mapping here: https://hidemywpghost.com/kb/url-mapping-text-mapping/#url_mapping

Change Paths in Cache Files

To activate Hide My WP Ghost to change the paths in the cache file, go to Hide My WP > Tweaks > Change Paths in Cache Files and the plugin will automatically change the paths in background using the cron option.

https://hidemywpghost.com/kb/activate-security-tweaks/#change_paths_cached_files

Note! If WordPress cron is deactivated on your website, you can manually click to change the paths once the files are cached.

Apache version on AWS Lightsail WordPress

Step1: Install, Setup Hide My WP Ghost Plugin and click the Save button with the new paths.

Step2: Copy the rewrite rules from Hide My WP Ghost into Bitnamy config file

AWS Lightsail (Bitnami) doesn’t enable overrides using .htaccess by default and the structure of the Apache config files is a bit different.

Bitnami uses “htaccess.conf” files by default instead of “.htaccess” files for security and performance reasons. You can find more info at https://docs.bitnami.com/general/apps/redmine/administration/use-htaccess/

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This is the question we asked ourselves as a software company many years ago when we switched our business to WordPress CMS. It’s hard to trust an open-source CMS where our websites will probably end up being hacked.

As a developer, I wanted to know how to protect my WordPress website and how to protect my clients’ websites. I started studying WordPress CMS, its weak points and strong points and I found out that not the WordPress core itself is the main issue but the installed plugins and themes.

Many free plugins and themes were built by beginner programmers without any security knowledge and frankly, they probably didn’t even care about their users. As WordPress CMS can’t work without a plugin or a theme, most probably each production website had installed, at one point, a vulnerable plugin or a theme.

How To Protect My WordPress Website

Luckily, there are many security plugins now that verify the plugin integrity and vulnerability but they can’t keep up with all the last updates and the new plugins on the market.

About 4 years ago our company came up with the idea of creating a security plugin that will protect all the vulnerable plugins and themes by blocking the attacks on the common WordPress URLs and Paths.

This idea led us to create the Hide My WP Ghost plugin. A plugin that allows you to change all the common paths with hidden paths and block the hacker’s bots access to the known vulnerable paths.

We successfully reduced the number of SQL and Script injection attacks up to 99% with the Hide My WP Ghost plugin. We significantly reduced the number of Brute Force and XSS Attacks.

The best part is that Hide My WP Ghost works together with all other security plugins on the market by adding a layer of security for each business.

Some of the popular security plugins are Wordfence, Sucuri, iThemes Security, etc.

We look forward on keeping WordPress the safest open-source CMS and reducing the bot attacks as low as possible.

Secure Hosting Companies

Choosing a safe hosting is also important when you create a website for your business. There are many WordPress dedicated hosting companies who offer security and management.

Some of the great WordPress hosting companies are WpEngine, InMotion, CloudWays, etc.

Note! Keep in mind to choose a plan that will keep a daily backup on your website’s data.

Once you have a secure hosting plan and security plugins installed on your server, you don’t have to worry about getting hacked and you can focus on getting the best out of your online business.

If you have any question, please contact us here

In this article will show you how to make Hide My WP Ghost compatible with the well known Really Simple SSL plugin.

First I want to congratulate the authors of the Really Simple SSL plugin who created such a simple and efficient plugin.

Now, Hide My WP Ghost works well with most of the Really Simple SSL options.

The only option that needs a bit of attention,if the 301 redirect with .htaccess which adds the rewrite rules in the .htaccess file after the Hide My WP Ghost rules.

To make sure the plugins are working together well after you save the options in Really Simple SSL plugin, save the settings in Hide My WP Ghost too. This way the rules are moved to the beginning or the .htaccess file.

# BEGIN rlrssslReallySimpleSSL
RewriteEngine on 
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on [NC] 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
# END rlrssslReallySimpleSSL

Note! If the .htaccess file is not writable, make sure you manually move the Really Simple SSL rewrite rules to the beginning of the .htaccess file and save the file.

That’s all. Enjoy the plugins and stay safe!

Please contact us if you have any question.

We are glad to announce that Hide My WP Ghost is now working with the Manage WP Godaddy plugin.

This is great news for developers who have many websites to manage and want to secure them with a custom wp-admin path.

How to configure Hide My WP Ghost

1. Install the free Hide My WP Ghost plugin from https://wordpress.org/plugins/hide-my-wp/ (or the premium one)
2. Activate the plugin and secure the WordPress paths.

How to configure Manage WP

1. You can access your account or create a new one at https://managewp.com/
2. Install the free Manage Worker plugin on your website https://wordpress.org/plugins/worker/
3. Connect your website using the API key from the plugin description in the Plugins tab

Once you connected your plugin, Hide My WP Ghost will know how to handle the compatibility and you will be able to connect to your admin area directly from the Manage WP panel.

Let us know if you have any question.

Using an Open Source CMS with open-source plugins and themes it’s giving a hard time preventing all the hack attacks to your WordPress site.

Many plugins are created by authors who don’t know how to completely secure them. The same with the themes’ authors.

Prevent Hack Attacks

Fortunately, there are security plugins that are built to help you protect your website and prevent hack attacks. Some of them are popular on WordPress: Wordfence, iThemes, Sucuri, etc.

Most of these plugins are working to identify if your website was already hacked but what’s also important is to add a layer on your WordPress site to proactively stop a virus.

The best and simplest way to do this is to change all the known vulnerable paths for all plugins and themes. To do this, you can install Hide My WP Ghost free plugin.

Hide My WP Ghost works together with other security plugins and hides the paths from hackers’ bots, stopping all Script and SQL injections. You can also include Brute Force protection to your login page if you want to use only one security plugin for your website.

Are you looking to move WordPress from HTTP to HTTPS and install an SSL certificate on your website? We have been getting a lot of requests on this topic because Google announced that Chrome browser will start marking all websites without SSL as insecure starting July 2018. In this article, we will show you how to properly move WordPress from HTTP to HTTPs by adding a SSL certificate.

Don’t worry, if you have no idea what SSL or HTTPS is. We’re going to explain that as well.

What is HTTPS?

HTTPS or Secure HTTP is an encryption method that secures the connection between users’ browser and your server. This makes it harder for hackers to eavesdrop on the connection.

Every day we share our personal information with different websites whether it’s making a purchase or simply logging in.

In order to protect the data transfer, a secure connection needs to be created.

That’s when SSL and HTTPS come in.

Each site is issued a unique SSL certificate for identification purposes. If a server is pretending to be on HTTPS, and its certificate doesn’t match, then most modern browsers will warn the user from connecting to the website.

Now you are probably wondering, why do I need to move my WordPress site from HTTP to HTTPS especially if it’s a simple blog or small business website that doesn’t collect any payments.

Why do you need HTTPS and SSL?

Last year Google announced a plan to improve overall web security by encouraging website owners to make the switch from HTTP to HTTPS. As part of this plan, their popular Chrome web browser would mark all websites without an SSL certificate as “Not Secure” starting July 2018.

As part of the announcement, Google also said that websites with SSL will also see SEO benefits and higher rankings. Since last year, a large number of websites have switched from HTTP to HTTPS.

Google has been slowly rolling out the “Not Secure” warning in Chrome. For example, if someone visits a HTTP website using the incognito window, it will be marked as Not Secure. If someone visits a HTTP website on regular mode and tries to fill out a contact form or another form, then the website will be marked as insecure.

When your readers and customers see this notice, it gives them a bad impression for your business.

This is why all websites need to move form HTTP to HTTPS and install SSL immediately.

Not to mention, if you want to accept payments online on your eCommerce website, then you need SSL.

Most payment companies like Stripe, PayPal Pro, Authorize.net, etc will require you to have a secure connection before accepting payments.

We use SSL for our websites including WPBeginner, OptinMonster, WPForms, and MonsterInsights.

Requirements for using HTTPS/SSL on a WordPress Site

The requirements for using SSL in WordPress is not very high. All you need to do is purchase an SSL certificate, and you might already have it for free.

The best WordPress hosting companies are offering free SSL certificates for all their users:

• Bluehost
• SiteGround
• WPEngine
• Liquid Web
• Dreamhost
• InMotion Hosting
• GreenGeeks

For more details, see our guide on how to get a free SSL certificate for your WordPress website.

If your hosting company does not offer a free SSL certificate, then you’ll need to purchase an SSL certificate.

We recommend using Domain.com because they offer the best SSL deal for both regular and wildcard SSL certificates.

By purchasing a SSL certificate from them, you also get a TrustLogo site seal for your website, and each SSL certificate comes with a minimum of $10,000 security warranty.

Once you have purchased an SSL certificate, you will need to ask your hosting provider to install it for you.

Setting up WordPress to Use SSL and HTTPs

After you have enabled SSL certificate on your domain name, you will need to set up WordPress to use SSL and HTTPs protocols on your website.

We will show you two methods to do that, and you can choose one that best fits your need.

Method 1: Setup SSL/HTTPS in WordPress Using a Plugin

This method is easier and is recommended for beginners.

First, you need to install and activate the Really Simple SSL plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit Settings » SSL page. The plugin will automatically detect your SSL certificate, and it will set up your WordPress site to use HTTPs.

The plugin will take care of everything including the mixed content errors. Here’s what the plugin does behind the scenes:

• Check SSL certificate
• Set WordPress to use https in URLs
• Set up redirects from HTTP to HTTPs
• Look for URLs in your content still loading from insecure HTTP sources and attempt to fix them.

Note: The plugin attempts to fix mixed content errors by using output buffering technique. It can have a negative performance impact because it’s replacing content on the site as the page is being loaded. This impact is only seen on first-page load, and it should be minimal if you are using a caching plugin.

While the plugin says you can keep SSL and safely deactivate the plugin, it’s not 100% true. You will have to leave the plugin active at all times because deactivating the plugin will bring back mixed content errors.

Method 2: Setup SSL/HTTPS in WordPress Manually

This method requires you to troubleshoot issues manually and edit WordPress files. However this is a permanent and more performance optimized solution. This is what we’re using on WPBeginner.

If you find this method difficult, then you can hire a WordPress developer or use the first method instead.

As part of this method, you may need to edit WordPress theme and code files. If you haven’t done this before, then see our guide on how to copy and paste code snippets in WordPress.

First, you need to visit Settings » General page. From here you need to update your WordPress and site URL address fields by replacing http with https.

Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save changes’ button to store your settings.

Once the settings are saved, WordPress will log you out, and you will be asked to re-login.

Next, you need to set up WordPress redirects from HTTP to HTTPS by adding the following code to your .htaccess file.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301] </IfModule>

If you are on nginx servers (most users are not), then you would need to add the following code to redirect from HTTP to HTTPS in your configuration file:

server { listen 80; server_name example.com www.example.com; return 301 https://example.com$request_uri; }

Don’t forget to replace example.com with your own domain name.

By following these steps, you will avoid the WordPress HTTPS not working error because WordPress will now load your entire website using https.

If you want to force SSL and HTTPS on your WordPress admin area or login pages, then you need to configure SSL in the wp-config.php file.

Simply add the following code above the “That’s all, stop editing!” line in your wp-config.php file:

define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true);

This line allows WordPress to force SSL / HTTPs in WordPress admin area. It also works on WordPress multisite networks.

Once you do this, your website is now fully setup to use SSL / HTTPS, but you will still encounter mixed content errors.

These errors are caused by sources (images, scripts, or stylesheets) that are still loading using the insecure HTTP protocol in the URLs. If that is the case, then you will not be able to see a secure padlock icon in your website’s address bar.

Many modern browsers will automatically block unsafe scripts and resources. You may see a padlock icon but with a notification about it in your browser’s address bar.

You can find out which content is served through insecure protocol by using the Inspect tool. The mixed content error will be displayed as a warning in the console with details for each mixed content item.

You will notice that most URLs are images, iframes, and image galleries while some are scripts and stylesheets loaded by your WordPress plugins and themes.

Fixing Mixed Content in WordPress Database

Majority of the incorrect URLs will be images, files, embeds, and other data stored in your WordPress database. Let’s fix them first.

All what you need to do is find all mentions of your old website URL in the database that started with http and replace it with your new website URL that starts with https.

You can easily do this by installing and activating the Better Search Replace plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit Tools » Better Search Replace page. Under the ‘Search’ field, you need to add your website URL with http. After that, add your website URL with https under the ‘Replace’ field.

Below that, you will see all your WordPress database tables. You need to select all of them to run a thorough check.

Lastly, you need to uncheck the box next to ‘Run as dry run?’ option, and then click on ‘Run Search/Replace’ button.

The plugin will now search your WordPress database for URLs starting with http and will replace them with secure https URLs. It may take a while depending on your WordPress database size.

Fixing Mixed Content Errors in WordPress Theme

Another common culprit causing mixed content error is your WordPress theme. Any decent WordPress theme following WordPress coding standards will not cause this issue.

First, you will need to use your browser’s Inspect tool to find the resources and where they are loading from.

After that, you will need to find them in your WordPress theme and replace them with https. This will be a little difficult for most beginners, as you will not be able to see which theme files contain these URLs.

Fixing Mixed Content Errors Caused by Plugins

Some mixed content resources will be loaded by WordPress plugins. Any WordPress plugin following WordPress coding standards will not cause mixed content errors.

We don’t recommend editing WordPress plugin files. Instead, you need to reach out to the plugin author and let them know. If they do not respond or are unable to fix it, then you need to find a suitable alternate.

Note: If for some reason, you’re still encountering mixed content error, then we recommend using the Really Simple SSL plugin temporarily, so your users are not impacted while you fix the issue on a staging website or hire a developer.

Submit Your HTTPS Site to Google Search Console

Search engines like Google consider https and http as two different websites. This means you will need to let Google know that your website has moved to avoid any SEO issues.

To do that, you just need to go to your Google Search Console account and click on ‘Add a Property’ button.

This will bring up a popup where you need to add your website’s new https address.

After that, Google will ask you to verify ownership of your website. There are several ways to do that, select any method and you will instructions to verify your site.

Once your site is verified, Google will start showing your search console reports here.

You also need to make sure that both the https and http versions are added in your Search Console.

This tells Google that you want the https version of your website to be treated as the primary version. Combined with the 301 redirects that you setup earlier, Google will transfer your search rankings to the https version of your website, and you will most likely see improvements in your search rankings.

We know that we did when switched our websites from http to https.

We hope this article helped you add HTTPS and SSL in WordPress. You may also want to see our ultimate WordPress security guide with step by step instructions to keep your WordPress site secure.

Source: https://www.wpbeginner.com

What is DNS-Prefetch ?

DNS prefetching is an attempt to resolve domain names before a user tries to follow a link. This is done using the computer’s normal DNS resolution mechanism.

The main reason for rel=dns-prefetch to exist is to speed up the way web pages load when they are using different domains for page resources. This process is often called “DNS prefetching“.

The WordPress link looks like this:

  <link rel='dns-prefetch' href='//s.w.org' /> 

Remove DNS-Prefetch from WordPress site

To remove the DNS-Prefetch link from WordPress wp_head hook is not very hard.

You can add the following code to your functions.php to remove DNS-Prefetch link from your header:

add_action( 'init', 'remove_dns_prefetch' ); 
function  remove_dns_prefetch () {      
   remove_action( 'wp_head', 'wp_resource_hints', 2, 99 ); 
} 

Generator META is usually used to point to the authors of the services used inside a website. Lately, more and more WordPress plugins authors are adding their generator METAs in source-code.

The WordPress generator meta looks like this:

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 5.*.*" />

To remove the Generator META from WordPress you can install a free plugin like Hide My WP Ghost and activate the Hide WordPress Version option.

The plugin will also remove:

• removes the version parameters from CSS Styles loaded in the source-code
• removes the version parameters fromJS Scripts loaded in the source-code
• removes the generator Meta to WordPress
• removes the generator Meta to WPML (WordPress Multilingual Plugin)
• removes the generator Meta to Slider Revolution Meta Generator
• removes the generator Meta to Visual Composer / WPBakery Page Builder
• removes the dns-prefetch link to WP.org
• hides the Jetpack analytics trails to WordPress