Here are some great WordPress security tips that are simple, effective and DEFINITELY worthwhile employing. Some tips are slightly more advanced in their implementation, but everyone will find something in here to make your website somewhat more secure.

1. Steven Sanders with 7 WordPress Security Tips
2. Matt Cutts on WordPress Security
3. Skull Bits’ “Stealth Login” Plugin for WordPress
4. Semper Fi Web Design’s WP Security Scan Plug In

Yesterdays I wrote about StatPress: the analytics WordPress plugin. So this morning I awoke and checked Google to see what was ranking where for “StatPress”. The results speak for themselves; the top 10 results were all indexed pages of WordPress PlugIn directories. Do you really want your WordPress admin pages (and links) listed in Google..?

The moral of this story – if you use WordPress, make sure you also use Yoast’s Meta Robot PlugIn to prevent Google indexing your WordPress admin pages.

It lives inside your WordPress dashboard and it gives you instant access to live website statistics like traffic volumes, keyword/search terms, referring websites, browser & operating systems, search spider visits and lots more.

And best of all, it also allows you to “spy” on your own website traffic. At any time you can see exactly who is accessing your site, where they’re from, their IP address, which pages they are viewing, what search term and engine brought them to you, PLUS what operating system and browser they are using. Google Analytics eat your heart out..!

And the biggest advantage to this type of analytics tool is there are no coding requirements. Google Analytics is arguably the best free tools for thorough, detailed website analysis. But you do need some coding skills/access, and sometimes it just “feels” like a laborious tool to use.

StatPress is exactly the opposite; it’s effortless to use and painless to access. Installation is a breeze, and since installing it I’ve been checking my basic traffic trends here more than inside Google’s analytics tool. Admittedly, it is not the fully-featured tool that is gAnalytics, but that does not matter. This plugin rocks..!

It’s instant, live data that you can analyze, search and export easily. It doesn’t replace gAnalytics, but it’s a faster, easier way to quickly check your stats.

This is how detailed StatPress really is. The Dashboard, which is a basic overview of all the stats, shows you ALL the following:

Overview : a total report on visitor, pageview, spider and RSS feed stats. Displays volume by total, this month, last month, today and yesterday.

Hits : reports your last 10 site hits. Breaks them down to time, IP address, TLD, page hit, operating system and browser used.

Keywords/Search terms : reports the last 10 search queries that brought traffic to your site. Includes date, time, keyword, search engine and search engine results page.

Referrers : shows you the last 10 URLs that sent traffic to your site, and what time and date that occurred.

Agents : the 10 latest Agents

Pages : what day, time, page and OS/Browser combo were last viewed.

Spiders : what day, time, Spider and Agent last crawled your site.

And that’s just the Overview…! This really is a must-have WordPress PlugIn. And with the recent crash and burn of alternate analytic providers, I’d be careful who you use to track your traffic. Between StatPress and gAnalytics there’s not much you can’t achieve.

Here’s the link to StatPress plugin on WordPress.org and the StatPress Homepage.