Over the past few years, WordPress has become one of the town’s most reliable CMS and blogging platforms around. Unfortunately, its comprehensive and user-friendly nature has made it famous amongst hackers too.
How to Secure Your WordPress Site?
If you have a stunning WordPress website that attracts lots of traffic, you should be prepared to put some more effort into security. There are several ways of making your WordPress site secure. Each of these principles has its own pros and cons.
One should realize that you cannot expect 100% security from a single method. However, a sensible combination of these methods will safeguard your WordPress site from most attacks. Here are the best ways to secure your WordPress website.
- Frequently Update WordPress Plugins
- Protect The Admin Login
- Change The Default Login Page URL
- Install A Security Plugin
- Handling Usernames and Passwords
1- Frequently Update WordPress Plugins
First of all, you should keep your WordPress plugins up-to-date because developers don’t release the updates just for fun, they update their plugins for security, new features, and fixes. Upgradation may take less than a few minutes.
However, frequent up-gradation will safeguard your website extensively. Also, make sure the core WordPress files are up-to-date too. It is quite interesting to note that every WordPress plugin comes with useful security patches.
Though vulnerabilities can be exploited, they should be fixed as quickly as possible. If you are designing your first WordPress site, try to update the files, plugins, and site every week.
2- Protect The Admin Login
Secondly, you should take care of the WordPress Admin area. Though the Admin panel is carefully protected, you must spend some effort and make it a lot safer.
According to experts, only people who are supposed to access the WordPress Admin page should be allowed to access it. If your WordPress site doesn’t support front-end content development or registration, your online visitors must not be allowed to access the “wp-login.php” file or /wp-admin/ folder.
The simplest way to achieve this is by adding restrictions in the “.htcaccess” file as following commands:
<Files wp-login.php>
Order deny, allow
Deny from all
Allow from –enter-your-ip-address-here-
3- Change The Default Login Page URL
The default login WordPress page is well known to everyone including the hackers, to take down your site, the hacker or the attacker can easily send massive requests to your login page for purpose of guessing the correct password.
Changing the default login page URL for WordPress will definitely secure your site from such an attacking mechanism. To change the default login page URL, install “iThemes Security” and enable “Hide Backend” feature.
4- Install A Security Plugin
Most webmasters who use WordPress as a content management system don’t know how to protect their website correctly, that’s why installing a security plugin is a mandatory step. Here are the best security WordPress plugins:
- Sucuri
- iThemes Security
- Jetpack Security
- WPScan
- Wordfence
- BulletProof Security
- All In One WP Security & Firewall
- Google Authenticator
5- Handling Usernames and Passwords
A lot of hackers believe that your database and WordPress site’s username would be “admin”. This is why you should change the site’s username before many any other changes! This will prevent simple and brute-force attacks.
Naming the admin username differently will increase your WordPress site’s security by at least 60%! And, the process of changing the “admin” username is very easy. During installation, you will be asked for a username, and this is where you key in a new value.
Moving on, you will be prompted to key in a password for your site. Make sure the password is as strong as possible! A lot of people end up typing “password” or “12345678” as their login password. This makes it very easy for attackers and hackers.
Try to include many characters, special symbols, and numeric figures in the password. In fact, you can opt for two-factor authentication too. New, responsive sites are designed with two-factor authentication as one of their key selling points.
