How to improve and increase security and speed in WordPress

Website design  is being widely used, and many people are interested in working in this field, all of whom are familiar with WordPress and use it to achieve their goals. As we explained to you in the articles on our site, the WordPress system has a lot of fans, and people prefer to use it due to the many positive points that this system has.

Among all the positive points of WordPress, we have to mention some of them, including that it is easy to work with, it provides regular updates by its developers, and has many other positive features, all of which have led to an increasing number of people who prefer to use it.

But the most significant positive point is that it has high security and speed, which are two factors that every website should contain because they can ultimately satisfy the users who use that website. Finally, they can gain a positive user experience which is considered one of the ways to success for website owners because users will share their positive experience with their friends, which will ultimately  increase the traffic to that website.

Here's how you can  increase the speed and security in WordPress, but first, we need to give you a general description of WordPress.

What is WordPress?

In general, WordPress is an open-source content system available to various users for free which can be used to launch a personal and even commercial website. As we mentioned, this system is open source which means that owners can use it to access its source code to view and modify it.

How to improve and increase security in WordPress?

As we have mentioned before, WordPress is so popular among different people, and due to the great interest of other users in it, hackers also increase their activity in this field and do their best to be able to interfere with its security and steal information from other people, which is why the developers of this system remind their users to minimize the entry of various hackers regularly, however, sometimes people face problems due to negligence and make their information available to profiteers, which can be very annoying and dangerous, here are some tips that you can follow to  increase the security of the system  to a great extent

- One of the most critical points to increase the security of a system is to install a suitable security plugin as soon as possible. You know for a fact that it is not possible for you to  check the security of your website  around the clock, and given that malware can enter the system and eventually compromise security, you should take action and try another solution which is using the tools available to help you scan it 24 hours a day to avoid any risks from happening.

One of the great security plugins that exist and is being used regularly by various users is Sucuri.net, which has many positive features, among which we can mention some of them including that it can be used to scan all malware remotely, Firewall, very effective security measures after hacking, etc., all of which can help you carry out your daily activities with peace of mind.

- There is another point that observing it for all sites will increase the security of the system significantly, which is choosing a suitable and powerful password that may be ignored in some cases, despite the importance of this issue. You should also try not to forget the password you have chosen. Another point should be considered, which is not using a simple password such as your date of birth and so on, because it allows hackers to access all the information on the website as soon as possible.

As a result, it is necessary to choose a code that is a combination of uppercase, lowercase letters, numbers, symbols, etc., so that profiteers cannot easily guess it, simply put, the more complex the password you choose, the more time it takes to crack it, but if you choose a simpler one, it can be guessed and compromised in a short amount of time.

Choosing the best wordpress hosting is very important as well. To provide high security for your system, it is necessary to select a host that can provide several layers of security and provide you with a very high level of it.

As you know, there are several companies from which you can choose a host for your website, each of which has its price. Some of them may have a low price that will attract you to it, but note that the low price should never mislead you because such companies will eventually offer you very few layers of security so that you will later have to pay multiple times to be able to return the security to your system; therefore, the best solution is to choose a suitable company from the beginning which provides you with more layers of security, so there would be no worries about the security of the website.

While choosing, you need to pay attention to the company's facilities and consider whether it gives you enough facilities according to the price or not, then make the best choice.

- Another important point that you should never ignore is that WordPress premium themes are very secure and have many features that you can use. All of these themes are reviewed and tested by highly skilled professionals, and regular updates are provided, all of which allow you to use them safely.

You may sometimes be tempted to use themes that are available for free, which you should never prefer to choose because such themes are not only of no benefit to your website but also are very dangerous because they contain hidden malicious code which can destroy your website and database and have a lot of negative effects.

- Disable file editing is another issue that is of great importance, and you must take it seriously. You can do this simply by entering the code:

define (‘DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT', true); in the wp-config.php file.

This is important because if  hackers gain access to your WordPress admin panel, they can inject malicious code into your theme and plugin, and the code may be injected in a way that you may not realize so that you may realize everything too late.

- Change the WP-login URL because it can have a significant impact on increasing the security of your site. Also, another thing you can do is to add a security question to the registration and login page.

- Use two-factor authentication to log in to the system. For instance, you can use a password and email, which can ultimately have a massive impact on increasing the security of your system, and you can prevent hackers from infiltrating your information quickly.

- Investigate the IPs that are trying to infiltrate your system and immediately block those IP addresses.

- Installing an SSL Certificate is one of the most critical steps that you can take to increase the security of your WordPress system, one of the essential things for site owners is to be able to  rank high in the Google search engine. It is interesting to know that one of the crucial factors for the Google search engine is that the site has an SSL certificate.

As a result, Google gives such websites a high ranking in the search engine, and as a result, the owners of these sites can be more successful simply put. What SSL does is encryptencrypt the information transmitted between the browser and the server so that hackers and profiteers cannot quickly gain access to the topics and texts transmitted.

The Let's Encrypt SSL certificate is available to various users for free. Still, if the information to be transmitted is susceptible, then you can use the monetary type of this certificate, which can be much more secure and is available to developers at different prices.

- To increase the security of your  WordPress system, you need to limit the number of attempts to log in to your system so that eventually, people who want to log in to your system after several attempts cannot reach their goal. The system will be closed temporarily, you can easily do this process with a login WordPress plugin, after installing the plugin, you can change the number of login attempts through Settings Login Restriction Attempts.

- Another thing that has a significant impact on increasing the system's security is regular updates. With the introduction of each new version, the proposed interpretation is more secure and faster than the previous one. In general, updating all systems is effective in increasing security, and you should always keep in mind that by editing each of the available plugins and programs, you can significantly reduce the security gaps which the older versions had and use the new version safely as you get rid of the bugs.

By default, WordPress automatically downloads minor updates. However, you need to do this process directly from your  WordPress admin dashboard  for important updates.

- Hide wp-config.php and .htaccess files is another point that should be considered. To hide the files, after your backup, there are two things you need to do:

First, you have to go to your wp-config.php file and then add the following code,

In a similar method, you will add the following code to your .htaccess file,

Although the process itself is so easy, it's important to ensure you have the backup before beginning in case anything goes wrong in the process.

How to improve and increase speed in WordPress?

Imagine that to find the answer to one of your questions, you search the Internet, and after viewing the different results, you click on one of the sites displayed on the search results page. After the site is loaded, you realize that it is very slow, and it takes a long time for the site to load compared to others. At this point, most of the time, you as a user decide to leave the site and look for the answer to your question again.

It is easy to recognize that the speed of a site has a huge impact on  the site ranking on the search results page. It is one of the factors that are of great importance for Google, the higher the speed of a site, the more successful it can achieve if we want to explain it to you in simple terms when the speed of a site is higher than other websites, the users would prefer to use it because they will gain more positive user experience while using it.

A slow website makes the users leave your website before it loads so that even if you upload high-quality content, you wouldn't be able to show it to others because of your website's loading speed, so the speed of a page should be considered as a priority for you as a website owner. As a result, one of the main goals of all site owners is to speed up their site as much as they can. By now, you have realized that the faster your website is, the  more traffic you will get to your page  and the more it will help your WordPress SEO.

In the continuation of this article, we will point out some tips so that you can increase the speed of your WordPress site with the help of them. As a result, users will achieve their desired result as quickly as possible, thanks to your site.

- One of the things that have a great impact on the speed of the WordPress site is choosing the right hosting service, which in the end, with the right choice, you can get a lot of satisfaction from your users, one of the things to consider while choosing a host is that a shared hosting provider such as Bluehost which can affect the performance of the entire server and reduces the speeds of the web if one of your neighboring sites gets more traffic.

As you know, a good hosting service, in addition to speeding up the site, also provides other features for site owners, including automatic WordPress updates and more advanced security configurations to protect the web, so choosing the right one is of great importance for you.

- Another point that may be interesting for you is that every time someone visits your  WordPress site, your WordPress pages and posts are rebuilt because these pages are "dynamic."

To make it happen, WordPress has to go through finding the information it needs, putting it all together, and then displaying it to its user. If many people are visiting your site simultaneously, the speed of your site is significantly reduced. To prevent this from happening, you need to use a caching plugin that is so helpful.

Because your caching plugin copies the page after the first load and then provides that cached version for each subsequent user, instead of going through the entire page generation process each time, which caused a decrease in the speed of your page.

- One of the things that have a great impact on attracting different users to your site is the existence of different images on it, which is one of the factors that makes the users enthusiastic and causes them to choose your website among other competitors so that it has a considerable impact on attracting users to the site at first glance. Then you have to provide users with high-quality content to make them stay on your website to increase the time that user spends on your website by paying attention to these factors.

Have you ever wondered if the images you post on your site might damage it instead of  increasing your site traffic ? This is possible, and when you do not optimize the images you choose for it, it will cause a reduction in its speed, so that to be able to speed up it, you need the help of editing software to optimize images which makes them take up less space, so that optimizing the images that you upload on your website is of great importance which you should pay attention to as much as possible.

All of these photos can be very large in their original format, but depending on the image file format and compression you have selected in your editing software, you can reduce the size of your image several times, typically, two formats are being used for different images, namely, PNG and JPEG, which are different from each other, and you should choose one of them according to your goals, we suggest that you use JPEG if your photo or image has different colors, and PNG if the image is simpler or you need a clear image. As a result, you will have no problems uploading images to your websites.

- Another thing that has a great impact on the speed of your site is that as a site owner, you should always pay attention to the new versions that are offered because the new versions that are presented are much faster than the previous ones, this  speed can attract a lot of users to your site, the important point about WordPress is that its developers regularly provide new versions to their users.

- Another thing that can speed up is using Excerpts on Homepage and Archives. When you put an article on it, it displays the full content of the article on your homepage and archive, which means that your homepage, categories, tags, and other archive pages will be loaded slower.

When this happens, the user no longer needs to refer to the main article, so the best solution is to upload a summary of the article that both increases your site traffic and does not slow down the site so that the user has to refer to the article for reading it completely.

We recommend that you go to "Read" and select "Show: Summary" for each article in the newsletter instead of "Full Text."

- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN), which is an important issue, and you can  increase the speed of it to a great extent for users  who are viewing your website from different parts of the world with the help of it.

As you know, the users who visit your site are from different parts of the world because the location of web host servers is different. The distance can affect the speed of it negatively, the best solution is getting help from Content Delivery Network which can be so useful in this field.

Using this service can help your users use it at high speed anywhere because CDNs are a set of interconnected servers and networks that generally deliver pages and other web content to the user according to their geographical location so that the distance is not considered as an obstacle in the way of searching on the Internet because of the existence of such helpful service.

This service reduces the access time of users to servers and also the time of information circulation inside the server. You may be wondering how does Content Delivery networks work?

CDNs are large networks around the world to simplify user access, all of which are being done with the help of connecting the user to the nearest server anywhere, because they act as a bridge if you want to have users from all over the world and exchange information between your server and users at high speed and provide a great user experience by providing the best services on it, you should use the CDN. Fortunately, this system is now being widely used by many reputable websites and brands because of the advantages and capabilities that it provides for them. Because of its abilities, it has lots of fans all around the world.

- If you want to upload different audio and video files, we suggest that you use the Blubrry podcast hosting service to avoid the speed of it from being reduced, which is so effective and helpful in this field, after using which you can see the good final result yourself.

Another factor that has a massive impact on speeding up your  WordPress site  is the use of Faster Plugins. When you use the wrong plugins instead of the right ones, it increases the page's loading speed and slows it down.

Among the plugins available to enhance the speed of the website, we can mention WPForms, MonsterInsights, SeedProd, etc., each of which has its features that you should check all of them to choose the best option to be able to increase your ranking in the Google search results page and achieve success.

- In addition to what we have suggested in this section, you can also do the necessary checks yourself by simply performing speed tests before and after installing a plugin to compare its effect on performance and finally select one of the plugins.

- After using the WordPress website for a while, the database will contain a lot of information, most of which may no longer be needed and will only take up space, so that to prevent this from happening, you have to get rid of the information which is not useful for you.

One of the plugins that can help you in this field is the WP-Sweep plugin, which, if you use it, you can delete all the useless information in the database with just one click. As a result, you will easily get rid of the files that you don't need and prevent them from reducing the speed of your website.

- You have to limit the storage of information related to different editions as much as possible because this additional information is not useful. They just occupy the space of your files. Because they can also slow down the website, they have to be removed as soon as possible so that its speed is not being reduced due to the occupation of a lot of space and users can gain a positive user experience while using it at high speed.

- One of the things that can have a significant impact on the speed of it is to use Lazy Loading, this loading is such that when there are images on it that the user is not currently viewing, they are not being loaded, and at the time when the user scrolls and reaches those images, they will be loaded for them, one of the plugins that can help you in this field as a site owner is Lazy Load by WP Rocket plugin.

- You can also use the Version Info plugin in order to find out which version of PHP does it use. By using this plugin and after activating it, you can realize your PHP version, which is going to be shown at the bottom of the WordPress admin dashboard page.

As you know, the WordPress programming language is typically PHP, and you need to use the latest version of it on your servers because the latest version is twice as fast as previous ones, which can have a significant impact on site speed as well as having a positive impact on user experience.

- Using DNS Level Website Firewall, this plugin can greatly help the security of your site and prevent various hackers from coming to your site and stealing the information contained in it, which can be a great help for you as a site owner. Some of these plugins run on your website, which lets the attackers access your web server before it is blocked, which is still effective for security, but it is not secure enough.

As a result, we recommend using a DNS-level firewall such as Sucuri or Cloudflare because these firewalls block various requests even before they reach your website so that they are much more secure, and they speed up it as well.

Last word:

In general, WordPress has a wide world that different users have been attracted to and use to achieve their main goal. In this article, we examined what solutions are available to increase the speed and security of your  WordPress site.

We have reviewed a number of them so that you can refer to them if you want to improve the performance of it and its speed, and by mastering all of them, you can increase the level of security and speed of it.

As we have mentioned above, speed and security are two factors that attract users to your website and ultimately cause a positive user experience which is considered as the key to success because if you can make a user satisfied, he/she will introduce your website to his/hers family and friends, so that the traffic to your website will increase. Your website will  gain a high ranking in Google search engine results page, this process will help you be successful easier and faster, so that, you should pay more attention to these two factors as much as possible.

The point that you should never forget, and you have to pay attention to, is updating it regularly because this issue is very important and can have a significant impact on the speed of the site and increases its security of it, paying attention to this issue and other points which have been examined in this article can be effective in attracting more users to your website and increase its traffic which can ultimately increase the ranking of it in the search results page, all of which ultimately leads to being successful and help you achieve a lot of success as a site owner, we hope the content is useful for you. You can make the most of it in the way of being successful.