Week Three: WordPress Essential Training 11-14
How can you manage spam on your site?
Some adjustments in the Discussion Settings can lower the amount of spam comments that show up on your site. Turning on ‘comment must be manually approved’ and/or ‘comment author must have a previously approved comment’ are ways of allowing you to manually filter out spam comments and allow authors that you know are real people. Comment Moderation and Comment Blacklist are ways of specifying variables and specific words, authors, etc. for comments that you either want to hold for approval or ban completely. For example, you most likely want to Blacklist most swear words from your site as well as other offensive words. You can also ban authors that you know are spammers easily with the Blacklist.
Hopefully most of that prevents the spam from making it to you to begin with, but anything that slips past can be dealt with in the Comments manager. Here you can see the actual comments and if they are too vague or don’t appear to be from a human than you can flag them as spam right there.
Why is it important to keep WordPress up to date?
Because almost as soon as a vulnerability in WordPress is discovered, they are working to create a patch to make the program more secure. Using an outdated WordPress version leaves you open to those vulnerabilities.
List three plugins you can use to improve security and explain what each plugin does.
The tutorial video suggests four plugins for security and backup. Cloudflare works as a middle-man between your site and the user. It can take some of the traffic burden off of your site and also intercept brute attacks and keep them from overwhelming your site. Vaultpress works to back-up your site so that if something goes wrong, you can recover. Akismet is a spam blocker that can quarantine suspicious comments and save many hours of moderation. Jetpack can blacklist IPs and protect your site from brute force attacks.
If your site crashes, how can you determine if it is a broken theme issue or a plugin issue?
Well, according to the video tutorial, if your site crashes it can only be a broken theme issue because WordPress does not allow you to activate a plugin that would cause a fatal error. Alternatively, to make sure that it is a theme error, you can go into your FTP and change the name of the theme folder in question and if you now have access to your Admin Dashboard, you know for sure that the theme is broken.