What are the Best WordPress Security Plugins?
With so many options out there, choosing the best WordPress security plugin could be a challenging task. However, the best way of choosing one is to understand your website’s requirements, figure out your budget, and look for the most reputed WordPress security plugin. Here’s a list of the WordPress plugins that can work best for your website;
Wordfence
Here comes the most downloaded WordPress security plugin— WordFence, with almost a 1+million active users. It’s a powerful, fully-featured security plugin for your WordPress website. The best feature of this plugin is it provides ultimate protection from malware, hacking, and malicious traffic.
Features:
- WordPress firewall to block and malicious before it attacks website
- Scans all plugins, files, and theme before they get uploaded to the system
- Live traffic information including origin, I.P. address, and time
- Advanced manual blocking features allow you to block traffic from any source, including country-specific block
- Advanced two-factor authentication with a time-based one-time password (TOTP)
- Detects compromised administrators’ passwords and enables them to reset a new password
- Helps you analyze, compare and fix broken files
Price: It includes both a free download (covers most of the listed features) and an affordable premium version at $99 per year. The free version covers almost all the requirements of small websites. The Premium version comes with advanced real-time analytics and premium support.
Sucuri Security
Sucuri Security is one of the popularly used and comprehensive plugins available in the market when it comes to protecting a website. It offers a set of security features to protect websites.
Features:
- Performs a detailed security auditing of website and logs all security-related activity
- Provides effective security hardening and protects your website from likely risks and exposures
- Sends you a notification with a complete report of any threat or suspicious activity
- Keeps you ahead of any potential security threat by actively File Integrity Monitoring (FIM)
- Helps you clean up malware affected website at no cost
- Checks your website blacklisting/blocking with blacklist engines
- Malware scanning (free front-end scans and premium version server-level scans)
- WAF (Web Application Firewall) helps filter bad traffic (premium version only)
- Apart from security, provides you CDN service to boost your website speed and performance (premium version only)
Price: It offers both a free plugin and a paid subscription. The free version offers most of the security services listed above and protects the website from common attacks.
For additional features like firewall protection, CDN services, etc., it offers packages from $9.99/month to full platform access for $199/year.
All In One WP Security & Firewall
All In One WP Security plugin is one the completely free plugin available with a decent website level firewall protection. Its main features can be broken into three main categories: basic, intermediate, and advanced. From a small website owner to a web developer, it offers website security for everyone.
Features:
- Protects user accounts with password strength tool
- Features Login Lockdown ability to protect against forceful login attempts
- Comes with graphs and charts for users to understand and fix any security issue
- Comes with a blacklist tool where you set requirements to block spammers based on IP and geographical locations
- Protects against comment spams by monitoring IP addresses and adding a captcha
- Provides front-end text protection by disabling right-click and text selection
- Helps you restore .htaccess, and .wp-config files
Price: Free
Note: Though it offers front end protection but lacks malware scanning and removal if your website gets hacked.
JetPack
Features:
- Protects user accounts with password strength tool
- Offers downtime monitoring and immediately update you if needed
- Offers automatic daily or real-time website backups with activity log to restore website the way it was before any malfunction
- Offers 1-click website restoration
- Automatically stops brute force attack and provides secure two-factor authentication for extra security
- Offers comment blocking with Akismet powered anti-spam features
- Offers malware scanning and one-click fix
- Offers free CDN for images
iTheme Security
- Generates strong passwords and offers automated password expiration age
- Provides an additional layer of security with two-factor authentication and google re-CAPTCHA
- Offers itheme brute force protection by banning users
- Monitors file changes and sends immediate alerts
- Offers 404 detection
- Provides WordPress keys and salts scheduled updates
- Hides WordPress vulnerabilities like WordPress login URL
- Enables away mode and make dashboard inaccessible
Why Should a WordPress Security Plugin Be Used?
WordPress security plugins will prevent your WordPress site from facing a hacking breach and protect your valuable information from being leaked or used for malicious purposes.
On average, a website is attacked by cybercriminals 44 times each day, including both non-WordPress and WordPress websites.
Sadly, most website owners don’t realize the importance of having a security plugin until it gets too late.
Plugins keep regularly scanning our website for any potential threat and keep a tab on bad traffic. Not regularly updating a website, plugins, or themes is one of the terrible blogging mistake which makes our websites vulnerable.
A security plugin is quite possibly the best security practice a business can adopt and apply to their website. It will ensure that the data on your website is secure, and is safe from any malicious purposes or personal gains.
Security Breaches That Can Be Faced If a WordPress Security Plugin Is Not Installed
To avoid facing a security breach that can be detrimental to your business’ image and its performance as a whole, installing a WordPress plugin should be your number one priority. Potential threats can include:
- Stolen data and information of users and customers
- Loss of website data with loss of access to the website
- Can affect a brand’s reputation due to any unhealthy practice by the hackers
- Negative effects on website SEO ranking
- Getting your data and website restored is not only time consuming but also a costly process
How to Choose the Best WordPress Security Plugin for Your Website?
Choosing the right security plugin is quite an important task. Before looking out for a security plugin, check out your hosting service. Many hosting services provide additional security measures, and you may not need any additional plugin or only need a plugin to fulfill the security gaps of your hosting service.
Another important factor is your website usage. If you have a small website or planning to start a blog, you can choose a free plugin or a freemium version. Once your website starts growing, you can invest in a paid version.
However, a security plugin is a must for any e-commerce website. Having a security plugin for an e-commerce website protects customers payment records and also gives you real-time website backup so that you do not lose any transaction or order record
Additional Security Measures
Users can also follow the below security measures and use WordPress security plugins to further secure off their website from malicious hackers. These are in general some of the best practices to keep your website secure.
- Always have a strong password: Weak passwords are easier to hack. Using the right and strong passwords will ultimately help protect your WordPress.
- Choose a reliable hosting: Always choose a reputed hosting. Always check and compare various hosting services.
- Keep your WordPress updated: This will help bridge the gap between any vulnerabilities present and prevent your website from being hacked.
- Keep your plugins and themes updated: Regular plugins and theme updates will add on to bridge the gap between vulnerabilities and further improve your website’s security levels.
- Avoid unknown plugins: Reputable plugins are known to protect websites, whereas unknown plugins may be malicious. Always use and download plugins from trusted sources and websites.
Wrap Up
To avoid security breaches and protect your website, installing a security plugin into WordPress is crucial. The best WordPress security plugin will mainly depend on the type of website you have or any specific needs you may have to protect that website.
Users are always recommended to look at the specific features of plugins to ensure they are getting the best return for their money. Additional measures can further protect your website from hackers and cybercriminals.
