WordPress has been the most popular, powerful, and highly customizable Content Management System since its launch in 2003. It is most preferred by the users for its ability to be used to create a blog or a website.
Being so popular it always has been a target of notorious attackers and hackers to try and perform various attacks to steal confidential data or deface the WordPress website.
WordPress is an open-source software that powers 38% of all the websites on the internet. It is highly customizable, easy to use, and SEO-friendly thus being the first choice of bloggers and content creators.
In WordPress, you’ve got the support of Plugins to add extra functionality to your blog or website. It has a thriving community of content creators and developers that meets once every month across the globe to discuss and share knowledge on WordPress.
Before we move on to discuss how to keep WordPress blog secure let’s find out Why WordPress Security is so important?
Why WordPress Security is Important?
As discussed at the beginning of this article WordPress is the sweet target of attackers. They don’t always go for complex procedures to deface your website. Sometimes it’s a matter of minutes and as simple as scanning through your social profiles to guess your WordPress login credentials.
A hacked WordPress Blog or Website can cause serious damage to your reputation, business revenue, and may land you in legal trouble. Attackers can even hold your website for ransom and you may need to pay a hefty amount to regain control over it.
Hackers can steal user information like names, email addresses, passwords, phone numbers, and other private details of your users.
This further paves the way for scammers and fraudsters to get through your bank details via. phishing or telecalling and steal money. It then continues to broaden and more and more innocents are sucked into this never-ending loop.
So, to sum it up. It’s a bad situation where you don’t want yourself to land up and cause harm to many others. That’s the reason you must keep your WordPress blog secure.
Simple Ways to Keep Your WordPress Blog Secure
Being a WordPress user you must know a few basic security practices that are essential to keep your WordPress safe from hackers.
- Keep Your Passwords Strong: This is a basic tip that must be implemented wherever you have your online presence.
- Be it your social accounts, WordPress Admin, FTP Accounts, Hosting Account, work email, personal email, other services, and products login. Use a different password for every other login.
- You can make use of Password Manager tools to keep your passwords encrypted online and use complex passwords that are tough to recall. Also, don’t share it with anyone.
- Keep Your WordPress Updated: WordPress releases frequent updates including bug fixes, software improvement, and security patches.
- It is highly recommended to install these updates whenever you are notified about them. Though minor updates get installed automatically but some major releases require you to manually initiate the update.
- You also need to update the installed plugins and themes to their latest releases.
- Choose your Hosting Provider Wisely: Do proper research, even ask your friends or colleagues about some good hosting providers they know of.
- Generally, the more you pay the better the hosting services are provided. Factors like frequent downtime increased hack attacks, inferior performance must denote that the hosting provider isn’t taking the security of your website seriously and has inadequate security mechanisms.
- If you are on a shared hosting plan you better upgrade to managed WordPress hosting to minimize the risk of cross-site contamination if a neighboring site is under attack.
Add a Security Plugin for Website Surveillance and Recovery
Not everyone understands code so in WordPress Plugins are the savior. The best WordPress Blog Security solution is to add a plugin that is designed to find and fix WordPress Security Issues. You will be bombarded with many security plugins when you perform a Google Search.
You can go for Plugins like Hide My WP, Sucuri that are equally powerful and can take care of your WordPress 24×7 even if you are away, so no need to manually check for issues.
They can help you with hiding the fact that your website runs on WordPress, Change its Login Path, Detect and Block Attacks in realtime, change WordPress queries URL, Notify you of visitor details who for suspicious activities with his IP, user agent, referrer and username.
Make Use of (WAF) Web Application Firewall
The best way to protect your website from attackers and hackers is by enabling the Web Application Firewall.
When enabled the firewall runs in between the internet and your site and analyses all the incoming HTTP requests. Meaning the firewall blocks all malicious traffic even before it reaches your WordPress website.
So, whenever an HTTP request with a malicious payload is detected the connection is dropped.
- DNS Firewall: It is used to route the website traffic through cloud proxy servers and only genuine traffic can make their way to your web server.
- Application Firewall: In this method, the firewall plugins scan through the traffic when it reaches your web server but before any WordPress script is loaded.
It’s better to go for DNS Level Firewall as it reduces load on the webserver. You can opt for Cloudflare or Sucuri for these services.
Always Prefer SSL/HTTPS over HTTP
SSL encrypts data that is transferred between the website and the host’s device. Encryption makes it harder for any middleman to sniff through the transferred data and steal information.
So, when SSL is enabled the website uses HTTPS instead of HTTP. You can easily distinguish between an HTTPS-enabled website when you see a closed lock sign beside the website address bar on the browser.
Following are some of the benefits of SSL Encryption on your Website/Blog:
- Avoid browser warnings alerting the visitors of the security risk involved in HTTP
- SSL Boosts website’s SEO rankings as Google trusts Secure sites
- Maintain User Trust – The notation of «Secure» in the address bar helps users to trust your blog/website.
- SSL protects users from Phishing and MITM attacks
Disable File Editing
In WordPress, while setting up your website you would find an «Editor» Button in the Appearance section of your dashboard. It allows you to edit the Theme and Plugins installed on your website.
It is always recommended to disable this feature once you are done with the changes and after your site is live. It refrains attackers from gaining access to your website and changing or injecting malicious code into it. Most of the time you won’t notice anything different until its too late. So, head on to your wp-config.php file and add the below code to block the ability to edit themes and plugins.
define(‘DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT’, true);
Change the Default Username
If you are still using the decade-old admin username, then you probably need to switch to a new one. ‘admin’ is basically the first username the hacker will try to gain control of your site. You don’t want to make it that easy for him :p
WordPress by default doesn’t allow to change usernames so you can try these methods to change the username to something different:
- Update the username from phpMyAdmin
- Create a new admin username and delete the old username
- Make use of a plugin to change the same
Limit Login Attempts
If you are still using the decade-old admin username, then you probably need to switch to a new one. ‘admin’ is basically the first username the hacker will try to gain control of your site. You don’t want to make it that easy for him :p
WordPress by default doesn’t allow to change usernames so you can try these methods to change the username to something different:
- Update the username from phpMyAdmin
- Create a new admin username and delete the old username
- Make use of a plugin to change the same
Final Thoughts
That’s all for this article hope you have gained some knowledge on how to keep a WordPress blog/website secure. Security is a never-ending topic as there is no website that is fully secure. Hackers will find their way and try to bypass the security. We have to be alert even when the security systems are in place and doing their job. As we humans have made machines and not vice versa.
