Despite the optimization on the webserver, it makes sense to install a couple of plugins that secure and speed up your wordpress installation.

In my concrete case, I am using as a minimum the following:

Hyper Cache
Hyper Cache is a simple caching plugin that pre-renders your content, so your webserver doesn’t need to processes all dynamic content for every request and only does this once there is a change.
Super simple, but speeds up your website enormously.
It also supports CDN.

Login LockDown
Limites the amount of possible attempts to login. This helps to prevent bruteforce attacks where an attacker tries random passwords till he has access. Find information about it here.

Stop XML-RPC Attack
Stop XML-RPC Attack helps you reducing the amount of requests going to xmlrpc.php. This could possibly used to flood your webserver with useless requests.

BJ Lazy Load
Lazy Load helps to only load content that the user is looking at. E.g. when opening a long page, not all pictures are visible directly. Some are below the fold. It makes no sense to load these images before they are watched, so this helps preventing unnecessary requests + increases the user experience, while speeding up everything.

EWWW Image Optimizer
EWWW Image Optimizer optimizes and compresses all pictures that you have uploaded or will upload in WordPress. Makes files smaller, while not losing the quality and therefore speeds up the page.

miniOrange 2 Factor Authentication
miniOrange 2 Factor Authentication enables you to use several methods of two factor authentication, means your username + password + a second authentication. This could be e.g. an email, SMS or the Google Authenticator. I highly recommend the Google Authenticator. It is free and simple.

All these plugins are free of charge, some have a pro version, which I don’t need.

Everytime your wordpress blog loads, it is also sending a lot of files that are static e.g. images, CSS, javascript and so on.

In the standard configuration, this is passed thru the PHP process which slows down the delivery as it has to be processed before, even that there is absolutely no reason to do this.

You can avoid this, by configuring NGINX to directly deliver these files and speed everything up.

Add to your https configuration the following line

location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico|woff)$ {
expires 30d;
log_not_found off;
}

If you have more file types that you want to deliver directly and that are static, add them to js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico|woff e.g. js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico|woff|pdf

Restart your NGINX and you are good to go.

There is plenty articles on this topic.

It is basically limiting the accepted ciphers for the encryption and kicking out old broken encryption algorithms.

My configuration for Nginx looks something like this.

ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
ssl_ciphers ECDH+AESGCM:DH+AESGCM:ECDH+AES256:DH+AES256:ECDH+AES128:DH+AES:ECDH+3DES:DH+3DES:RSA+AESGCM:RSA+AES:RSA+3DES:!aNULL:!MD5:!DSS;
add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=0; includeSubdomains";

Add this to your specific host configuration in the server {} part for port 443.

For Apache I am using something like this

SSLProtocol all -SSLv2 -SSLv3
SSLCipherSuite ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:DHE-DSS-AES128-GCM-SHA2\
56:kEDH+AESGCM:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384:ECD\
HE-RSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA:DHE-DSS-AES128-SHA256:DHE-DSS-AES256-SHA:AES128-GCM-SHA256:AES256-GCM-SHA384:AES128-SHA:AES256-SHA:AES:CAMELLIA:DES-CBC3-\
SHA:!aNULL:!eNULL:!EXPORT:!DES:!RC4:!MD5:!PSK:!aECDH:!EDH-DSS-DES-CBC3-SHA:!EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:!KRB5-DES-CBC3-SHA:!DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:!DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM\
-SHA384:!DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:!DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:!DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:!DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256:!DHE-RSA-CAMELLIA128-SHA:!DHE-RSA-CAMELLIA256-SHA
SSLHonorCipherOrder on


Check your result using SSL Test.

One step to improve the overall security in the internet is the usage of https.
https makes sense for every site, not only banks, insurances and online shops.
It is not only making the communication between you and your user secure, it also could improve your Google ranking.

The simplest way to do this is Letsencrypt. Letsencrypt is free of charge and super simple to use.
It comes with a simple bash script that you can execute and it will take care of all the configuration necessary to encrypt your side successfully.

Go to Certbot choose your setup and follow exactly the steps shown underneath.

In my case this was:

This takes a maximum of 10 minutes and you have a secure connection.

Be aware that your certificate needs renewal every three months, but this only takes a couple of seconds.
I added that to my update script, that I am running frequently to cover for this. I will probably post this pretty soon too.

If you like it, please consider donating to Letsencrypt. Even small amounts like $5 can help to keep this project alive. The cheapest alternative certificate I know costs $25 per year.

And just to mention it, for around $60 yearly you can sign up to StartCom and generate as many certificates as you like.

Once done have a look at the SSL Test to check if your site is fully encrypted and gets a good grade.

If you are getting everything but an A, consider optimizing this as well. Have a look at this blog post for SSL optimization.

Also another step is to redirect all your traffic from http to https, so you are 100% sure to serve only secure content. Have a look at my post to achieve forwarding traffic from http to https.

For quite a while, I am supporting the finance blog of a friend of mine. He started this as a small blog project (it is still a blog) and quickly got a lot of traffic.

The initial setup was a hosted website with a provider including PHP and MySQL.
Quickly there was too much traffic and the site became really really slow. On top, the possibilities in this environment are limited.

Next step – own server. So we booked him a machine at Hetzner, a German ISP with quite good conditions. I put VMWare in place and virtualizied the entire thing.
As time goes, the machine became old and had to be replaced. So we decided for a new machine and to install everything bare metal (no VMs).
The current machine holds a Skylark Quad-Core processor, 64 GB of RAM, SATA HDD and a lot of more cool things.

So a fairly decent setup.

Recently the site was attacked using several different technics.

This series is about the steps we took to keep the site alive and also gain speed, performance, reduce load and file sizes.

The result of this series should be a WordPress installation on steroids.

You will use and run:

– Nginx
– http/2
– https / SSL encryption
– Caching for WordPress
– Optimized compression for images and files
– CDN
– Fail2Ban to avoid to many requests from one source
– Optimized caching on client side
– Faster page loads
– Lazyload for images
– and many things more