iThink! | Website Solutions | Ontario, Canada

You are here: Home / Archives for Tutorials

Welcome to our tutorials and information section of our site. This area is designed to assist our customers and clients with their new WordPress or HTML website suceed with their new investment. We would love to hear your feedback and questions. For a general overview of WordPress, pleaes visit What is WordPress and How can I use it?.

By

Speeding up Custom Hosted WordPress Websites

WordPress_Speed
How Well Does your Website Stack Up?

If you are facing problem of slow loading WordPress website, or simply want to improve your users experience by minimizing loading times here are a few great suggestions courtesy of HostPapa.ca.

The first question we need to ask ourselves in coming up with solutions to any problem is what is the root of our issue. There are two amazing websites that will assess every aspect of your website from GZIP compression and image size to where we place our JavaScript (js) code. Both websites listed below provide free reports and grading on how well your website is preforming and provide actionable information on how to improve your site speed.

Additionally, there are numerous factors involved in determining why your website loads so slow and it is difficult to track the exact reasons contributing to the load. However, here is a list of things you need to do:

  1. Optimize the databases and enable Gzip compression.
  2. Plugin related issues:
    Plugins can have a huge impact on your site speed. Deactivating all plugins (yes, all) to see if this resolves the problem. If this works, re-activate the plugins one by one until you find the problematic plugin(s). Remove any inactive or active plugins that you don’t need.
  3. Theme related issues:
    Switching to the Twenty Eleven theme or default theme to rule out any theme-specific problems is always recommended. This way you can identify if the problem is related to theme.
  4. Optimizing Images
    The culprit for a large site is often large images. The quick way is to use the Pingdom site speed test tool to find if you have images that need to be optimized. Enter your website at http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ and run the test. After the test is run, click the drop down and choose ‘Sort by file size’.

Shared Hosting Environments

In a shared hosting environment there are a large number of factors that can affect your site’s performance. Below, I have listed two common reasons.

1. Occasionally when another user hogs all the available memory, cgi processes, or some other limited server resource you may face loading issues with your website. This is short lived and in many cases the simplest thing to do is be patient and wait for ten minutes then try again.

2. Your website, theme, and plugins require PHP memory in order to run properly. If your combined resources are consuming too much memory, this eventually will affect the website load time. In this case you need to work upon your website to reduce the resource consumption.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Lastly, sometimes latency alone will add to load time. Content Delivery Networks (CDN) such as CloudFlare can assist in improving the  latency or how quickly your web browser can connect to the website and view the page by acting as a proxy between your visitors and your webshosting servers. CDN’s like CloudFlare can also protect your website against malicious visitors, save bandwidth and reduce average page load times.

How Does a CDN Work?

Once a CDN such as CloudFlare is enabled for your website, it is designated as your authoritative name servers; this allows CloudFlare to clean and accelerate your traffic as all requests to your website are now routed through CloudFlare. With network routing technology and 23 data centers around the world, CloudFlare is able to:

  • Bring visitors the fastest connection possible – CloudFlare’s global Anycast network routes customers to the closest datacenter, resulting in your website loading twice as fast for your visitors no matter where they are located.
  • Screen your website’s traffic for malicious visitors – CloudFlare receives requests for your website and analyzes them to determine if a visitor is a threat based on the visitor’s IP, the resource being requested, the payload being posted and how frequently requests are being made among other things. Threats are blocked and good visitors are able to quickly access the pages they request.
  • Cache static content on your site – CloudFlare caches static content on your website like images, JavaScript and CSS, but not HTML. Cached content is refreshed frequently and delivered directly to visitors from a local CloudFlare data center at an extremely fast speed. Even when data is not cache-able, CloudFlare is able to respond to requests just as fast by using premium routes.
  • Optimize your web content – Rocket Loader technology is included in all CloudFlare plans (even the free one) and helps your website to more efficiently process requests for third party scripts like apps, widgets and tags. Rocket Loader ensures that no script blocks your page content from loading by bundling all script requests into a single request and loading them one at a time.

Optimize WordPress

GTmetrix is a great resource for evaluating the speed of our sites.  With many website running content management and blogging systems such are amazing platforms to develop out content, offering thousands of great plugins to create a full-featured website with a lot of neat functionality. These plugins however, can insert additional CSS and JavaScript files into your header which can hurt your site’s performance (and Page Speed and YSlow scores).

The professionals at GTmetrix have written some recommendations for WordPress users seeking optimization help.  Take a quick look at their website for detailed information, however in summary the following Pluggins will improve your website in a few clicks:

W3 Total Cache

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/

This plugin adds page caching onto our WordPress install which helps us with Page Speed’s Leverage Browser Caching rule. It also has features to help with other recommendations, including enabling gzip compression, setting ETags, and even CDN settings (if you have one), to further tweak your performance.

WP Smush.it

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-smushit/

This plugin runs every image you upload through Yahoo’s Smush.it application. This will losslessly optimize every image and helps us with Page Speed’s Optimize images recommendation.

How well did my sites improve?

I admit, I have not enabled W3 Total Cache thus far on my site, however, with a few tweaks by enabling GZIP and updating my .htaccess with Future Expires Headers significant improvements in response times to my sites were observed.

See for yourself….

ithink_speed

By

The Not-So-Secret Art of Creating a Secure Password You Can Remember

Passwords are a part of our life, from home computers, mobile phones, online banking, and our office accounts. Creating a password that will protect our privacy, make our online lives feel secure, while easy to remember is a challenge. Our friends at Buffer Open have done a great job discussing the merits of password security and tools and tips for creating great password.

How do you balance the necessity of highly secure passwords with the utility of easily recalling them all? It’s a question I mull each and every time a security breach happens. When the Heartbleed vulnerability was discovered last spring, the mandate was for everyone to change all their passwords right away. It’s still on my to-do list. I cringe at the thought of getting hacked, and I also cringe at the thought of taking the time and mental energy to do a complete overhaul of my favorite passwords.

Read the entire article here.

By

Microsoft Security Essentials

Microsoft Security Essentials is a new, free consumer (yes, you read that correctly – FREE) anti-malware solution for your computer. It helps protect against viruses, spyware, and other malicious software. It’s available as a no-cost download for Windows XP SP2 and higher, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.

Why should I download Microsoft Security Essentials?

  • Comprehensive protection—Microsoft Security Essentials helps defend your computer against spyware, viruses, worms, Trojans, and other malicious software.
  • Easy to get, easy to use—Because Microsoft Security Essentials is available at no cost, there’s no registration process that requires billing or personal information collection. It installs after a quick download and Genuine Windows validation and then stays automatically up-to-date with the latest protection technology and signature updates.
  • Quiet Protection—Microsoft Security Essentials doesn’t get in your way. It runs quietly in the background and schedules a scan when your computer is most likely idle. You only see alerts when you need to take action.
  • Automatic Updates

What are others saying

“When put against AV-Test’s “WildList” collection of 3,194 recent, common viruses, bots, and worms, Microsoft Security Essentials detected and removed each and every one of the malware samples. How does this compare to other security products? AV-Test coordinator Andreas Marx notes that “several other [antivirus] scanners are still not able to detect and kill all of these critters yet.” In addition, Microsoft Security Essentials put up a perfect score with zero false positives–it didn’t flag a single clean file as being malicious. AV-Test also took an initial look at Microsoft Security Essentials’ rootkit detection, testing it against a few rootkit samples, and found “nothing to complain about.”  – Nick Mediati, PC World, 06/25/2009

Microsoft Security Essentials security status

Microsoft Security Essentials has a clean, simple home page that shows the security state of your computer.

A green icon means your computer is protected.

A green icon means that the security status of your computer is good. Microsoft Security Essentials is up -to- date and is running in the background to help protect your computer against malware and other malicious threats. When your computer has an issue that requires your attention, the look of the Microsoft Security Essentials home page changes based on the issue. The status pane turns either yellow or red depending on the situation, and an action button appears in a prominent location on the page with the suggested action.

A yellow icon means that status is fair or potentially unprotected and that you should take some action, such as turning on real-time protection, running a system scan, or addressing a medium-severity or low-severity threat. 

A yellow icon means that status is fair or potentially unprotected and that you should take some action, such as turning on real-time protection, running a system scan, or addressing a medium-severity or low-severity threat.

 A red icon means that your computer is at risk and that you must address a high- or severe-level threat to protect it.

A red icon means that your computer is at risk and that you must address a severe threat to protect it. Click the button to take the recommended action and Microsoft Security Essentials will clean the detected file and then do a quick scan for additional malicious software.

Final Thoughts

Overall, we have to give Microsoft some credit for dealing with critisim of security face first and at a price you can not beat.

By

WordPress Video Tutorials and How-To’s

Everyone has their own learning style, there are those that just fiddle around (I am in that catagory), others will run to Chapters and grab a few books and a copy of WordPress for Dummies and be all set.  For others, video or hands on demonstatations and how-to’s are the way to go.

Well the good folks at Atuomattic Innovation have developed WordPress.TV for that very reason.  A WordPress TV you will find a series of online videos and how-to to get you up and running with your WordPress Blog or CMS website.

Here’s are a few WordPress videos to start:

Basic Information on WordPress

Writing a Post and Publishing Contents

Advanced WordPress Features

By

Whats new in WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious”

We’ve been waiting a while for a final release of WordPress 3.0, and its finally here. When you see what’s new I think you’ll agree that it’s been worth the wait.

WordPress 3.0 includes lots of improvements and updates—from a simpler and cleaner user–interface, to some more major changes such as improved post type options (I.e. Newsletter, Product and Contacts).

You’ll see more about the new features in the video below. But here are a few of the highlights that stood–out to me with this latest release:

  • Bulk updates – Update your WordPress installation or up to 15 plugins at once
  • Custom menu’s – More advanced menu options, such as drop–downs
  • Custom header image – Easily apply different custom header images to individual posts
  • Custom post types – New post types including Products, Contacts, Employees and Newsletters takes WordPress closer to being a fully–fledged CMS
  • MU + WP 3.0 – Control multiple WordPress sites from a single installation

See what’s New in Wordress 3.0

Read more about WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious” here, or you can download it here.

News and Events