Professional WordPress: Design and Development, 2nd Edition

Chapter 13

Statistics, Scalability, Security, and Spam

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Adding traffic counters to your website
• Caching your content for higher traffic loads
• Keeping your WordPress site healthy and secure
• Delegating permissions to your users

The past few chapters have covered how to present your fabulous content in effective and beautiful ways, how to increase the likelihood of visitors finding your content, and how to amass various content sources into your WordPress website. What happens when (if?) this all succeeds and scores of visitors flock to your site? Well, now you have a live and active site, which opens up a whole range of other challenges you have to think about. In this chapter, you will look at mechanisms to define and measure success, and then deal with the resultant attention you’ll get in terms of unwanted content, malicious visitors, and the need to scale in response to increasing readership.

STATISTICS COUNTERS

Viewing traffic statistics allows you to see which content on your site is actually bringing visitors in. This shows you what content is working and what is not. In addition, traffic statistics can show you valuable information about your visitors and their hardware and software setups. This information enables you to tailor your site to accentuate the positive and support your visitors’ browsers to create a more pleasant and meaningful experience.

Statistics packages employ a couple of different methods for gathering data, and each has its own ...