Out of the box, Umbraco is a well built and pretty fast content management system. However, it is still important you perform some steps to further optimize Umbraco’s performance and loading speed. Here on Sysadmins of the North, I wrote about 11+ tips to optimize Umbraco 7 CMS earlier, and in this post I write about implementing them in Umbraco 8.
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Here are 3 ways of blocking access to a PHP sendmail.php script on your Windows Server IIS webserver. This comes in handy if a websites on your webserver sends out spam and you need to block access to a script on a specific website or globally in IIS. You can use a web.config file for this purpose, and here is how.
…This article shows you how to add a trailing slash to URL’s in Umbraco 8, using IIS URL Rewrite Module, without breaking the Umbraco backend. Forcing one particular URL avoids duplicate content, which is important for SEO.
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It’s recommended to disallow access to and execution of PHP files in wp-content/uploads folder. Preferably without the use of a security plugin. Blocking access to PHP files in WordPress wp-content/uploads folder is easily achieved with a .htaccess file on Linux Apache, or web.config accesssPolicy in Windows Server IIS, and here is how.
Disallow direct access to PHP files in wp-content/uploads/Read More »
Basic Authentication managed HTTP module for IIS 10 with virtual users support. In my pursuit of a basic authentication alternative in IIS, other than the built-in Basic Authentication module or Helicon Ape, I came across Devbridge AzurePowerTools. It’s apparently one of few HTTP managed modules for IIS that enables HTTP Basic Authentication with support for virtual users.
…Basic Authentication module for Windows Server IIS 10Read More »
The WordPress XML-RPC API has been under attack for many years. Back in August 2014, WordPress released version 3.9.2, fixing a possible denial of service issue in PHP’s XML processing. There are brute-force amplification attacks, reported by Sucuri, and so on. So, how do you protect WordPress from these xmlrpc.php attacks, optionally still being able to use (some of) its functionality like Jetpack? This post gives you some insights.
…Protect WordPress from brute-force XML-RPC attacksRead More »
Having an SSL certificate in your WordPress is the de-facto standard nowadays, did you know that? Google ranks sites having HTTPS higher in their SERP. But in WordPress, how do you configure an SSL certificate and HTTPS URL? You’ll learn the important steps to move WordPress from http to https in this post.
…SSL in WordPress: how to move WordPress to HTTPS? The definitive guideRead More »
When you use iisnode to host the Node.js blogging software Ghost on your IIS web server, and you set up an SSL certificate for your Ghost website, you may run into too many redirect issues when changing Ghost’s config.js file. This happend to me yesterday, and here is the solution.
Ghost on IIS with HTTPS, how to resolve a “Too many redirects” errorRead More »
Jim Walker from HackRepair.com posted a 2016 version of his Bad Bots .htaccess on Pastebin. I offered Jim to translate his Bad Bots .htaccess to web.config, to be used with Windows Server IIS. And here it is, learn to protect your WordPress website with this web.config file!
HackRepair.com’s Bad Bots .htaccess in web.config for IISRead More »
How to fix the URL Rewrite Module error “Rewrite error: Expression contains a repeat expression” on Windows Server IIS. The other day, I had to migrate a website from a Linux/Apache web server to Windows Server IIS. The website in question had a lot of sub domains, all pointing to folders within the web root using that same name: foobar.example.com would redirect (rewrite) to www.example.com/foobar.
…IIS URL Rewrite “Rewrite Module error: Expression contains a repeat expression”Read More »
Rewrite and proxy HTTP requests in IIS using a .htaccess. In my case scenario, I had to proxy requests in IIS, because a website was moved from web server A to B, and the DNS wasn’t updated yet. All HTTP requests for the moved website are handled in IIS’ Default Web Site; that’s the wildcard host, and the original host no longer existed there. We needed to match our website and proxy those requests to the new IIS web server. This can either be done using a proxy with URL Rewrite, IIS Application Request Routing (ARR), or a .htaccess file handled by Helicon Ape.
The Baidu spider (BaiduSpider user agent) can be a real pain to block, especially since it does not respect a robots.txt as it should. This post shows you how to block Baidu Spider bot, using IIS URL Rewrite Module based on its User-Agent string.
…Do you host your WordPress website on Windows Server IIS? And are you having trouble with your web.config? I often receive questions about how to use a web.config file in WordPress on Windows Server, and which settings are important for a WordPress site. Maybe it’s because I’m a WordPress on Windows Server IIS enthusiast, so here is my web.config for your convenience (really, it’s not that special).
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Set up HTTP Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS) in Windows Server IIS 10. Scott Hanselman wrote a great post on how to enable HTTP Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS) on IIS web servers, and here is some more technical information about HSTS in IIS, and other security headers…
…How to enable HTTP Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS) on IISRead More »
In this post I provide you various HTTP to HTTPS redirection methods, for Windows Server IIS and Linux Apache. Use these examples to your advantage to secure the traffic between your visitors and your website.
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