WordPress is by far the most popular content management system, accounts for over one-third of all websites online. It allows users to easily create their websites and manage them with tons of themes and plugins. However, its popularity also attracts hackers, who are constantly looking for bugs or flaws in the system. To protect your WordPress website against these hackers and ever-changing attack methods, you can take a look at these 7 simple steps.
Table of Contents
Update
Most updates include fixes for vulnerabilities, and some of them already might be known by the hackers. Developers are always working to find these vulnerabilities, bugs, or flaws to fix them, so make sure your WordPress version and the plugins are always up to date. It only takes few minutes to update, but it can save you from various unwanted situations.
HTTPS
When you enable an SSL certificate, it encrypts the data being transferred from your website to the visitor, and your website uses HTTPS instead of HTTP, allowing your users to know that they are protected. You can easily get a free SSL certificate from a non-profit organization, Let’s Encrypt, which is supported by Chrome, Facebook, Mozilla, and many other major internet companies. Most hosting service providers are also offering a free SSL certificate for WordPress websites.
Backup
Even if you do everything to protect your websites, you can’t be too careful. Sometimes a user mistake or an attack on your hosting service provider can cause unexpected damage to your website. For situations like this, always have multiple backups in various places. So instead of losing all of your data, you can restore your website after a short downtime.
Permissions
When creating user accounts, make sure that they only got the permissions they need. It can minimize the human error risk and if one of the users got hacked, it also minimizes the actions that the hacker can do. Also, make sure that they are using strong passwords or two-factor authentication for their WordPress accounts.
Web Application Firewall
Web Application Firewall, or WAF for short, is one of the essential tools to protect a website. It basically blocks malicious traffic before reaching your website. A DNS level website firewall can also direct the traffic through its cloud proxy servers and only allows the safe ones to the server. A WAF can easily protect the website against DDoS attacks, one of the most popular attacks used by hackers.
Plugins
As we mentioned before, there are tons of plugins for WordPress, and obviously, some of them focus on protecting the website against attacks and human errors. Some of these plugins are actively working to find backdoors or other problems that can cause problems and to fix them. These plugins mostly focus on different aspects of security so it would be wise to take a look at them and install the ones that you may need.
Delete the “admin”
The admin account is basically the owner of the website. If a hacker manages to find its password somehow, he/she can do whatever he/she wants to your website. The default username for the admin account in WordPress is “admin”, which makes it easier for hackers. However, if you change the username “admin” after setting up your WordPress website, hackers should find both the username and the password. You can easily create a new admin account and delete the old one, change a plugin to change the username, or change the username from phpMyAdmin.