WordPress is the most popular website and blogging CMS system. Because WordPress is so widely used, it’s an incredibly popular target for hackers. The open source nature of the WordPress code is also allows hackers to find exploits and hacek your site. Below are some most important and essential WordPress security tips, which will help you to keeps you, your site and your visitors safe and secure from hackers. These WordPress security tips don’t guarantee a 100% protection against hacking attempts, but they will protect you against the majority of attacks.
Use Secure Hosting
There are several companies now offering WordPress hosting, but make sure your WordPress site is host on a secured hosting service provider. When search for a web hosting provider don’t shortlist cheapest service provider, but select a company who provide all WordPress necessary features with good technical support and secure hosting. Following are some essential features which you should check before chose hosting provider.
- Support for the latest PHP and MySQL versions
- The mod_rewrite Apache module
- Account isolation
- Web Application Firewall
- Intrusion detecting system
Keep Everything Updated
Each update or newer version of WordPress not only contain new features, but it’s also brings with security patches and bugfixes. Hackers can easily target older versions of WordPress with known security issues. So it is most important to update everything – not just WordPress but also update your all plugins and theme to their latest versions. If you don’t keep your website updated, you could be leaving yourself open to attacks. So don’t ignore ‘Please update now’ dashboard messages.
Unique, Strong Username and Password
If the Username and Password of your dashboard is simple, then it is very easy for hackers to hack it and log into your site without you knowing. Keep following tips in mind when you create WordPress user account.
Never use “admin” as your username
When you first created your site, by default your username was set to admin, just like most other WordPress sites out there. Most of the hackers will assume that your dashboard username is “admin”. You can easily block a lot of brute-force and other attacks simply by changing your admin username differently. Also try to avoid common usernames such as backadmin, siteadmin, administrator, your website name or your name.
Very Strong Passwords
It’s strongly recommend that choose a complex very strong password which contain letters in uppercase and lowercase, numbers and characters. Don’t choose a password that’s similar to your username, website, your name or a simple word with a few changes.
Limit login attempts
Limit Login Attempts means, allowing user to how many login details retries will be allowed, and how long an IP will be locked out for after too many failed login attempts. In the case of a hacker or a bot attempting a brute-force attack to crack your password, it can be useful to limit the number of failed login attempts from a single IP address.
Use Two-Factor Authentication
For Two-Factor Authentication requires a user to login with not just their username and password, but also a unique code that’s generated for one-time-use and sent to a device via SMS or an iOS/Android app. Enabling two-factor authentication for your WordPress website will significantly improve the security of your website.
Secure WordPress Admin Area
Limit Access to Important Pages
Your admin dashboard and login page are the most important pages which can grant access to your entire site. Limiting access to these pages means you and your users will be the only ones that will be able to access your site.
Change Database wp_ Table Prefix
By default, each table in the WordPress database begins with wp_. If you don’t change the database prefix, the table names of your site’s database are easily known to the person who trying to hack your site. There are many plugins available that can change the table prefix.
Hide your WordPress Version
It is very important to upgrade your WordPress with latest version but for some reason, if you cannot upgrade to the latest WordPress version, you should not make the WordPress version that you are using visible to others. As the bugs of previous releases are known to all through wordpress.org, it will easier for them to hack your website.
Wisely Choose Theme and Plugins
Be careful about installing themes and plugins. It’s important to install only those themes and plugins which are regularly maintained and updated. Weak themes and plugins may have buggy codes through which some other codes or sql queries can be injected or some other harmful activities can be done to damage your site or its ranking. It’s strongly suggested that only use themes and plugins that are listed on WordPress.org or built by a well-established developer.
Remove Unused Plugins, Themes & User Accounts
Keeping unused or inactive plugins, themes and users on your WordPress site increases your attack surface. So remove all Unused Plugins, Themes & User Accounts, if you need inactive users in your WordPress database, then change their role to ‘Subscriber’ in order to limit any actions that could be performed.
Backup Your Site & Database
Even by following all these WordPress security tips, you could still get hacked, so it is very important that take backup of your complete site and database regularly. When you take a backup of complete site and database, that means you can easily recover your site if something were to go wrong such as making a change that breaks your site or if site get hacked. There are many
