Setup WordPress SSL Certificate

Secure Your Site with HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS)

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In today’s digital landscape, securing your website is more than just a best practice—it’s essential. One powerful tool in your web security arsenal is HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS).

This policy ensures that browsers only connect to your site using secure HTTPS connections, protecting users from threats like protocol downgrade attacks and cookie hijacking.

This tutorial walks you through implementing HSTS on your website using the .htaccess file and submitting your domain to the HSTS preload list for maximum protection.

 

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Setup WordPress SSL Certificate

Increase Website Security with X-Security Headers

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Here are three techniques to increase your website’s security posture.

This tutorial explains how to add X-Security Headers to protect against cross-site scripting (XSS), page-framing, and content-sniffing by adding extra security headers to your sites’ resources.

 

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Gravity Forms Logo Wordpress Plugin

Disable Gravity Forms Autofill link, Save with link

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Recently my Stripe Pricing Fields within Gravity Forms obtained new features.

Namely an Autofill link and a Save with link option, each of which I did not want and has caused confusion and even raised alarm bells among my clients.

Rather than ask for permission Stripe opted to ask for forgiveness by enabling their new Link payments feature automagically.

This article will take you through the steps to disable this new Autofill link and Save with link options from any forms created within Gravity Forms.

Disable Gravity Forms Autofill link, Save with link

 

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How to Add Hotlink Protection to your Website

How to Prevent Hotlinking

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Hotlinking is the act of linking to a file that is hosted on another site, instead of downloading the file and hosting it on your own server. With proper source citation of course.

Images are most frequently hotlinked filetype, but zip, PDF and other digital assets can also be hotlinked.

Since hotlinking requires the website server hosting the file to use its own bandwidth to load it on the offending site, it’s considered bad etiquette. Others go further and call it theft. That’s because it eats up the bandwidth of the site you took it from without giving them the benefit of increased traffic or credit.

In this article I show you how to block others from hotlinking various filetypes from your web server. To spare your server from other undesired traffic, read my article on a list of web crawlers to block.

 

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Brave Browser Logo

Add Brave Search to Mozilla Firefox

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In my opinion and research the Brave Search engine is the industries best privacy focused search engine. In fact, Brave Search is my default search engine knowing full well that if I have to, I can still use pop into Google or Bing.

This article will show you how to quickly and easily add and use the Brave Search engine within your Mozilla Firefox browser.

 

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How to block Facebook crawler

Block Facebook Crawler facebookexternalhit/1.1

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The Facebookexternalhit/1.1 is a user agent used by Facebook to crawl and index web pages for its various services, such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

This crawler is responsible for retrieving content, images, and other metadata to improve Facebook’s search functionality and provide users with relevant results.

However, the facebookexternalhit crawling activity can sometimes cause issues for website owners, such as increased server load, bandwidth consumption, and potential security risks.

This article covers why you might want to block facebookexternalhit as well as how to block the facebookexternalhit crawler.

 

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WordPress Content Management System Icon

class-avada-head.php Avada Theme Warnings

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I imported a pre-built Avada website into a fresh installation of WordPress but was presented with the following warnings on the frontend when using the Avada theme.

  • Warning: Undefined array key “width” in /public_html/wp-content/themes/Avada/includes/class-avada-head.php on line 414
  • Warning: Undefined array key “height” in /public_html/wp-content/themes/Avada/includes/class-avada-head.php on line 415

I also received the following warning on the backend of WordPress.

  • Warning: Trying to access array offset on false in /home/customer/www/public_html/wp-content/themes/Avada/includes/lib/inc/redux/framework/FusionReduxCore/framework.php on line 2024

Troubleshooting the issues revealed that it may have been attributed to the SVG upload feature within the Avada theme.

I managed to clear up the issues by simply disabling and enabling the SVG upload feature. See instructions below.

 

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WordPress Content Management System Icon

Disable Subscriber WordPress Admin Bar

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In this article I will show you how to quickly and easily add a script to your child theme functions.php file which will block access to the WP Admin bar and backend for anyone with the Subscriber role.

 

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