How to Secure a WordPress Website: 7 Tricks to Keep Your Website Safe

Google blacklists around 10,000+ websites every day for malware and around 50,000 for phishing every week. Hackers are increasingly focusing their efforts on WordPress websites. You are not an exception, regardless of the type of content you give on your website. You could be hacked if you don’t take necessary safeguards. You should check the security of your website, as you do with anything technology-related.
We’ll go over the top 7 best tips for keeping your WordPress website secure against vulnerabilities in this guide. But first, let’s dig a little deeper into why website security is important to you.

Why Do You Need to Secure WordPress?

If you’re running a business website, you’ll want to pay special attention to WordPress security. It is your job, as an online business owner, to secure your business website in the same way that it is your responsibility to defend your physical store facility.

WordPress is a fantastic platform for individuals looking for a flexible, adaptable, and most importantly, secure website builder. WordPress’s team is committed to make WordPress sites as secure as possible, releasing automatic updates on a regular basis to assist you improve the security of your site. However, nothing on the internet is completely secure. Cybercrime damages are expected to cost up to $10.5 trillion per year by 2025, and a hacked WordPress site can steal user information, passwords, install harmful software, and even spread malware to your users. It’s therefore crucial that you’re willing to put as much time and effort as possible into securing your website as you dedicate to the design and content stages.

7 Smart Ways to Effectively Secure Your WordPress Website:

1.Choose a Good Hosting Company:

Your WordPress hosting service is usually the first barrier that hackers must overcome in order to gain access to your website. A reputable shared hosting service, such as Hostgator or Hostinger, goes above and beyond to secure its servers from frequent threats. When you pay a little more for a good hosting firm, you get extra levels of security automatically applied to your website. You can also substantially speed up your WordPress site, provide automatic backups, automatic WordPress upgrades, and more advanced security configurations to protect your website by choosing reliable WordPress hosting. Also, a good hosting provider can impact how well your site performs, how reliable it is, how large it can grow, and even how highly it ranks in search engines. Once you’ve chosen your host, it’s also important to keep a close eye on how it’s performing.

2.Use a Reputable Theme:

When it comes to selecting a WordPress theme, you may believe that the appearance is the only factor to consider. You’d be mistaken! The theme you select might also have a significant impact on your website’s security. Nulled or cracked themes can be found on a few websites. A nulled or cracked theme is an unlicensed version of a premium theme that can only be obtained through unlawful means. They are also quite hazardous to your website. Those themes may contain hidden harmful code that could cause your website and database to crash or log your admin credentials. Users of nulled themes do not receive any help from the developers because they are provided unlawfully. This means that if they cause any issues to the site, you’ll have to figure out how to fix them and secure your WordPress site by yourself.

While it may be tempting to save a few bucks, always avoid nulled themes. Take a look at the reviews of the theme you’re interested in. If they’re good, you can presume it’s safe to install.

3.Install a WordPress Security Plugin:

A security plugin takes care of your site security, scans for malware and monitors your site 24/7 to regularly check what is happening on your site. After backups, the next thing we need to do is set up an auditing and monitoring system that keeps track of everything that happens on your website. This includes file integrity monitoring, failed login attempts, malware scanning, etc. sucuri.net is a great WordPress security plugin.

4.Create Secure Login Credentials:

Everyone knows the standard WordPress login page URL. The backend of the website is accessed from there, and that is the reason why people try to brute force their way in. Just add /wp-login.php or /wp-admin/ at the end of your domain name and there you go, then you’ll be given the opportunity to create a login username and password. The username will default to admin, although you can change it if you’d like.

Your password, however, is a very important and weak point part of website security and unfortunately often overlooked. It’s important you use a complex password, or better yet, one that is auto-generated with a variety of numbers, nonsensical letter combinations and special characters like % or ^. In order to keep your WordPress website secure, be sure to use strong passwords for:
Your user account
FTP accounts
The WordPress database
Your hosting account
Email address
Everything else that is connected with your site

Also, set the limits on login chance of a brute force attempt as the hacker gets locked out before they can finish their attack.

5.Move Your WordPress Site to SSL/HTTPS:

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a protocol which encrypts data transfer between your website and users browser. This encryption makes it harder for someone to sniff around and steal information. Once you enable SSL, your website will use HTTPS instead of HTTP, you will also see a padlock sign next to your website address in the browser.

SSL is mandatory for any sites that process sensitive information, i.e. passwords, or credit card details. Without an SSL certificate all of the data between the user’s web browser and your web server are delivered in plain text. This can be readable by hackers. By using an SSL, the sensitive information is encrypted before it is transferred between their browser and your server, making it more difficult to read and making your site more secure.

Now, it is easier than ever to start using SSL for all your WordPress websites. Many hosting companies are now offering a free SSL certificate (Let’s Encrypt) for your WordPress website.
If your hosting company does not offer one, then you can purchase one from godaddy.com.

6.Keeping WordPress Updated:

Keeping your WordPress up to date is a good practice to keeping your website secure. With every update, developers make a few changes, oftentimes including updates to security features. By staying updated with the latest version you are helping protect yourself against being a target for pre-identified loopholes and exploits hackers can use to gain access to your site.
After all, 55.9% of entry points for attacks are known to come from vulnerable plugins (i.e. those that haven’t been updated). So, It is important to update your plugins and themes for the same reasons.
Most of the time, WordPress updates are incredibly minor and — whilst you may not notice a difference — potential hackers certainly will!

7.Install a WordPress Backup Solution:

Despite your very best efforts, sometimes the worst happens, and hackers manage to infiltrate your website. It doesn’t have to mean the end of your online presence, though. But Backups allow you to quickly restore your WordPress site in case something bad was to happen, you can restore your site to the way it was before it was hacked or otherwise harmed. This will help you fix the issue and move on as quickly as possible.
There are many free and paid WordPress backup plugins (UpdraftPlus or BlogVault) that you can use. The most important thing you need to know when it comes to backups is that you must regularly save full-site backups apart from your hosting account.

8.Disable File Editing:

WordPress comes with a built-in code editor which allows you to edit your theme and plugin files right from your WordPress admin area. In the wrong hands, this feature can be a security risk which is why we recommend turning it off.
You can easily do this by adding the following code in your wp-config.php file.
1 // Disallow file edit
2 define( ‘DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT’, true );

Alternatively, you can do this with 1-click using the Hardening feature in the free sucuri plugin.

WordPress security is one of the crucial parts of a website. If you don’t maintain your WordPress security, hackers can easily attack your site or you’ll spend hours trying to repair the damage. You may permanently lose data or see your personal information compromised. Maintaining your website security isn’t hard and can be done without spending a penny. Some of these tips are for advanced users but if you have any questions message us.

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