Keeping your WordPress-powered blog secure may seem like a daunting task, but there are a few simple things you can do to make sure that you are not the easiest target on the Internet.
Hackers are usually pretty smart and driven people, so if they really want to get into your website they probably will. This post continues our discussion about blog security and introduces a few WordPress-specific strategies that you can employ.
WordPress is a great blog platform and light content management system, however it does broadcast some information that can help the “people who are up to no good” find your blog. This post will help you stop WordPress from broadcasting this potentially harmful information to these people. Future posts will also recommend some WordPress security plugins that will help you keep your blog secure.
First lets take a look at some areas that your blog may be displaying unwanted information, and how to remove it.
Your Theme
The Problem:
Look at the footer (bottom of page) of your website and see if there is a link or text that says something like this:
If it does, you are letting search engines, and anyone else who wants to, know that you are currently running WordPress. This can make it easy for the “people who are up to no good”, and who target WordPress sites, to find your blog by popular search engines.
The Fix:
To fix this we need to remove the link from the footer, and you can do this from the back end of WordPress.
To get started log in to your blog and then on the left hand menu click the “Appearance” button. After you have done that select the editor link that appears below the appearance button.
Make Sure that the “Update” button below is present, otherwise you will need to change permissions to be able to edit the files necessary.
To make the necessary changes, select the | Footer (footer.php) | from the menu on the right hand side, and make sure the update file button is still there.
Let’s remove the link from the footer the highlighted area in red between the <p> and </p> can all be deleted, and the part in darker red is the link to WordPress.
I am going to replace this with: “Dev Blog © 2010″
and save it, this is how it displays now:
Next week we will show you how to remove the Wordpress Generator Meta Tag. This Meta Tag actually displays what version you are running in you page source, and your page source is accessible to anyone with a web browser.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
My scan tells me to pay attention to the following
/usr/www/users/flagsa/betablog/wp-content/uploads/swift_custom/
What do I need to fix and how? Does the missing hyphen in flagsa make a difference? My normal URL is flag-sa.org. Where do I find this to make a correction?
Thanks
I almost forgot the other thing I wanted to know.
What file do I need to edit to remove the now-empty column to the left of the blog posts?
Check your Widgets and see if it is widgetized, if so you can choose what you want to put in there.
It is very good, very good practitioners of search engine optimization one of the means.
I have use a theme with a protection code to prevent me to remove the footer link. My question here is I not means to remove the link of others people which have giving away a good theme. But, I would like to know how do I make a footer link to prevent someone delete it?
Your best bet would be to find a WordPress developer because this will most likely take a few files to make it work.
Nice trick brother, thanks for share, i will visit back
Great stuff! Keep bringing it.