Secure HTTP Headers vs Machete

Machete is a simple suite of tools that solves common WordPress annoyances using as few resources as possible. Machete doesn’t cover every single use case, but there is a huge amount of sites that would require less plugins if they used Machete. All Machete tools have two things in common: they solve problems faced by many web developers and they do it using as few server resources as possible. So far, Machete includes the following tools: WordPress Optimization WordPress places a lot of code inside the tag just to keep backward compatibility or to enable optional features. You can disable most of it and save some time from each page request while making your installation safer. Cookies & GDPR Warning We know you hate cookie warning bars. Well, this is the least hateable cookie bar you’ll find. It is really light, doesn’t affect your PageSpeed score and plays well with static cache plugins. Analytics and custom code You don’t need a zillion plugins to perform easy tasks like inserting a verification meta tag (Google Search Console, Bing, Pinterest), a json-ld snippet or a custom stylesheet (Google Fonts, Print Styles, accessibility tweaks…). The Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager tracking codes are PageSpeed optimized, GPDR friendly. Maintenance mode The maintenance mode that ships with WordPress is just a basic lock-down that is activated whenever you do a major update. With machete Maintenance Mode you can hide your unfinished page from visitors and search engines, give your clients a secure temporary access and lock your site without affecting your SEO. Post & Page cloner Adds a “duplicate” link to post, page and most post types lists. Also adds “copy to new draft” function to the post editor. Social Sharing Buttons Social sharing done the Machete way. The icons are made as a custom webfont embedded in a minified CSS file that only weighs 5.8KB. The sharing actions use each platform’s native share URL. WooCommerce Utils WooCommerce was designed to work for every possible use case, but that often leads to unexpected behavior. These simple fixes can improve the WooCommerce user experience by making it behave as clients expect.

Harden your web applications. HTTP header fields are components of the header section of request and response messages. The headers define the operating parameters of an HTTP transaction. Securing HTTP headers will improve the resilience of your web application against many common attacks including those that are on the OWASP top 10 list. Securing headers can also improve your SEO rank and in addition to preventing websites from being marked as dangerous by browsers and antivirus applications. Protect sensitive user information and be compliant with privacy regulations. Defend users from stealing private data by protecting website cookies. Use the proper directive such as “secure”, “httponly” and “samesite”, all of those will be applied automatically by “Secure HTTP Headers” plugin. Secure HTTP Headers will automatically analyze any website and will build up secure headers directives, by the latest best practice. In addition, Secure HTTP Headers offers fully configurable options, apply or skip any header directive as needed. Install and activate Secure HTTP Headers with full confidence, the deactivation of this plugin will return your website header directives to their original state. Main plugin functionality HTTP Strict Transport Security – helps to protect websites against man-in-the-middle attacks and cookie hijacking X-Frame-Options – helps to protect users against ClickJacking attacks X-Content-Type-Options – helps to prevent the browser from MIME-sniffing Referrer-Policy – helps to control how much referrer information should be included with requests Clear-Site-Data – helps to ensure that data is deleted from the browser if the user logs out X-Download-Options – helps to control how IE 8 will handle downloaded HTML files Access-Control-Allow-Origin – helps to ensure whether the response can be shared with requesting code from the given origin Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy – helps to prevent a document from loading any cross-origin resources that don’t explicitly grant the document permission Permissions-Policy – helps to allow and deny the use of browser features in its own frame, and in content within any iframe elements in the document Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy – helps to protect websites against a set of cross-origin attacks dubbed XS-Leaks Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy – helps to protect websites against speculative side-channel attacks, like Spectre, as well as Cross-Site Script Inclusion attacks X-Permitted-Cross-Domain-Policies – helps to control how cross-domain requests from Flash and PDF documents are handled Cookie Http-Only flag – helps to protect websites against Cross-Site Scripting, or XSS attacks Cookie Secure flag – helps to ensure that cookie is sent over a secure connection Cookie Samesite Lax flag – helps to protect websites against CSRF and XSSI attacks Expect-CT – helps to prevent the use of misissued certificates for a website. Note: The Expect-CT will likely become obsolete in June 2021 What are the optional extras? Magnisec is offering “Secure HTTP Headers enhanced” A plugin that contains, in addition, an engine that watches and builds in any website changes a CSP – Content Security Policy that is best practice and recommended by all professional securities experts, that mitigate XSS -Cross site Scripting, one of the most common and destructive attacks. Price: 50$ /year for a domain. More details and installation here