4 Handy Tips to Safeguard Your WordPress Website

Everyone is at least a little bit apprehensive about security on a WordPress website.

The platform and your website itself is actually quite secure in and of itself. The problem usually comes from recklessly downloading and installing themes and plugins and widgets, or even hosting your website on a server equivalent of a soup kitchen. Generally, a high yield target like WordPress sites are attacked and hacked without the user even knowing it, injected with spam which can get it banned or penalized from various serious engines.

In order to secure your WordPress websites, you need to become proactive and lay down some laws. Here are the 4 most important (and often overlooked) security tips to safeguard your WordPress website.

 

1.     Trusted sources

Make sure that you are only downloading anything like themes, plugins, and widgets only from sources mentioned on WordPress.org or .com repositories and/ or pages.

The official plugin and theme repositories and sources like Envato market, Elegant Themes, iThemes, StudioPress, WPMUDEV, WooThemes, Yoast, and others like them can be trusted. You can be sure that anything you download from these websites will not be laced with hidden backdoors, malicious bits of code, and that the product (theme/plugin) is consistently updated and supported.

Any ‘free full version’ of a decidedly premium product will be packed with malicious code. If you download pirated items, you will eventually get locked out or banned of your WordPress site.

 

2.     Passwords and username

This is the easiest step in the journey, the simplest line in the book, and takes nothing from you.

Every character (alphabet, number, or special characters that are allowed in passwords) you add in your admin username and password increases your security and reduces your chances of getting breached via brute force algorithm attacks on your login exponentially. Every character counts.

Make sure to set up long, complex password and username for your WordPress admin, and never go with default username and password. Also ensure that you have a separate ‘Editor’ account to publish your posts under (admin account name will otherwise show up beneath every post you publish from it.

 

3.     Security Plugins

These are long-term investment, and their yields are usually spectacular in terms of consistent, continuous uptime.

Security plugins available for WordPress websites come in free as well as premium forms, and there are many of them. The best in line are Sucuri security and WordFence, both of which scan your website content and database routinely for malware, monitor activity, track users, keep a log of it all, and give you countless security hardening features from .htaccess to wp-config.php, login security, IP blocking, blacklisting, and many more.

High traffic websites that have made the transition to HTTP/2.0 can use W3C Total Cache, integrate it with KeyCDN with DDoS protection enabled for added security against DDoS attacks.

Always download a multi-featured security plugin instead of countless little plugins for each feature separately. It’s good for both security and performance to have minimal number of plugins on your website active at any given point in time.

 

4.     Update

Make sure to get your themes, plugins and the WordPress core updated in a routinely manner.

WordPress rolls out at least 3-4 major platform upgrades (the ones that are exclusively named after jazz musicians like Clifford, Coleman, etc.) and at least 2-3 maintenance and/ or security releases (minor version upgrades) for each of the major versions. The latter are updated (by default) automatically, but major version upgrades need to get the Green light from you. Always keep an eye on Admin >> Update screen to find out.

Plugins and themes, if they are downloaded from trusted or developed by a reliable WordPress development company will usually be updated in pace with platform updates, so make sure to update them too.

 

Endnote

Airtight security comes from some effort on your part in hardening your WordPress security and maintaining your WordPress website regularly, regardless of your niche or scale.

Author Bio: Tracey Jones is a well-known writer and a professional WordPress Developer for a reliable Drupal to WordPress Company – HireWPGeeks Ltd. Instead of all these things, she loves to share her innovative ideas with others across the web online regarding web design and development trends.