Tech

How to secure a WordPress website


Every day, Google blacklists approximately 10,000 websites for malware, and approximately 50,000 for phishing
every week. You should follow the WordPress security best practices in order to make sure you are up to date security-wise with your WordPress website. We’ll go through all of our best WordPress security tips in this guide to help you secure your website from hackers and malware, without coding.

What is the importance of WordPress security?

A hacked WordPress site will significantly harm your company’s revenue and credibility. Hackers can steal user information, passwords, install malicious software, and even infect your users with malware. Worst case scenario, you might be forced to pay ransomware to hackers in order to regain access to your website.

We’ll review some of the best practice steps without a coding knowledge to secure a WordPress website.

Maintain WordPress up to date

WordPress is an open-source program that is updated and maintained on a regular basis. WordPress downloads minor changes automatically by default. You must manually start the update for major releases. WordPress also comes with a library of thousands of plugins and themes that you can use to customize your site. Third-party developers manage these plugins and themes, and they release updates on a regular basis.

These WordPress updates are critical for your WordPress site’s security and stability. Check to see if your WordPress heart, plugins, and theme are all up to date.

WordPress updates
WordPress updates

As we can see in the picture above, we have two plugins that require an update. As we mentioned, we must keep our plugins updated because of security and stability.

Create a strong username and password

Stolen passwords are used in the majority of WordPress hacking attempts. Use stronger passwords that are exclusive to your website to make this more difficult. Not only for the WordPress admin section, but also for FTP accounts, databases, WordPress hosting accounts, and custom email addresses that use the domain name of your website. Since strong passwords are difficult to recall, many beginners avoid them. For example, you can
use LastPass, EnPass, or 1Password to save your passwords.

Another way to reduce the risk is to only offer your WordPress admin account to those that you really need. Make sure you understand user roles and capabilities in WordPress before adding new user accounts and writers to your WordPress site if you have a large team or guest authors. Also, avoid using username and passwords that include your website name, or simply words like admin, administrator, webmaster, etc.

Have a reliable hosting provider

Your WordPress hosting service is one of the most important aspects of your WordPress site’s security. Having an excellent hosting provider is of utmost importance.

  • They keep an eye on their network for any suspicious behavior.
  • To avoid large-scale DDOS attacks, all successful hosting companies have tools in place.
  • To prevent hackers from leveraging a known security flaw in an older version, they keep
  • their server applications, php versions, and hardware up to date.
  • They have emergency management and injury plans in place, allowing them to protect
  • you.

A shared hosting package allows you to share server services with a large number of other customers. This exposes the website to the possibility of cross-site contamination, which occurs when a hacker uses a neighboring site to target yours. So, choose your hosting provider wisely.

Have an SSL certificate

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a data encryption protocol that encrypts data transmission between your website and the user’s browser. It is important to know that this name (SSL) got stuck with us, end-users, but it is the TLS (Transport Layer Protocol) that is used as a modern HTTPS encryption standard, and SSL got deprecated on up to date servers. Your website will use HTTPS instead of HTTP after you allow SSL, and a padlock icon will appear next to your website address in the browser. The idea behind using HTTPS is to have encrypted data transfer between peers in communication. In order to sniff this kind of communication, the attacker needs to pay a lot of trouble and with good maintenance of the server, it is virtually impossible to do it without cracking the shared key for data encryption.
Nowadays most hosting providers include SSL/TLS certificates in their offer. Contact them if you are not sure how to install it and make sure they have SSL disabled and only running TLS.

HTTPS Padlock
HTTPS Padlock

Backup your WordPress website – UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin

Backups are your first line of defense in the event of a WordPress attack. Remember that nothing is completely secure. If government websites can be hacked, you can be sure that yours can, too. Backups allow you to easily recover your WordPress site in the event that something goes wrong.

Luckily there are plugins that can help you easily backup your WordPress website. We recommend using – UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin.

WordPress - UpdraftPlus
WordPress – UpdraftPlus

For the full setup, you can check out this tutorial on YouTube.

Install a WordPress security plugin – Wordfence

Following backups, the next step is to set up an auditing and tracking system that records anything that occurs on your website. File integrity tracking, unsuccessful login attempts, malware scanning, and so on are all examples of this. There are many great plugins for securing your WordPress website, but we chose Wordfence.

WordPress Wordfence
WordPress Wordfence

New users may find WordFence intimidating at first, but the company has done an excellent job of making it simple to get started. There is a lot of detail on the primary dashboard. However, it is straightforward and quick to comprehend.

Overall, this is a nice plugin to have, and the premium edition is well worth the money. There are also some cool features of the plugin, such as the fact that it runs directly on the WordPress platform rather than in the cloud.

Check out this tutorial on how to set up Wordfence.

Install a WPS Hide Login plugin

Protect the website by modifying the login URL and stopping non-logged-in users from accessing the wp-login.php page and the wp-admin directory.

WPS Hide Login is a small plugin that allows you to adjust the URL of the login form page to whatever you want, quickly and safely. It doesn’t modify or rename files in heart, and it doesn’t add rewrite laws. Before you change your URL, write it down somewhere, so you can easily login back to your WordPress website. When you deactivate this plugin, your site returns to its previous state.

Install a WPS Hide Login plugin
Protect the website by modifying the login URL and stopping non-logged-in users from
accessing the wp-login.php page and the wp-admin directory.
WPS Hide Login is a small plugin that allows you to adjust the URL of the login form page to
whatever you want, quickly and safely. It doesn't modify or rename files in heart, and it doesn't
add rewrite laws. Before you change your URL, write it down somewhere, so you can easily
login back to your WordPress website. When you deactivate this plugin, your site returns to its
previous state.
WordPress – WPS Hide Login

This plugin is easy to use. In the dashboard go to Settings, then go to General, and on the bottom of the General page, you can see the section named WPS Hide Login. Find the Login URL and change it to whatever you want, but don’t forget to write down or memorize your new URL.

WordPress - Hide Login
WordPress – Hide Login #2

You can even change the Redirection URL.

That is pretty much it. The above steps should help you secure your WordPress from the most common attacks. However, be aware that in order for any security policy to take effect it is important that staff, and anyone managing sensitive data, be properly informed and trained for security awareness. Without awareness, security is just an ilusion.

Check out our other tech blogs and write to us if you would like to connect on some topics!

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