WordPress is one of most famous and used systems online, which also makes a great target for hackers. If you have website with WordPress, it means you have to be extra cautious taking good security efforts so you can protect visitors, you and your data. Securing your webpage is serious thing to consider doing. Ultimately, security doesn’t mean having systems that are perfectly secure as it’s almost impossible to maintain or achieve. Security is helping in reduction of risk, not eliminating it totally. For a good start, when it comes to security of your website, hosting environment is very important. There are many choices available today and you need to have quality trusted web hosting. It has to provide you with most updated versions of their software servers, with reliable methods for recovery as well as backup.
WordPress Security
WordPress usually patches vulnerabilities with an update but, if your web hosting lacks a good security practices, you can become another hacked victim because of mistakes of other people. 41% of websites are exploited and hacked due to picking the wrong hosting. Running just a plain site with WordPress is not too hard. But after you add many plugins, it’s becoming more difficult. Usually people who are hacking webpages, are using automated tools, and with that they can search through thousands of webpages and find vulnerabilities.
What kind of steps can you do in order to keep your WordPress website safe?
Always use premium plugins and themes. Be very skeptic if they are getting updated rarely or if they are maintained poorly. Good idea is to take notes of actions for your plugins with WP Security Audit Log. It is being very useful for tracking the changes on a daily basis. This of course doesn’t mean that Logs can help you in preventing problem with security but it will be much easier for you to trace problem source. Don’t download plugins that are free and the ones that are not downloaded in large numbers, stay away from them. Even if using premium themes and plugins, doesn’t have to mean your webpage will be safe. But you can be sure, that if any of the exploits are found out, the response will be quick.
Username and password
Always when you create website, protect your login page, as this is one of the key targets for attacks. Login page of your website is probably one of most vulnerable parts. You need to choose username that’s unusual and have a strong password. Don’t choose ” Admin ” as your username, it’s not good but many people use this. This was previously also default username for WordPress primary account. Don’t use predictable usernames because you will ease the job for hackers to break in. Most common passwords are : 12345, 123456, 12345678, password and qwerty. When you create password, picking very unusual random string characters will create you good password for defense. Best combination for password would be mixing uppercase and lowercase letters with special characters and punctuations. Your password should not make any sense or be connected with you in any way to be harder to guess. Also limit the number of possible individual login attempts. This is probably easiest method to defense yourself from attacks.
Wordfence
Having good security plugin is really essential for your WordPress security. Wordfence is really good software as it has real time blocking of networks, attackers. It limits bots and scrapers, it also blocks users who are trespassing the rules of your security, it protects you against attacks and scans for back doors or malicious scripts.
I would like to quote Mad Eye Moody from Harry Potter movie that said : Constant Vigilance! So keep updating your website constantly. As I’ve already said, there is not such thing as being fully safe and secured online. You can have many security measures and your webpage could still get hacked. By making sure your login pages are strong, your usernames and passwords hardened and unfamiliar, your website updated regularly, greatly improves the chances of being protected against many threats on a daily basis.
