Security Archives - PurposeThemes

Posted on January 23, 2016

How to take Backup of WordPress Themes and Restore

One of the biggest nightmare that one can ever get is that you have lost all the information related to your website during installation or it has been hit by a malicious attack. WordPress is the most popular web platform and because of this, the chances to be hacked by hackers becomes at highest priority. At times the website will not be targeted specifically but is hacked due to certain plugins or the themes. No one can give an assurance that there website is safe from any type of attacks. So the best way to avoid such type of situations is by backing up of WordPress Themes.

Ways to Backup WordPress Themes:

Manual Backups:

Manual Backups of the WordPress themes is one that gives you the direct control of what is backed up. But at times it is not convenient to take up the backups manually every time. There is also a possibility that due to work load or pressure one has skipped the manual backup process. Also at times it can be time consuming process.

Web hosting Company:

Web hosting company also takes the daily backups of the data that is stored on their servers. But there is no guarantee of data loss and data corruptions. So it is not wise to depend on the web hosting companies for the backup as they are not responsible for any data loss.

WordPress Backup Plugins:

WordPress Backup Plugins are the best way to completely automate the WordPress backup process. There are various paid as well as free WordPress Plugins that are available and which are very easy to use.

To list some of these WordPress Plugins that will help to backup are:

1) VaultPress:

VaultPress is one of the WordPress Plugin founded by Matt Mullenweg to backup the site. They offer automated backups with easy restores and also daily security scans. It provides with real time cloud backup solution.

2) BackupBuddy:

BackupBuddy is the best way to backup a WordPress site. It is the plugin that is made by iThemes that offer a comprehensive solution for backing up of the sites. It is easy to schedule the daily, weekly or monthly backups and storing them on the Dropbox, Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, Stash and even emailing it to yourself.

3) UpdraftPlus:

It is another WordPress Plugin that allows to create complete backup of the WordPress site that can be either stored in the cloud or can be downloaded into your computer. It is completely free but there is a premium version of the plugin with additional features and addons. It also offers database encryption for an added level of security.

4) BackUpWordPress:

It will take the backup of the entire site including the database and all the files. It includes scheduling so one can create different schedule for the files and the database. The free version will not allow you to store the backups to a cloud storage service. If one wants to store the backups to a place other than the hard drive then he will have to purchase the extensions.

5) Duplicator:

In order to migrate the WordPress sites Duplicator is very popular WordPress Plugin. This Plugin requires a good technical knowledge for it to work properly. One of its drawback is that it does not allow you to create automated scheduled backups.

6) WordPress Backup to Dropbox:

It is one of the free plugin that backups all the the files and a SQL dump of its database to the Dropbox. One can also schedule the backups to upload it to your Dropbox account.

8) BackWPup:

It helps to take the complete backup to complete installation including /wp-content/ and pushing them into external backup services. One can schedule automatic backups and also restore from the backups.

Backing up of the site can be considered as the wisest decision that one can made. But for this you will have to decide the WordPress Plugin that will perform this job of backing up of your themes efficiently and automatically. The decision is always yours!

Posted on December 1, 2015 July 2, 2016

How to Scan WordPress Theme for Safety and Vulnerability

Check if your WordPress theme is safe to use with PurposeThemes

Building websites with WordPress CMS is a great experience to developers and non-developers all over the world. WordPress works entirely on themes and templates. WordPress Themes allow users to change the look and functionality of a WordPress website and they can be installed without altering the content or health of the site. The main thing that is very important is the Security of the website and the question that arises for it is,

Why WordPress Theme Security is Important?

Reasons are as follows:

Hackers may access your blog for their use if your theme is not secured.
Vulnerability of WordPress themes might slowdown your Website.

There are multiple themes for WordPress CMS, whether free or premium, these are enough to get desired appearance of your site. It is very important that you get secured WordPress themes. Theme Developers all over the world has different strategies of releasing themes free of cost or paid versions. Some strategies behind releasing free themes are as below:

1. Releasing basic version of WordPress theme free of cost on websites like wordpress.org is the very first choice of developers. It makes them easy to spread their product ‘Theme’ among WordPress followers thereby increasing the direction rate of users from free towards premium themes.

2. There are developers who actually build links of their other products and websites through these communities to make their services more viral.

3. There are some instances when some developers build themes with malicious scripts/unsafe or unwanted code to run some hacking code on other’s server. Following are some of the reasons of doing so-

To get back links from your blog
To get access to your blog
To redirect your blog to spam links
To add their advertisements and banners to your site
Or to simply make your website slow down

So here the question arises,

How to Check if your WordPress Theme is Safe to Use?

This question is answered by our PurposeThemes’ Team with 3 different options as follows:

Check the theme template files from the respective theme folder, whether they are built according to WordPress Standards.
Another way is you can check the Page Source from frontend and find corrections accordingly.
The best way to check malicious scripts or unwanted code of your WP Theme is using the Theme Authenticity Checker (TAC) plugin.

Theme Authenticity Checker (TAC) plugin:

This plugin has extraordinary potential to scan all your WordPress themes’ files and detect the unsafe code within minutes. TAC searches all the WordPress themes installed within wp-content folder and their respective files for scanning and detects malicious code accordingly. If any such malicious code is found, TAC displays the path to the theme file, the line number, and a small snippet of the suspicious code.

You do not require any special knowledge of plugins to use this plugin, just download and activate, it will do rest of the work for you automatically.

Here we have tested this plugin with two different WordPress themes and the results are as below:

Iconic One WordPress theme: There is a hardcoded link in footer for iconic one theme which is detected by this plugin.

Responsive WordPress theme: Theme is Okay.

Thus, we can say that to have a safe WordPress site it is very necessary that we have a safely coded theme. With this TAC plugin it is very easy to achieve it. Just download this plugin and test all your installed WordPress themes today before building your site.

Posted on October 15, 2015 October 15, 2015

Find Best WordPress Themes on Performance and Security

The main reason behind a successful website is attractive design which will drive more visitors to your site. One of the greatest advantage of WordPress is that one can easily change the theme at any time. It is indeed very simple to change the theme for the website from so many themes that are available. At times it is confusing to make the best choice from so many themes available. As there is a saying by Pat Riley, “Look for your choices, pick the best one, then go with it.”

Here are some of the points that will help you out to make a better choice for the themes.

How to Select a Theme that will go well with your website

Know your site better

Before making a choice for the theme it is always good to go through the website and have a proper study of it. Pen down the customization that you require and your expectation from a particular theme. It is always good to have the road map for your site before making a choice for your theme.

Pen down the features of your website

Note down all the features that are offered by your product and based on this make the choice for the theme that will go well with your website. Also comparison with the present theme will help you out to select a theme with additional features.

Proper Testing and study

After the theme is selected spend some time for testing of the particular theme. Find out whether all the features are working properly and the theme is going well with all the browsers. One can also have different test cases to find whether the particular theme selected has met with all the requirements.

Making things simple

It is always good to have the themes that are simple to understand and its implementation will not make your site look complex. You can opt for a simple changes initially and as the things progress you can have the complex one.

Layout of the theme

There are some of the themes that are available that allow you to change the width of the theme from the control panel. It is always good to have some one in your team with proper knowledge of CSS and PHP that will help you out with the design customization.

Responsiveness

Make sure that the theme that is selected by you is responsive with other devices such as mobile phones and tablets. Every thing should be displayed properly in one column so that it will not ruin the look of your website on other devices.

Knowing the capability of the theme easily through Plugins:

The above points will partially help you out to make a right decision, but it is not wise to completely rely on them to make the choice. There should be a tool available that will help you to check the capability of the theme.

In order to check the latest WordPress standards and practices in a simple and easy way there is a tool available known as Theme Check.

Features of Theme Check:

Simple and easy way to test
Saves time as all the results are given at ones
Supported by different languages
Checks whether the themes meet with latest standards of WordPress themes
Ensures whether the themes has proper functioning in many different environments

It is also very important to keep a track on debugging and performance on database queries. So in order to cope up with this there is a plugin available known as Query Monitor.

Features of Query Monitor:

Views debugging and performance information on database queries
Keeps a track on hooks, conditionals and HTTP requests
Offers advanced features that are not available in other debugging plugins
Automatic AJAX debugging
Allows to set an authentication cookie Query Monitor output when you are not logged in

On the basis of the above points and plugins (Theme Check and Query Monitor) one can check the performance and security of the themes and help you out to make a better choice. This will help you out to avoid the confusions and to have the theme that is best suited for your website.