A Guide to WordPress Website Security
The internet is constantly advancing, and so staying on top of your website security is key to keeping your website secure, safe and prepared for anything.
As WordPress is so widely used, this comes with being a popular target for hackers. With users using WordPress to create over 28 million websites, this makes it much easier for hackers, as once one site is hacked, this could mean plenty other sites created using WordPress are potentially at risk as well.
What do Hacked Websites have in common?
Lack of proper security. It all stems down to not having the right security for your website. Whether it’s outdated plugins (or not having any at all), an insecure hosting provider, or insecure usernames and passwords, this can lead to huge risks for your website.
In fact, a report from Sucuri in 2019 found that 47% of all hacked websites contained at least one backdoor (a vulnerability allowing hackers to gain access to a website)
How do I prevent this?
- Firstly, if you haven’t already, look to improve your Username and Password Strength. An insecure password or username is one of the leading reasons for breaches, with 71% of accounts being protected by passwords used on multiple websites.
- Next, keep your WordPress security plugins up to date. Outdated plugins can put your website at risk, and make it much easier hackers to gain access to your website. To combat this, you can set your plugins and themes to auto-update, so you won’t forget to update them. As well as keeping them updated, only download trusted plugins and themes. Some ways to tell if something is trusted or not is to look at its reviews, downloads and whether it’s regularly updated or not.
- A really important way of staying safe is to hide your WordPress username. WordPress usernames can be easily guessed, with tools such as WPScan making this very simple to do. You can find out how to hide your username here.
At TechChaps, one of our sites that we manage started to show about 20+ login attempts every day, before the IPs were blocked by the Login Attempts Reloaded plugin. Upon investigation, we found that it was due to the ability to easily find the user_id and usernames from our WordPress site without any hassle.
Summary
Website security can be a daunting topic, so we at TechChaps hope this helped you understand it a little bit better! Below you can find a few plugins and helpful tools we recommend to make your WordPress website a little more secure.
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