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Free Tools and Services for Every WordPress Website

Free Tools and Resources for Every WordPress Website

The WordPress ecosystem is supported by hundreds of thousands of theme developers and plugin developers. There’s a free plugin for anything and everything. However, you can also significantly enhance your WordPress site through the use of free third-party tools, plugins or not. Here is a list of free tools you can use for your WordPress site, whether you’re writing a blog or running an online business.

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How to Fix Every Pingdom Page Speed Test Warning

Pingdom Speed Test

Depending on your site, whether you run a business or you’re a blogger, there can be a lot of different warnings that show up in your Pingdom page speed test report. Below is a list separated by sections to help you correct a majority if not all of the warnings you may see. If we miss anything, and I’m sure we will because Pingdom can very well change some things here and there, let us know in the comments section below and we’ll add it to the article.

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Securing the WordPress Admin User From Unauthorized Access

Securing the WordPress Admin User From Unauthorized Access

The most common hacking method is nothing sophisticated or new. It’s the attempt at guessing your username and password. Unfortunately, many users leave their username vulnerable by leaving it as the default “admin.”

In this article, we’ll go through the ways in which you can secure your administrator user account, more specifically the username. We have a separate article written that dives deeper into the password which you can read here.

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Send Text Messages for Free Through WordPress

Send Text Messages for Free Through WordPress

If you use a plugin that provides notifications to users through email, you might instead want to send text messages as notifications. However, most people will run into one of these problems:

  1. Text messaging is not supported by the plugin or theme.
  2. You don’t want to pay for an SMS service.

Fortunately, there is a way to send free text messages as long as you can send email for free (which is going to be true for almost everyone).

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How to Prevent Image Hotlinking in WordPress

How to Prevent Hotlinking in WordPress

Hotlinking is a very common but unethical practice on the Internet. It’s when another website uses your website’s images on their site, making your server load the image and taking up your bandwidth. And if you have any amount traffic on your website, you are most likely a victim of it yourself.

The technical term for hotlinking is inline linking but can also be known as leeching, direct linking, and offsite image grabbing.

Fortunately, there is a quick and easy way to prevent this from happening to your WordPress site. And as an added bonus, there’s a way to make your website profit off of these thieves. Let’s get right to it:

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How to Change the WordPress Logo on the Login Page

WordPress Logo

If you’re like me, you care about all of the little details and like to personalize everything about your site to make it as unique as possible. One of the things that people are quick to point out is the WordPress logo that is displayed on the login screen.

It might not bother you but if you are creating a website for a client or a friend, customizing it by using the website’s logo instead of the standard WordPress logo adds a nice touch. Unfortunately, many people shy away from this because of the varying recommendations out there from creating entire folders with stylesheets to using plugins, all of which confuses some novice users and those who are not very technical.

But instead, if all you want to do is change the logo, you can implement the changes below, which will take less than 5 minutes. I promise:

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Make Sure You Use a Strong Password & Why Your Weak Password Can Be Guessed in Less Than One Second

strong password

In my webinars, I always get questions about security. It always seems like the people whose WordPress sites get hacked believe that it happened through some sort of unknown vulnerability that’s beyond their technical comprehension. Though it is true that outdated software does leave vulnerabilities open, in many of my observations, I found that these same users did not follow basic security protocols like using a strong password.

Here’s a real story: I had a client several years back whose website constantly got hacked. So they came to me for help. The name of their company was Sons X, where X represents what their business did, for example, Sons Window Cleaning or Sons Automotive. I omitted their full business name for their privacy. They were using a firewall (as should everyone) so they were confused as to how they were getting hacked more often than their peers.

After they began to work with me, I immediately found a red flag. Their admin credentials were:

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How to Create a Full Backup of Your WordPress Site

How to Create a Full Backup of Your WordPress Site

Always having a full backup of your WordPress website is the best preventative measure you can take against anything that may go wrong with your website such as hacks, breaks, or user error. Whether you’re new to WordPress or you’ve already been using WordPress for your website, it’s important to know why you need regular backups, what backups are, and how to successfully restore a site using a backup. All of this will help you get your site back up and running as quickly as possible in the event that your site is down or not functional.

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Use Two-Factor Authentication to Bulletproof your WordPress Login

Two-Factor Authentication

Two-Factor Authentication is one of the few guaranteed security methods that every WordPress website should use. The method is popular among many websites (WordPress or non-WordPress) that take security seriously such as banks because it ensures that unauthorized users will not be able to access your account, even if they have your password.

So why is it so secure? Two-Factor Authentication relies on two elements in order for someone to login:

  1. Your Password – Something you know.
  2. Your Mobile Device – Something you have.

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Best Free WordPress Courses for Every Beginner

WordPress Courses

There’s no doubt that WordPress has a huge learning curve. And if you do not have experience working with code you might find yourself in need of a developer, or perhaps you just want a developer to maintain your site, which is where Zen WP comes into play. But regardless of one’s level of expertise, everyone needs a solid and basic understanding of WordPress.

Naturally, taking some WordPress courses would be the best answer, but as with anything, the free ones tend to be of much lower quality. That is not to say that all free WordPress courses are terrible. There are certainly some gems out there if you look hard enough.

Fortunately for you, we’ve already done all of the work and put together a list of the best WordPress courses out there. These courses are 100% free and are, dare I say, better than most paid courses.

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