How to Secure Your WordPress Site
WordPress sites are also like any other web sites that needs to be secured well, hackers & some viruses are always there to do damages or steal your web site information. There are so many websites getting attacked by cyberpunks daily. That indicates how much protection needs for a website.
Without no doubt WordPress is the most popular and secured content management platforms in the world. WordPress powers more than 40% of websites on the internet. WordPress security teams always monitor for any vulnerabilities to keep the platform always secured. However in some cases, because of site owners irresponsibility most of the sites gets attacked or get hacked. Ignoring security precautions and protocols are the main reasons for this.
Therefore always it’s better to follow security measures and protocols to protect your site.
How to protect your WordPress site ?
Adhere to the below guidelines and security protocols
1. Perform regular scans for malwares
In a situation of malware attacks you will experience massive drops in site traffic and performance or sometimes you may see changes in the site you never made. If you are experiencing those issues, it’s better to scan your website as soon as possible for malwares.
Even everything is running smoothly, it is best to run malware scans at least once a month to protect the site.
Once a site infected with malware, search engines like Google remove the site from there search results. Even sometimes they blacklist those sites. In a situation like those it will be a huge effect for your site revenue as well as your brand
There are very efficient security plugins available for WordPress to scan your site for malware threats.
Apart from scanning for malwares, those plugins will monitor and indicate if there are any security vulnerabilities.
Most popular plugins are,
- WordFence
- All in One WordPress Security and Firewall
- Malware Security
Apart from above mentioned plugins, you can use sucuri site check to find out if there are any malwares in your site or is your website is blacklisted. this is a free service provided by sucuri
2. Keep your data and files back up
It doesn’t matter even if you had all the security measurements in order, if you are not taking any backups of your website.
It’s recommended to have a backup version of your site on a remote server, so because of any reason if things not went as expected, you have a backup option to restore your site.
In some cases when we add plugins or themes there you may be have seen WordPress Error messages.
In a situations like this if you have a backup of your site in somewhere, you can easily restore that without putting your time to resolve WordPress plugins or theme errors
In WordPress there are no any in-build backup options. However most of the hosting providers offers backup services additionally for you to add in to your hosting plan
Also there are few good backup plugins or cloud services which you can use
Plugins :
- VaultPress
- BackUpWordPress
- BackupBuddy
Cloud Services :
- Stash
- Dropbox
- Amazon
Apart from those services mentioned, you can backup your site manually as well. Take a backup of whole WordPress folder of your site and the database.
3. Always select most trusted hosting providers
When you are planning to host a WordPress site, always keep remember to do a background check of the hosting service. Apart from keeping your site safe from security threats it’s a vital part for you to consider about having a strong security for your back-end services as well. In the past we have seen so many hosting providers gets security attacks and went whole data centers offline withing the matter of minutes.
When you are choosing a hosting provider always check if they have a well planned security protocols and are they offing 24 hour support.
Below enlisted are some of the security features you might need to consider when you are selecting a hosting provider
- DDoS protection
- Malware scan frequency
- Backups
- Hardware & Software Upgrades
- WordPress Upgrades
Most of the time a reliable hosting plan will be above your budget. but it will protect all your websites from future attacks you might get. Below are few of the best hosting services available in the market
- Bluhost
- Hostinger
- HostGator
4. Use Strong Passwords all the time
It’s highly recommended for site owners to have strong passwords for their admin panels and server panels. If you are using a normal words with numbers like abc@1234, those passwords are very easy to predict from today’s hacking tools.
When creating passwords, always keep remember to adhere to the CLU(Complex,Long and Unique) points. Create a password which include lowercase, uppercase, digits and add few special characters like *&%$. Also make sure to have a long password all the time
It would be better to have a password like this “2BAa^g67@*ASD#@” than the password like “123456”
There are so many online password generators as well for you to make a strong password. Some of the popular ones are as listed below
- LastPass
- 1Password
Also in WordPress there is an in-built password generator as well for you to have a strong password
5 Install all the recent updates of WordPress(Plugins, Themes, Core)
Like mobile phones and other operating systems gets updated with new versions. WordPress also gets updates for WordPress Platform, Plugins & Themes. A update will upgrade your system performances and security measurements. Therefore it’s mandatory to update all the tools you are using for your WordPress site as soon as you gets a new update
Regularly check your installed plugins and theme
Since plugins and themes causes heavy security issues it’s always recommended to test your plugins before install and activate. It’s best to test it in a test site before activate it on the production web site.
Most of the times the plugins and themes we are using are 3rd party developed and those may might cause security and performance issues. Also keep remember to download the plugins from trusted sites only.
Remove unused themes and plugins
Perform a deep search about the plugins you are using and check if you really need those plugins.
All the new plugins you are adding in to the site only will reduce the performance of the site. If you can only have the required safe plugins, then there is a good chance for you to stay safe from security attacks.
Conclusion
Always keep remember to follow above mentioned guidelines since it’s very important to secure your site from cyber attacks
