Introduction

A Guide to WordPress Website Security.

The internet is constantly advancing, so staying on top of your website security is key to keeping your website secure, safe, and prepared for anything.

WordPress is the most reliable platform for website content management and analytics as it is user-friendly and cost-effective. But it also has the potential to attract hackers and website hijackers. With users using WordPress to create over 28 million websites, hackers can easily penetrate and breach your website privacy. Plenty of other sites created using WordPress are potentially at risk; once the site is hacked.

Contents

1. What do hacked websites have in common?


2. How do I prevent this?


3. Summary

Author: Ahmed Fareed
IT Consultant

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 Whether it’s outdated plugins (or not having any), an insecure hosting provider, or insecure usernames and passwords, this can lead to huge risks for your website.

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)

What do hacked websites have in common?

Firstly, if you haven’t already, look to improve your Username and Password Strength. With 71% of accounts being protected by passwords used on multiple websites, an insecure password or username is one of the leading reasons for breaches.

Next, keep your WordPress security plugins up to date. Outdated plugins can put your website at risk, and make it much easier for hackers to gain access to your website.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.

An essential 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 the 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 requires vigilance in all aspects of website design and usage. So, we at TechChaps hope this helped you understand it a bit better! Here are listed some of the best plugins and helpful tools recommended to make your WordPress website a little more secure.

1. SX User Name Security
2. Edit Author Slug
3. Limit Login Attempts Reloaded