How to secure a Wordpress site

WordPress is no doubt the most popular CMS worldwide. Its popularity makes it a major target for hackers.
Keeping a website secure should be the major concern of every serious website owner. Google blacklists around 10,000+ websites every day for malware and around 50,000 for phishing every week. Getting blacklisted by google is a risk with heavy revenue consequences, a risk no website owner should take for any excuse whatsoever.

As with every other thing about wordpress, keeping it secure is not a very difficult job and doesn’t require so much(if at all) of technical knowledge. We will be discussing in this post several steps you can take to keep your wordpress website secure.
WordPress core software is audited and updated regularly by wordpress expert developers, and thus very secure. You cannot however, guarantee the safety from the perspective of other factors like user activities, outdated plugins and themes that are not directly under the wordpress team care. While wordpress makes sure to provide access to regularly updated facilities (plugins and themes) via its wordpress.org depositary for users to build sites to suit their needs, there is a lot that can be done on your own part to keep your site secure.

Tips to secure wordpress without coding

1. Backups
Aside getting hacked, there are other incidents that could lead to permanent loss of data, eg server crashes, database loss, misconfiguration etc. Backups are your first defense against any WordPress attack or unforseen losses. Remember, no website or host is 100% secure. If government websites can be hacked, then so can yours. Never ignore that possibility. Plan for it, with backups. That way you can easily restore your website should any of these incidents occur.
Some web hosts offer regular off-site backups for a fee or free as part of the hosting package. A popular host used by some of our clients, Solidhostglobal is reputed to be offering this service for free along with their hosting packages.

READ ALSO  Start your own business or work for salary? This will solve the puzzle for you!

What If your host isn’t offering you a backup solution?

You can still do that on your own using Codeguard website backup Service. Codeguard is a very popular off-site backup solution. They have been trusted by thousands of businesses worldwide. It’s a solution that can work for any type of website, not just wordpress.

Another great choice is the use of wordpress backup plugins.
There are many free and paid WordPress backup plugins like Updraftplus and Vault that you can use to store a backup of your website on a remote storage on the cloud. Popular remote storage providers include Amazon, Drop box, Google Drive, Stash etc. You can keep backups based on how frequently you update your website, the ideal setting might be either once a day or real-time backups.

2. Install a Security Plugin
A security plugin offers an auditing and monitoring system that keeps track of everything that happens on your website.
This includes file integrity monitoring, failed login attempts, malware scanning, etc.

A very important feature that comes with many popular security plugins is the ‘web application firewall (WAF)’. It is a website firewall that blocks all malicious traffic before it even reaches your website.
Many security plugins come with assorted layers of security, and added services. There are quite many out there, but you need to check with your host if they support your choice security plugin. Although most plugins are compatible with any host, there have been reported cases of incompatibility. Top security plugins to try out include Wordfence, Succuri, Shield security, etc.

3. Get SSL/HTTPS
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a protocol which encrypts data transfer between your website and users browser. You can confirm if a site has this protocol by checking for the green padlock icon in the website address area of the browser. This encryption makes it harder for a 3rd party to sniff around and steal information. Search engines have huge regard for websites with SSL, which is a very good reason why every website owner is encouraged to have an SSL certificate.
It’s not really that expensive to get a domain validation (DV) certificate. With some web hosts You can get a free SSL certificate with your hosting package.

READ ALSO  What really is blogging?

4. Keep your installation always up to date.
Outdated scripts are one of the major vulnerabilities that can get a site hacked. Hackers are working every hour of the day to break into websites through loopholes in outdated scripts. By keeping everything updated you keep this part of the risk well taken care of. It’s true that updating a site could be quite cumbersome, especially if you’re running a big website on wordpress. You can get a free wordpress update for all scripts and softwares on your site with our Website management Service.

5. Use strong Passwords
Some people are allergic to passwords 😂. It’s funny but true. People don’t like to stress themselves trying to remember passwords. The fact remains that the most common WordPress hacking attempts take advantage of weak or stolen passwords. You can tighten your security by using stronger passwords that are unique for your website. Not just for WordPress admin area, but also for FTP accounts, database, WordPress hosting account, and your custom email addresses which use your site’s domain name. Of course you don’t need to be told what a hacker can do if they get access to your website’s custom email accounts.

You can handle the above recommendations to secure your wordpress website without any coding knowledge. If you can do them well then your site is good to go. To achieve a higher layer of security however, you’d be needing to dig into coding work. If you wish for advanced security for your website you can contact our expert team to get our experts handle the work for you.

READ ALSO  Does your business really need a website?
User Review


    Leave a Reply