WordPress security is a hugely important topic for any website owner. Google lists around 10,000 websites every day that have malware and around 50,000 sites with phishing every week.
If you are serious about your website, you should pay attention to WordPress security best practices. In this guide, we will share all the top WordPress security tips that will help you protect your website from hackers and malware.
Although the core WordPress software is highly secure and is regularly audited by hundreds of developers, there is a lot you can do to keep your website secure.
Host Center – Web Hosting, believes that security is not just about eliminating risks. It’s also about mitigating risks. As a website owner, there are many things you can do to improve the security of your WordPress site (even if you’re not tech-savvy).
There are several steps you can take to protect your website from security vulnerabilities.
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Why is website security important?
A hacked WordPress site can cause serious damage to your business’s revenue and reputation. Hackers can steal user information, passwords, install malware, and even distribute malware to your users.
Worst of all, you may find yourself paying ransomware to hackers just to regain access to your website.
In addition, your website becomes slow as a result and sometimes even corrupts and breaks.
In March 2016, Google reported that more than 50 million website users had been warned that a site they were visiting might contain malware or steal information.
Furthermore, Google blacklists about 20,000 malware sites and about 50,000 phishing sites every week.
If your website is a business website, you should pay special attention to the security of your WordPress system.
Similar to how business owners are responsible for protecting their physical storefront, as an online business owner it is your responsibility to protect your business website.
WordPress is open source software that is regularly maintained and updated. By default, WordPress automatically installs minor updates. For major releases, you must initiate the update manually.
WordPress also comes with thousands of plugins and themes that you can install on your site. These plugins and themes are maintained by third-party developers who also release updates regularly.
These WordPress updates are crucial to the security and stability of your WordPress site. You should make sure that your WordPress site’s core, plugins, and theme are up to date.
The most common WordPress hacking attempts use stolen passwords. You can make these types of hacks more difficult by using stronger passwords that are unique to your site. Not just for your WordPress admin area, but also for your FTP accounts, database, WordPress hosting account, and email addresses that use your site’s domain name.
Many people don’t like using strong passwords because they are hard to remember. The good thing is that you don’t have to remember passwords anymore. You can use a password manager.
Another way to reduce risk is to not give anyone access to your WordPress admin account unless you have to. If you have a large team or guest editors, make sure you understand user roles and capabilities in WordPress before adding new user and editor accounts to your WordPress site.
The role of WordPress hosting
Your WordPress website hosting service plays the most important role in securing your WordPress website.
How does a good web hosting company work in the background to protect your sites and data?
They continuously monitor their network and suspicious activity.
All good hosting companies have tools to prevent large-scale DDOS attacks,
They keep their server software, php versions, and hardware up to date to prevent hackers from exploiting known security vulnerabilities in an old version.
They are prepared to deploy disaster and accident recovery plans that allow them to protect your data in the event of a major accident.
With a shared hosting plan, you share server resources with many other customers. This opens up the risk of cross-site infection where a hacker can use a neighboring site to attack your site.
Securing WordPress in a few simple steps (no coding)
We know that improving the security of a WordPress site can be a scary thought for beginners. Especially if you’re not a techie. So guess what – you’re not alone.
Host Center has helped thousands of WordPress users harden the security of their WordPress site.
We’ll show you how you can improve your WordPress security in just a few clicks (no coding required).
If you can point and click, you can do this, no doubt!
WordPress website backups
Backups are your first line of defense against any WordPress attack. Remember, nothing is 100% secure. If government websites can be hacked, then yours can too.
Backups allow you to quickly restore your WordPress site in case something malicious happens.
There are many free and paid WordPress backup plugins that you can use.
The most important thing you need to know when it comes to backups is that you must regularly save your backups in a full backup version and in a remote location (not in your storage account).
We recommend storing it in a cloud service like Amazon , Dropbox , or private clouds.
Host Center performs regular backups for all its clients and servers.
Based on how often you update your site, the ideal setting may be once a day or real-time backups.
Fortunately, this can be easily done using plugins like UpdraftPlus or BlogVault . Both are reliable and, above all, easy to use (no coding knowledge required).
Best WordPress Security Plugin
After backups, the next thing we need to do is set up a control and monitoring system that keeps track of everything that happens on your website.
This includes monitoring file integrity, failed login attempts, malware scanning, etc.
Fortunately, all of this can be taken care of by the best free WordPress security plugin,
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WordPress
You need to install and activate the free Sucuri Security plugin.
Upon activation, you need to go to the Sucuri menu in your WordPress admin. The first thing you will be asked to do is create a free API key. This enables audit logging, integrity checking, email notifications, and other important features.
The next thing you need to do is click on the ‘Hardening’ tab in the settings menu. Go through each option and click on the ‘Apply Hardening’ button.
Enable the Web Application Firewall (WAF)
The easiest way to protect your website and be confident about your WordPress security is by using a web application firewall (WAF).
A website firewall blocks all malicious traffic before it even reaches your website.
DNS-level firewall – This firewall routes your website traffic through its proxy servers in the cloud. This allows them to send real traffic only to your web server.
Application-level firewall – These firewall plugins inspect traffic as soon as it reaches your server but before most WordPress scripts are loaded. This method is not as effective as DNS-level firewall in reducing server load.
For more information, see our list of the best WordPress firewall plugins .
Migrate your WordPress site to SSL/HTTPS
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a protocol that encrypts data transmission between your website and your users’ browsers. This encryption makes it difficult for someone to snoop and steal information.
Once you enable SSL, your website will use HTTPS instead of HTTP, and you will also see a lock symbol next to your website address in the browser.
SSL certificates were typically issued by certificate authorities, and their prices ranged from $80 to hundreds of dollars per year. Due to the added cost, most website owners chose to continue using the insecure protocol.
To fix this, a non-profit organization called Let’s Encrypt decided to offer free SSL certificates to website owners. Their project is supported by Google Chrome, Facebook, Mozilla, and many other companies.
In all Host Center WordPress hosting packages, SSL is included in the package at no additional cost.
Change the “default” administrator username
Back in the day, the default WordPress username was “admin.” Since usernames made up half of the login credentials, this made it easy for hackers to perform brute force attacks.
Fortunately, WordPress has since changed this and now requires you to choose a custom username when installing WordPress.
However, some one-click WordPress installers still set the default username to “admin.” If you notice this is the case, it’s probably a good idea to switch your web hosting.
Since WordPress doesn’t allow you to change usernames by default, there are three methods you can use to change the username.
1. Create a new administrator username and delete the old one.
2. Use a username changer plugin
3. Update the username from phpMyAdmin
Add two-step verification
Two-step verification requires users to log in using a two-step verification method. The first is your username and password, and the second step requires you to authenticate using a separate device or app.
Most of the leading online sites like Google, Facebook, Twitter allow you to enable it for your accounts. You can also add the same functionality to your WordPress site.
First, you need to install and activate the Two-Factor Authentication plugin. Upon activation, you need to click on the ‘Two-Step Verification’ link in the WordPress admin sidebar.
Next, you need to install and open an authenticator app on your phone. There are several available such as Google Authenticator, Authy, and LastPass Authenticator.
We recommend using LastPass Authenticator or Authy because both allow you to back up your accounts to the cloud. This is very useful in case your phone is lost, reset, or you buy a new phone. All of your account logins will be easily restored.
Good luck to everyone.
You can find more details in the original article.
The article was translated from English to Hebrew.
The original article in English is at the following link
