WP Easify

Secure Your Website

WP Easify
September 15, 2020
8:05 am

5 Simple Steps to Secure Your WordPress Website

If you own a WordPress website, you want to make sure it’s always up and running, fast, secure, and not hacked or infected.

To keep it that way, you need to properly manage and protect it.
Below are the first 5 steps you can take right now to significantly improve your WordPress website’s security.

01 – WordPress Backups

Regularly backing up your website is the single most important thing to do when it comes to website maintenance and security. In case something goes wrong, you will want to have a recent copy of your website that you can easily restore.

You should make at least 2 different daily backups to offsite locations. The best options are:

Find a good hosting provider that will make daily backups of your website for you.

Use a free plugin like UpdraftPlus that lets you make automatic WordPress backups to offsite locations like DropBox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 and Rackspace.

02 – Updates

Keeping your WordPress core, themes, and plugins up to date ensures that your website remains safe and operating. With each version update, bugs and security issues are fixed and patched.

As per these reports, 80% of hacked WordPress websites were running outdated themes or plugins.

By simply updating your WordPress core, themes, and plugins to the latest versions, you can significantly improve your overall website security.

03 – Latest Php Version

Apart from keeping your WordPress core, themes, and plugins up to date, you should also ensure that you are using the latest PHP version available.

This will not only improve your website’s performance, but will also have a greater impact on your website’s security.

PHP versions are usually fully supported for two years. After that period, bugs and security issues are typically not fixed and patched anymore.

So, if your PHP version is 7.1 or lower, you are being unnecessarily exposed to security vulnerabilities.

04 – Brute Force Protection

Brute force attacks are the most common types of attacks to WordPress sites. These are attacks where hackers and bots try gaining access to a site by guessing usernames and passwords, over and over again, until they’re successful.

To protect your information you can use a custom username, strong passwords, two-factor authentication, limit login attempts, set up a custom login URL, and delete unused WordPress installations.

Even better, you can use a WordPress security plugin that will do all of those things for you and significantly decrease the chances a hacker can gain access to your site.

05 – WordPress Security Plugins

According to WP Forms, the average website is attacked 44 times every day.

And if any of those attacks are successful, it could seriously hurt your business online.

That’s why you should install a WordPress security plugin like Sucuri Security or iThemes Security.

These will monitor all security-related events within your WordPress install, including malware, and notify you immediately about any suspicious activity observed on your website.