How to secure your WordPress website

Achieve Higher Rankings with London's SEO Experts
How to secure your WordPress website

By

 

Be it blogging or website creation, WordPress is one such Content Management System that is popular and the most preferred choice. It is quite simple and easy to handle, it has a lot of amazing features as well as a very powerful SEO.

No doubts here as to why this is one of the top choices for a webpage. However, though popular, the risks attached to any such software is very high. Hackers always find ways of getting through popular software such as WordPress and access the sites of users. This is something that you would not want, as getting the account suspended due to phishing or other similar activity can damage your reputation. In addition to this, a lot of expenses will have to be incurred to fix the issue.

Also, regaining the trust of clients is very difficult and time-consuming. And not to forget, this could impact your search ratings as well.

However, there are many ways in which you can safeguard your WordPress site and avoid the attempts of hacking.

7 simple tips to secure your WordPress site 

1. The Two-Factor Authentication Login

This step is something that we normally avoid in order to access our accounts easily. However, this step is crucial for safeguarding your account. Implementing the two-factor authentication (2FA) might be a very simple method but it is one of the very effective ways of avoiding such attacks. It provides an additional layer of login security to your website as it requests additional details to validate your logins such as proof of ID, secret questions or a code generated on your smartphone which needs to be entered on your webpage in order to gain entry. An excellent example is the WP Google Authentication plugin.

2.  Enforce Login Limits

A simple way of avoiding hacking attempts on your webpage is to reduce the number of login attempts. This also prevents any unauthorized manual attempts at logging into your webpage. In this method, there is a mechanism of locking when the webpage offers a retry for login. The plugin -WP limit login, allows the user to avoid any kind of forced attack on your login page. It does so by blocking the IP addresses that surpass the limit of failed login attempts during any specific time period.

 3. Changing the Login URL of the Admin

Many people usually leave the admin login of their WordPress webpage as a default one, and this normally ends in wp-admin or the wp-login.php. The security of your webpage can be enhanced by switching this to a less predictable login like /wp-login.php? or even my_login.php etc. This might be a very simple step, but it prevents any kind of automated savage force attacks that have will attack your default admin login. You can check out the security plugin – iThemes for this purpose. 

4.  Use more secure Passwords

The basic and most simple security measure is to keep changing your passwords regularly and also make your password very strong. Do not use commonly known information such as names, special event dates or birthdays, etc., as these are known to many people. The password chosen must always be a combination of various lowercase, special characters, uppercase as well as numbers that make it stronger and tougher to crack. You could also make use of a password generator tool in case you find it tough to create a strong password. 

5. WP-Admin Directory must be protected with a password

The very crucial directory of any WordPress website is the wp-admin directory. Hence, it has to be protected by a strong password. You need to have two passwords – one to log in and one to protect the admin area. You could make use of the AskApache Password Protect plugin.

6. Forcing Strong Passwords for User Accounts

In case you have a blog that has many users, you must ensure that all the members have a very strong password. In case they do not, you must force them to have one. A plugin such as Force Strong Passwords ensures that the admin area of your WordPress webpage is secure. The plugin makes sure that the users are compelled to make use of secure, and tough to crack passwords that make use of good password protocols, like the mix of upper and lower case characters, symbols, and numbers.

7. Switch to HTTPs (SSL/TLS)

You might not be aware of the Man-In-The-Middle Attack (MITM). MITM is a situation wherein the information sent between parties has been eavesdropped by someone who is monitoring the data that goes back and forth. A common way to stop this is to immediately switch from HTTP which is insecure to HTTPs that are secure by making use of an SSL Certificate. This generates an encrypted link between the web server and the browser which cannot be penetrated. 

Conclusion

You might have seen that your website does not need complicated steps to safeguard it. Most of the steps are simple ones that are mostly neglected and side-lined. Along with strong passwords, a lot of plugins are available these days that make sure your WordPress webpage is safe and always protected. Hacking is quite common these days and most of the time hackers are able to get into your webpage due to your sheer carelessness.

This can cost you a lot in terms of negative reputation, money and time spend to reset the webpage, and time spent to get back the trust of your customers/viewers. In order to avoid this, a simple method like a strong password with a combination of various characters can save your webpage from potential hackers. You must remember that the solutions lie in simple things!

Author Profile

Jitendra Vaswani
Jitendra Vaswani is a Digital Marketing Practitioner & international keynote speaker currently living digital nomad lifestyle. He is the founder of kickass Internet Marketing blog www.bloggersIdeas.com where he interviewed marketing legends like Neil Patel & Rand Fishkin.

During his more than 6+yrs long expertise in Digital Marketing, Jitendra has been a marketing consultant, trainer, speaker and author of “Inside A Hustler’s Brain: In Pursuit of Financial Freedom” which has sold over 20,000 copies, worldwide. He has trained 3000+ digital marketing professionals till date and has been conducting Digital marketing workshops across the globe from 5+ yrs. His ultimate goal is to help people build businesses through digitization make them realize that dreams do come true if you stay driven.
Share to spread the knowledge!