Blogging Tips Archives - Rick's Daily Tips

ATTN Bloggers: Beware insecure and malicious WordPress plugins

Posted on January 22, 2020

Are you a blogger who uses WordPress to power your blog?

If so, you probably have several plugins installed that add extra features or functionality to your blog.

To be sure, WordPress plugins are wonderful things. They can add all kinds of useful and attractive bells and whistles to your blog and make it more enjoyable to use.

What’s more, installing a high-quality security plugin can help protect your blog from hackers. And believe me, your blog IS being attacked by hackers on a daily basis, whether you realize it or not.

Unfortunately, all of the above being said, some plugins can also put your blog and all of your hard work at risk. [Read more…]

Q&A: How can I prevent URLs left in comments on my blog posts from automatically becoming active links?

Posted on January 20, 2020

Question from Kim W.: I have a WordPress blog and lots of people are leaving comments on my posts that contain links.

How can I prevent the URLs in those comments from automatically becoming active links?

I really don’t want hackers leaving links to malicious websites via comments on my blog posts!

Thanks for your help.

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

Q&A: Which web hosting company hosts your Rick’s Daily Tips tech blog?

Posted on January 14, 2020

Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.

Question from Kate L.: I really love your blog Rick. I’ve learned so much since I started reading your tips a while back!

I have a question that I hope you won’t mind answering for me but I’ll understand if you’d rather not.

I’ve been blogging for about 2 years and my blog has really slowed down a lot over the last few months.

I did some research and read that WordPress gets slower as a blog’s traffic levels increase.

That has me thinking the slowdown is probably due to my blog’s traffic more than doubling to a little over 4,000 visitors a day about the same time things slowed to a crawl.

I’m pretty sure I need to move my blog to a new web host with faster servers. I noticed that your pages load really fast even though your site obviously gets a lot more visitors than mine.

Would you mind telling me which hosting company is hosting RicksDailyTips?

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

Great news: The free version of the Wordfence security plugin for WordPress now supports Two-Factor Authentication!

Posted on December 26, 2019

Are you a blogger who’s been using a stand-alone Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) plugin to enable 2FA on your blog’s login page?

If so, I have great news for you…

The awesome free Wordfence Security plugin will now add Two-Factor Authentication login security to your blog without having to use a separate 2FA plugin!

[Read more…]

Has your blog’s email server been ‘blacklisted’? Find out right now.

Posted on December 2, 2019

If you’re a blogger you probably depend on email to communicate with your readers, your advertisers and any other folks that you talk to in the course of writing and managing your blog.

And chances are you even use email to deliver an informational newsletter to your subscribers.

If you’ve noticed that many (or even most) of your emails are being ignored, there’s a good chance that your email server has somehow landed in an email blacklist database. [Read more…]