Have you been searching for ways on how speed up your WordPress? Actually site speed is undeniably not to be taken for granted and this must be a great concern to you to sustain your web site in the World Wide Web.

Here are some of the effective techniques to achieve a supersonic speed on your blog.

1. Unused Plugins should be Disabled

You need to assess whether you require the plugins that you have installed and determine if they necessarily serve a useful function. Also, you need to deactivate plugins that you have not deleted since it can possibly build loopholes and back doors that hackers can use it to exploit.

2. Install a Caching Plugin

You must have to install a caching plugin to decrease the load time for the blog’s pages. It will also help ease the work on the hosting server.

3. Select the Right Web Host

Since there are many web hosting companies out there who claim to be the best of its kind, you should not be enticed by their claims. You must choose the web host that are reliable to achieve optimize and efficient blogs on your web site.

4. Use Less External Scripts

Having too many scripts installed that come from different providers can help increase the loading of your blog since they came from an external source. That is why it is best to use external scripts so as not to affect the performance on your site.

5. Check for Hacks & Other Exploits

There are many threats lurking just around the bend such as malicious codes that can cripple the performance on your website. It is recommended that you must check regularly for these malicious items to get rid of them instantly.

6. Optimize Your MySQL Database

By optimizing MySQL database on your blog can help reduce the load on your hosting server and can also help improve the loading time.

7. Reduce the Number of Images

Images can help bring out the overall outlook of your blog. However, you must have to limit in using images. Remove unnecessary pictures and images that you think are not necessary on your web site.

8. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

This is a network that can optimized servers around the world that contain all the copies of the data on your web site. This can also help in reducing the time in loading your site. What’s more? This really works best particularly if you have visitors wherever they are in this world since the servers closest to them can help deliver the content faster.

9. Avoid Flash Content

Flash can consume a lot of time to load so it is better not to use flash as your main design on your web site.

Use these simple techniques and you will surely increase your speed in an instant.

This article is written by Dave Cooper, who also writes for tweakwindows7.net, a site emphasizing on windows 7 tweaks.

It sometimes very important to secure our blogs, be it wordpress blogs or any hackers are sure to try to peep into your account. So, let’s check out how you can save your blogs from the hands of hackers. With the help of some simple tips you can easily save your wordpress blog and secure the wordpress blogs from the hackers.

Upgrade to latest Version
There are periodic updates which wordpress brings in so that it is further optimized and also security is enhanced with previous bugs solved. Many of us don’t take time to update with the same, but its very important to update with these updates, it hardly takes time for updating.

Use Lock Down WordPress Plugin
There is a plugin which is called as Lockdown WordPress plugin with which it can lock the users if they enter the password more than 3 times. So, with this you can also get to know that who is trying to try out to hack in the blog with testing of the passwords. Also, most importantly this plugin is for free and takes very less time to install. You can also choose from the number of wrong passwords attempt lock.

Change password
Once in 15 days or in 30 days its recommended to change the password for your account and also its very important to use a tough and combination password which should consist numbers, upper case and lower case combination, alphabets and also preferably special characters so that it becomes difficult to crack your password.

Backup Blog
Always back up your blog and also other critical data like database and settings as if in an unlikely event the account gets hacked, then at least you have the latest backed up data which can be then used later. If you don’t backup the data then it is very risky as this may create a huge loss to you as you will be left with nothing, be is your account or the database and blogs. And also with backup in place, you can restore this blog anytime.

Hide information
It’s better to hide some critical information, so that hackers don’t come to know about the bugs in that version and make use of the bugs as their strengths for intruding into the blogs. Hide your blog’s wordpress version number. To do this just remove the following line from your theme’s header.php – php blog info (‘version’); ?>” />. So, you can easily hide the version name if you are in the self hosted wordpress as in the free version, you cannot hide the same.

Login Securely
Always ensure that you login to your blog via SSL if your host comes with an SSL certificate which is quite common these days. And also never use un trusted network for accessing blogs as this may again leak out critical data which can in turn give a chance to intrude into your account. Also, by default username will be ‘admin’ during wordpress installation, so its highly recommended to change your username as to some other login name apart from the Admin.

Install Plugins Carefully
Always make sure that before installing new plugins check if the plugins are good and working properly, because weak plugins may have unwanted codes which may damage your site or its page ranking and also sometime also affects the page loading speed very badly. Also, ensure that the plugins which are installed are loaded are trustworthy are not which can be known by checking the review.

So, all in all by following the above simple steps you can easily secure your WordPress blog from falling into the wrong hands.

About the Author:
Chetan Bhawani is a dentist, a tech blogger and a web-hosting adviser at the best web hosting reviews site. You can check out the different Linux hosting companies to compare the best hosts in that field.

Today is our 12th day of WordPress Master 25 Days program.

If your are visiting this blog first time or you have missed any one unit of WordPress master 25 Days program then you must read previous units which I have compiled in single post.

• My 7 Days at WordPress Master 25 Program

Today is our 12th Day of WordPress Master 25 Days Pro.I know how important is Search Engine Optimization for any blog to get the traffic,Search Engine Friendly Url optimization is one of the SEO part of your blog.Here you can find the tips on Search Engine friendly urls customization.

Day #12: How To Customize Search Engine Friendly Urls

Step:#1

Login to the Admin panel of your WordPress blog.

Step #2:

Click on Permalinks under the Setting tab on the dashboard.

See the image below:

You’ll find following url structure under default which is not search engine friendly url.We can say it “Ugly”.It doesn’t look nice.

http://example.com/?p=N

Then how to choose your own Search Engine friendly Url ?

It is very simple to choose your own Search engine friendly url.Follow the steps to optimize Search Engine friendly Urls of your blog.

1. Go on Permalinks Setting under the setting tab on your admin panel.
2. Check the Radio Button of “Custom Structure” and fill the following Tags:

/%postname%.html

3. Click on Save.

View the following image carefully:

Urls of your blog posts will be optimized for Search Engines by following the previous steps which have mentioned in this post.

If you think that the WordPress Master 25 Days program is useful for you or you need any other blogging support and guidelines in future,you can subscribe my newsletter by filling the email id.

NOTE:

YOU CAN GET MY COMING EBOOK ABOUT BLOGGING TIPS BY SUBSCRIBING TO MY NEWSLETTERS NOW.

Mostly bloggers are familiar with Chris Pearson’s awesome wordpress theme Thesis.Thesis is really superb theme but nowadays many top most bloggers are switching their blogs from thesis to Genesis wordpress theme created by StudioPress Team.

I recently noticed that famous bloggers like Brain Clark of copyblogger.com and Chrisbrogan of Chrisbrogan.com switched their blogs from Chris Pearson’s Thesis theme to Genesis Theme framework of StudeoPress.

Why Professional Bloggers Jumping from Thesis Theme Framework to Genesis Theme Framework :

Genesis is the Foundation of any Smart WordPress Design.Genesis Theme Framework refers to the parent theme. Reviewing the parent theme without any regard to the child theme is just not possible, since part of the actual Genesis Theme Framework’s impressive attributes lie on its extension—the child theme.

Father of The WordPress (Matt Mullenweg) Says about Genesis Theme:

“Child themes are the only way you should build your WordPress site on top of a framework, and Genesis has great support for child themes and other WordPress functionality.”

Genesis is Search Engine Optimized

State of the art code and smart design architecture make it easy for search engines to see what you’ve got. With automatic updates to the Genesis Framework, you never have to think about it again. Your code will always be up to date and fully optimized.Genesis will help your blog rank higher in the search engines.

Genesis Offers Great-Looking Turn-key Designs

Your site looks can be instantly updated with child theme, while all of the SEO benefits and the core Genesis functionality remain untouched. That means that changing the look of your site is a snap — and you don’t need a designer or developer to do it. You can radically change the look of your site every week if you want to, and you’ll never hurt your search engine rankings because the design is kept completely separate from the core code.

Genesis Gives You Unlimited Everything

You get unlimited support. Unlimited updates. Unlimited websites. There’s no “Developer Option” here. One low price entitles you to unlimited support, updates, and domains you can build on. If you’ve got multiple websites,Genesis offers unparalleled value.

Genesis Gives You State-of-the-Art Security

WordPress sites can be vulnerable to those who want to take your site down or exploit it for malicious reasons. Having your site hacked is an expensive, time-consuming hassle — and it can really damage your reputation.Genesis theme framework has optimized security features so your valuable work can be secure.

Genesis Makes Customizing Your Site Incredibly Easy

Genesis offers features to make it simple to set up your site exactly the way you want it.

Genesis has Custom Widgets and Layout Options

StudeoPress Team has developed some custom widgets for you to use on any area of your site. Here’s a list of the custom widgets available with the Genesis Framework:

• My Tweets – displays an unordered list of your latest Tweets .
• User Profile – displays the Gravatar of a user, as well as their bio and a link to an about page.
• eNews & Updates – displays an opt-in box for users to receive your posts by email.
• Featured Posts – displays post excerpts and a thumbnail to be used in a featured section.
• Featured Page – displays page excerpts and a thumbnail to be used in a featured section.

Download the Genesis Theme Framework

Are you running your WordPress blog on Thesis frame work ? You might be like to customize your thesis WordPress theme.

I am also a big fan of thesis WordPress theme playing with thesis code.I have published number of tutorials about thesis WordPress theme and the another one is discussing with you right now.

Thesis gives you number of options to customize it with custom files.

You might be noticed the titles of posts and pages on some blogs running on thesis WordPress theme.

You can also style the titles of posts and pages on your blog.You need to copy the CSS code given below and paste in your custom.css.

On Single Pages

Place this code in custom.css (adjust color value as desired):

.headline_area h1 {
   color:#B22222;
}

On Multi-Post Listings

Place this code in custom.css (adjust color values as desired):

.custom h2 a {
   color: #3399ff;
   text-decoration: none;
}
.custom h2 a:visited {
   color: #3399ff;
   text-decoration: none;
}
.custom h2 a:hover {
   color: #ff0000;
   text-decoration: underline;
}
.custom h2 a:active {
   color: #3399ff;
   text-decoration: underline;
}

You can change the code and font size and face according to color combination of your own thesis theme.

Thesis is one of the best WordPress framework theme.It gives us number of options to customize with little tweaks.

You might be noticed the time stamp on many blogs near bylines or headline.Thesis also gives you the option to do such things.You can display the time stamp for your post on what time you have published it.

In the Design Options panel, under Display Options : Bylines, uncheck the “Show published-on date in post byline” and “Show number of comments in byline” options. Then, place this code in

custom_functions.php:

function custom_byline() {
  if (!is_page()) { ?>
  <p class="headline_meta"><abbr class="published" title="<?php echo get_the_time('Y-m-d H:i'); ?>"><?php echo get_the_time(get_option('date_format')); ?> <?php the_time('G:i a'); ?></abbr>
 &middot; <span><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>#comments" rel="nofollow">
 <?php comments_number(__('0 comments', 'thesis'), __('1 comment', 'thesis'), __('% comments', 'thesis')); ?></a></span></p>
<?php }
}

add_action('thesis_hook_after_headline', 'custom_byline');

Note: This code excludes Pages from having the custom byline applied; you will need to remove the extra conditional code if you wish to use it on Pages as well.