WordPress security is vital since bot attacks are becoming more frequent these days. You can defend your website against malware attacks and hackers.
There are some steps to take to secure your WordPress website. You can implement those suggestions. You should follow all steps to safeguard your website against security flaws.
Are you ready? Let’s go ahead and begin.
Website security is essential, and you should take additional care of WordPress security if your website is a business.
WordPress updates
WordPress is open-source software that receives frequent updates and maintenance. WordPress automatically installs minor updates by default. Major releases require you to start the upgrade manually.
You can install thousands of plugins and themes on your website, which is another feature that WordPress offers. You can enable auto-updates for plugins and themes.
These updates are essential for the stability and security of your WordPress website. Ensure that the theme, plugins, and WordPress core are all updated.
- User permissions and strong passwords
The most popular method of hacking WordPress is the use of stolen passwords. Utilizing more brutal passwords exclusive to your website may make that more challenging. Not only for the WordPress admin area but also for your custom email addresses that use your website’s domain name, FTP accounts, databases, and WordPress hosting accounts.
Due to their difficulty remembering, many users dislike strong passwords. The benefit is that you are no longer required to memorize passwords. A password manager such as Dashlane can be used.
Giving anyone access to your WordPress admin account only when necessary is another way to lower the risk. Before adding new user accounts and authors to your WordPress website, ensure you understand user responsibilities and capabilities in WordPress if you work with a large team or have guest writers.
WordPress Hosting responsibility
The most significant factor affecting the security of your WordPress website is your WordPress hosting provider. A reputable shared hosting company will go above and beyond to safeguard its servers from typical security risks.
If your hosting providers are Hostinger, Bluehost, or Siteground, you must take extra steps to safeguard your website.
The hosting provider monitors their network to spot any unusual activities.
Good hosting providers have mechanisms in place to stop massive denial-of-service attacks.
They maintain the most recent versions of their hardware, PHP scripts, and server software to stop hackers from exploiting a known security flaw in an outdated version.
They can safeguard your data in the event of a significant accident since they have disaster recovery and accident plans ready to be implemented.
You and many other users share the server resources when subscribing to a shared hosting plan. It increases the possibility of cross-site contamination, in which a hacker could target your website by using a nearby website.
A managed WordPress hosting service gives your website a more secure basis. For the protection of your website, WordPress hosting providers provide more sophisticated security options, automatic backups, and WordPress updates.
Simple Steps for WordPress Security (No Coding)
Enhancing WordPress security might be daunting for non-tech-savvy users.
So, how can you increase WordPress security with a few clicks and no coding knowledge?
2. Set up a backup solution for WordPress
The first thing to do to keep your website safe is to take a backup of it. With backups, you can quickly recover your WordPress website in the event of any mishap.
You may utilize a lot of commercial and free WordPress backup plugins. Regarding backups, the most crucial thing you should know is that you must periodically save full-site backups to a remote location, not your hosting account.
We advise keeping it on one of the cloud services, like Dropbox.
Depending on how often you update your website, once-a-day or real-time backups may be the best option.
Fortunately, employing plugins like Duplicator, UpdraftPlus, or BlogVault makes this simple. Notably, they don’t require coding and are dependable and straightforward.
3. Top Security Plugin for WordPress
Setting up an auditing and monitoring system that records every action taken on your website is the next task we must undertake after creating backups.
The security plugin covers virus detection, unsuccessful login attempts, file integrity monitoring, etc.
Fortunately, Sucuri Scanner, the most excellent free WordPress security plugin, can handle everything.
Installing and activating the free Sucuri Security plugin is required.
You must navigate to the Sucuri menu in your WordPress admin after activation. You require a free API key as soon as possible. Email notifications, integrity checks, audit recording, and other crucial functions are possible.
The next step is to select the ‘Hardening’ tab from the menu by clicking on it. After choosing each option, press the “Apply Hardening” button.
Explore all the tabs and options of this robust WordPress security plugin to learn what it can do, including tracking failed login attempts, audit logs, and malware scanning.
4. The Web Application Firewall (WAF) should be enabled.
A web application firewall is the most straightforward approach to safeguarding your website and feeling secure with WordPress (WAF).
Website firewalls can block traffic earlier, which is dangerous to your website.
Sucuri is the most excellent web application firewall for WordPress, and we use it ourselves.
The best feature of Sucuri’s firewall is that denylist removal and malware cleanup are guaranteed. They promise to fix your website (no matter how many pages it has) if it was hacked while they were watching over you.
There are more DNS-level firewall providers besides Sucuri. Another well-known rival is Cloudflare.
5. Switch to SSL/HTTPS for Your WordPress Website
Data transmission between a user’s browser and your website is encrypted using the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) protocol. This encryption makes it more difficult for someone to sniff around and steal information.
Your website will use HTTPS instead of HTTP after you enable SSL, and the browser address bar will display a padlock icon next to your website’s address.
A nonprofit group named Let’s Encrypt decided to provide website owners with free SSL certificates to address this. Numerous businesses support their efforts, including Google Chrome, Facebook, and Mozilla.
Starting to use SSL for all of your WordPress websites is now simpler than ever. These days, many hosting providers provide a free SSL certificate for WordPress websites.
If your hosting provider does not, you can get one from Domain.com. They offer the market’s most excellent and dependable SSL deal. It has a TrustLogo security seal and a security warranty.
You should be in good shape if you follow all of our advice thus far.
You can still take more steps to strengthen your WordPress security, though.
Here, we only discuss those steps that do not require any coding knowledge.
6. The number of login attempts
WordPress, by default, permits users to attempt logins as frequently as they’d like. Because of this, brute-force assaults against your WordPress website are possible. Hackers try to break passwords by attempting various login combinations.
Limiting a user’s ability to make multiple unsuccessful login attempts is an easy fix. It is automatically taken care of if you’re using the web application firewall that was previously mentioned.
On the other hand, if you still need to configure the firewall, follow the instructions below.
Installing and activating the Login LockDown plugin is the first step.
After activation, configure the plugin by going to Settings > Login LockDown.
7. Turn Off WordPress’ XML-RPC Support
XML-RPC was enabled by default in WordPress 3.5.
Because it facilitates the integration of your WordPress website with online and mobile applications, XML-RPC is quite powerful and can significantly increase the strength of brute-force attacks.
A hacker would have to attempt 450 different passwords on your website to be detected and prevented by the login lockdown plugin.
However, an XML-RPC hacker can utilize the system’s multiple functions to attempt thousands of passwords with only 20 queries.
For this reason, we advise turning off XML-RPC if you are not utilizing it.
8. Log out automatically for WordPress Users Who Are Ideal
Users who are logged in but ideal may become a reason for security risks.
Passwords can be changed, sessions can be hijacked, and account modifications can be made.
For this reason, many financial and banking websites automatically log out inactive users. You can also add comparable features to your WordPress website.
Installing and activating the Inactive Logout plugin is required. To adjust plugin settings after activation,
Navigate to Settings > Inactive Login.
Just enter the time and include a message to log out. Remember to click the “Save Changes” button to save your configurations.
9. Customize the WordPress Login Screen with Security Questions
Adding a security question to your WordPress login screen makes it considerably more difficult for someone to gain unauthorized access.
Installing the WP Security Questions plugin will allow you to add security questions. The plugin settings are configured through the Settings » Security Questions page upon activation.
10. Checking WordPress for Security Flaws and Malware
Installing a WordPress security plugin will cause it to automatically scan your site for malware and indications of security lapses.
However, you can manually scan if you see an abrupt decline in website traffic or search engine rankings. You may utilize the security plugin for WordPress.
It’s straightforward to run these online scans; all you have to do is enter the URLs of your websites, and their crawlers will search them for known malware and malicious code.
Note that most WordPress security scanners are limited to scanning your website. They cannot clean up a hacked WordPress website or remove the infection.
I hope this article suggests the easiest way to protect your website against malware attacks and hackers for non-tech-savvy users. All these steps have been tried and tested. It works to the extent that you can protect your website against unusual activity and malware attacks efficiently and effectively. You have to implement all these steps.
There are other processes as well, but coding is required. I will also discuss those processes in any article. So stay tuned with me.
