WordPress security is a critical issue for all website owners. Every day, Google blacklists roughly 10,000+ websites for malware and around 50,000 for phishing.
Although the WordPress platform is excellent and safe, it can still be attacked by hackers since no system is entirely secure. However, because most problems in the WordPress source code are quickly repaired, the situation of the website being hacked stems primarily from the user’s poor WordPress web security.
If you are serious about your website, you must follow WordPress security best practices. We will provide all of the best WordPress security techniques in this post to help you safeguard your website from hackers and viruses.
Why Is Website Security Critical?
A hacked WordPress site can seriously harm your company’s income and reputation. Hackers have the ability to steal user information and passwords, install dangerous software, and even spread malware to your users.
Worse, you may be forced to pay ransomware to hackers in order to recover access to your website.
If your website is a company, you must pay special attention to WordPress security. It is the obligation of the business owner to secure their physical retail facility, just as it is your responsibility as an online business owner to protect your business website.
Ways You Can Increase WordPress Security
Admin account should not be set as “admin”
Right from the beginning of creating a WordPress website, when naming the admin account, you should not set it as admin, administrator, or root, etc. Because these are very common names, and hackers can use the attack method known as “Brute Force Attack” to try to login to the admin page.
If your website is leaving the administrator account in a less secure way, please change it immediately. Change can be done in 2 ways, as follows:
- Create an account with a new username and set the highest administrator privileges for it. After that, log in to the new account and delete the account with the other admin username.
- Login to the PhpMyadmin site, then find the wp-users table and change the username as admin in the user_login.
Set a complex password
Setting a password that is too basic, like the username, is easy for hackers to discover. When creating passwords, avoid including your date of birth, phone number, ID number, or other personal information.
A strong password will contain capital, lowercase, numerals, and special characters. Furthermore, the password must be a particular length (about 8–12 characters).
Secure WordPress settings with 2-step verification
The current 2-layer security method is used for many accounts, including Google and Facebook accounts. It helps your website to be protected by one more layer when, unfortunately, someone knows the account and password.
Regularly Backup Your Web Data
Web data backup needs to be done regularly (daily or weekly). You can perform manual or automatic backups. But to save effort, you should set up automatic backup system or use backup plugin for your WordPress.
The most important thing to remember about backups is that you must save full-site backups to a location other than your hosting account. We recommend storing data in the cloud via Amazon, Dropbox, or private clouds like Stash.
Install security plugin for WordPress
If you are not a security expert, then with WordPress you are always backed by great plugins that can help you protect your website.
Currently, including both free and paid plugins, there are many plugins that support WordPress security enhancement. But there are a few options that we recommend for you to use:
- Sucuri
- Wordfence
- iThemes Security
Update WordPress, themes, plugins to the latest version
New versions of WordPress, themes or plugins will often be bug fixes, new feature updates. So whenever there is an update notification, check the changelogs to see what’s new in the new update.
If you find that the update is a fix for an error, back up the website and then immediately update to the new version to avoid risks.
Website backup is necessary because the update can be a feature upgrade and many incompatible themes and plugins will cause errors for the website. At this point, the backup will help you restore the old version temporarily and you have time to find a way to fix the error.
Turn off editing plugin and theme files
This will help your website avoid being broken when someone can access the web admin page.
There are some quite sophisticated hackers when they insert some malicious code and files into plugins and themes on your website.
So, the solution here is to disable direct file editing in the WordPress Admin. Turning off this function means that, to edit a certain file, you must access the file manager via FTP or File Manager.
How to turn off the plugin and theme file editing functions on the web is very simple. Simply insert the following code “define(‘DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT’,true);” at the end of the wp-config.php file and save it.
Conclusion
The following are some simple ways of helping defend your WordPress site against malicious assaults. Completing all of the advice we provide will not totally safeguard your site.
However, to guarantee that your website is fully safeguarded, use the WordPress security tips listed above.
