Is My WordPress Site Secure? Ten Essential Steps To Protect Your WordPress Site
Your website may be important to your livelihood. You have spent a lot of money, time and effort in creating and maintaining your website. And after all this, you never want to lose your website.
Well, this is something to worry about because security breaches are everywhere on the internet, and that is why protecting your website is vitally important. You can take some steps to prevent your WP site from attacks and evil intentions.
As you already know, WordPress is the most popular open-source CMS that powers more than 40% of websites. The thought is that open-source platforms are more prone to attacks. Is that true? If it is, how can you secure your WP site?
Is WP really secure? In this article, you’ll learn about the importance of WP security. And some essential steps you can take to secure your WP site.
Why Is WordPress Security Important?
Similar to the importance of physical store security, business owners implement door locks, CCTV, electronic article surveillance and other anti-theft devices to protect their stores. As an online business owner, it is your responsibility to take some steps to secure your business website.
If you have a business website, then you have to pay extra attention to your WP security. There are many people with evil intentions that can cause serious damage to your business and reputation by hacking your WP site. Hackers can steal your information and your customer’s information, install malicious software, and distribute malware. They can even make you pay ransomware to regain access to your website.
How Secure Is WordPress?
Because WordPress is free and open-source software, the majority thinks an open-source script is vulnerable to all sorts of attacks. Nevertheless, WordPress is more secure than its other online brothers and sisters.
The foundation of WordPress is based on dedicated developers who work daily to keep the platform as secure as possible. They do daily security monitoring and update the software as it is released. So, they are doing all to make WordPress secure, but there’s a lot more to do on the user’s side.
Ways To Secure Your WordPress Site
However, there are many ways to protect your WP site. Some of the best tricks to help you secure WP, even more, are listed below:
Choose a Good Hosting
First and foremost, choosing good and trustworthy hosting can affect your overall business performance. It is a fundamental block of your business journey. Whether it’s a concern of security or something else related to your website, there is no other choice besides choosing reliable and high-quality hosting.
If you take a look into different hosting, you’ll see not all hosting companies and their offers are created equal. Some of the hosts don’t take website security seriously enough, and most of the time, users don’t even know that until they face some serious damage.
The reality is you can’t fix your host. But you can choose it wisely. In AEserver, we provide you with WordPress hosting and managed WordPress hosting with multiple security layers and some additional security features, including SSL certificates, Website backup, premium DNS, Site lock and WAF/DDOS protection to ensure better protection of our customers.
Always Use the Latest Version
Keeping WordPress updated is a good practice to minimize the risk of security breaches. Many websites are running on an older WordPress version and are more inclined to get attacked.
WordPress is supported by dedicated developers and gets updated every now and then. These updates are meant to fix bugs and also have security patches.
It’s not just WordPress you need to update but the plugins and themes too because many hackers utilize the older versions of themes and plugins that the users do not update. So, if you’re using WordPress, it’s important to update every product, including.
Tip: Besides using the latest version, it is also important to use trustworthy themes and plugins. Always use original premium themes.
Use Secure Login Credentials
Using a secure username and password is very important. Why?
Because when you create a website, your username will be set to “admin” by default, but you’ll be allowed to change your username and set a strong password. It will make it harder for hackers to break into your website.
Hackers always try a brute force attack on a default username. So if you have the username “admin”, change it to something unique as soon as possible.
Setting up a unique password is equally important as a unique username. You might think of a password that is easy to remember, while this password can be easy to guess too. If you’re using a plain password, you need to change it by including nonsensical letters, special characters and numbers. So it’s not a big deal for advanced hackers to crack it without hassle. You can also use a strong password generator to prevent your password from being hacked.
Tip: install a login limit attempt plugin to prevent your site from a brute-force attack
Change Your WP Login URL
When you log in to WordPress, by default, the address will be “yourwebsite.com/wp-admin”. Same as default username, a default URL can be a reason you can get hacked.
To prevent this, you can change the URL of the admin login page. Further, you can add two-factor authentication to protect your WordPress login page.
Related: Best Practices To Secure a Domain (Guide)
Set File Permissions and Disable File Editing
Be mindful of your file and directory permissions to protect your WordPress site on a hosting level especially, if you are using shared hosting. Setting wrong file permissions can be catastrophic, especially when you’re working in shared hosting. WordPress recommends changing the directory permission level to “755” and files to “644” to protect the whole file system.
Another way of reducing the risk is to disable file editing. If someone has access to your admin dashboard, they can edit all files that include themes and plugins. And if you disable file editing, no one can alter any file even if they have access to your admin dashboard.
Protect wp-config.php File
It is an advanced practice to secure your WordPress site. Wp-config.php is the most important file in your root directory, holding all the crucial information about WordPress installation. Protecting it means protecting the core of your WordPress.
To protect your wp-config.php, move it. You can move this file to a higher level than your root directory, which will make it almost impossible for a hacker to gain access, While WordPress will have easy access to the file.
Install Security Plugins
Checking your website security regularly for malware is quite a time taken and requires a good knowledge of coding, as sometimes you don’t even see a piece of malware written in the code.
For this problem, WordPress has a variety of security plugins. These plugins provide you with an additional layer of security for your WP site. The task of security plugins may include file monitoring, malware scanning, failed login attempts, etc.
Some of the most popular security plugins are listed below:
Switch to HTTPS
Install an SSL certificate and switch your WP site to HTTPS.
Installing an SSL will ensure the security between your site and your visitor’s computer by encrypting the connections between your site and your visitor’s browser. It is mandatory for every website, especially the one that processes sensitive information.
However, SSL plays an important role in SEO; Google provides a higher rank to the sites with an SSL certificate.
Enable Web Application Firewall
Nowadays, everyone is familiar with the concept of a firewall, a program that lies between your WordPress hosting network and all other networks that automatically prevents all sorts of unwanted attacks.
We highly recommend installing a web application firewall for your WordPress site to keep malicious activities out of your website.
Backup Your Site Regularly
In the end, after implementing every possible way to protect your website, your website will still not be 100% secure. And there’s no magic solution to it. That is why a great security plan always includes a website backup solution.
Make sure all of your website’s data is backed up daily by WordPress and your host. Because in the occurrence of an attack, you may lose all of your data.
Our security experts always recommend automatic backups as well, in case you forget to do it manually.
The Bottom Line
WordPress security is the most important part of a website that you shouldn’t ever take for granted.
Cybercriminals are developing new ways to leverage companies’ online presence, while on the other hand, security engineers are developing ways to stop them.
Implying security is not just for developers but users too. So, the above security tips will help you out where some of them are just simple adjustments. Others can affect your entire site, such as SSL certificates.
And, of course, you want to run your website on a secured WordPress host. In AEserver, you’ll be facilitated with the security services your website needs. Our developers and security experts will help you maximize your WordPress security as it is our top priority to provide a secure website to our customers.
