webmaster notes - Suay.Site

How to reboot a server in DigitalOcean

Posted by Alex On November 15, 2022

DigitalOcean offers various cloud technologies for developers, but of all the variety of services, I use only VPS (virtual private server). At the same time, due to the large number of cloud solutions, it is not intuitively clear how to perform such a simple action in DigitalOcean as rebooting the VPS. The server can be restarted by connecting to it...

Sitemap.xml files: what they are for, how to use them, and how to bypass “Too many URLs” error and size limits

Posted by Alex On October 20, 2022

Table of contents What are Sitemaps What are the restrictions for sitemap files How can you compress a sitemap file Can I use multiple sitemaps? What is the structure of sitemap files How to generate sitemap files How to Import a Sitemap into Google Search Console Sitemap.xml file status “Couldn't fetch” Is it necessary to use the sitemap.xml file? What...

How to prevent Tor users from viewing or commenting on a WordPress site

Posted by Alex On October 19, 2022

The Tor network is an important tool for anonymity, privacy, and censorship circumvention, which in some countries is being fought even at the state level. But Tor is a public tool, so it can sometimes be used for online trolling and bullying. This article will show you how: prevent Tor users from commenting on your WordPress site prevent Tor users...

How to prevent search engines from indexing only the main page of the site

Posted by Alex On September 1, 2022

To prevent search engines from indexing only the main page, while allowing indexing of all other pages, you can use several approaches, depending on the characteristics of a particular site. 1. Using the robots.txt file If the main page has its own address (usually it is index.php, index.html, index.htm, main.html and so on), and while trying to open a link...

iThemes Security locked out a user – how to login to WordPress admin when user is banned (SOLVED)

Posted by Alex On July 11, 2022

iThemes Security is a plugin for WordPress that makes it difficult for hackers to attack the site and collect information. Among other features, iThemes Security has protection against brute-form paths (search for “hidden” folders and files), as well as protection against hacking user credentials by brute force passwords. Once set up, the iThemes Security plugin usually works fine and doesn't...

WordPress error “Another update is currently in progress” (SOLVED)

Posted by Alex On January 26, 2022

When updating a WordPress site, for example, when migrating to a new version of WordPress, you may encounter an error: Another update is currently in progress. This problem is fairly easy to fix. It is especially pleasing that this error is not fatal, unlike, this error does not prevent users from browsing the site, and the webmaster can go to...

How to block access to my site from a specific bux site or any other site with negative traffic

Posted by Alex On August 21, 2021

There are situations when negative traffic comes from certain sites, for example, from bux sites or simply from sites that you don't like. In some cases, such traffic can be dealt with, but not always. Quite often, there are tasks like “go to a search engine, enter such and such a query, go to such and such a site” in...

How to protect my website from bots

Posted by Alex On August 19, 2021

In the article “How to block by Referer, User Agent, URL, query string, IP and their combinations in mod_rewrite” I showed how to block requests to a site that match several parameters at once – on the one hand, it is effective against bots, on the other – practically eliminates false positives, that is, when a regular user who is...

How to block by Referer, User Agent, URL, query string, IP and their combinations in mod_rewrite

Posted by Alex On May 28, 2021

As part of the fight against the influx of bots to the site (see the screenshot above), I had to refresh my knowledge of mod_rewrite. Below are examples of mod_rewrite rules that allow you to perform certain actions (such as blocking) for users who meet a large number of criteria at once – see the most recent example to see...

Redirect to HTTPS not working in WordPress

Posted by Alex On May 21, 2021

This is not an obvious problem, because for some pages the redirect to HTTPS works, but for some it does not. I ran into this problem on WordPress quite by accident. Therefore, if you are a webmaster with WordPress sites, then I would recommend that you check your sites too. Redirecting from HTTP to HTTPS is quite simple, you need...