WordPress powers 19% of the web, and 48 of the top 100 blog sites online. With a strong community of users and developers, the WordPress platform is evolving day by day, with more features and Add-ons.

This, in turn, poses some threats as well. Vulnerabilities and hacks can end up disrupting the website functioning. There have been many instances where a blog owner lost complete access to his site.

Click here to secure your WordPress site

WordPress is a well-designed website management platform. The basic installation, with the latest version of software, doesn’t have much preposterous security issues.

But this basic installation may not suffice most online businesses. Website owners would need to customize their sites with additional plugins or themes or custom code.

If not cautious enough, these additional pieces of code can render your website vulnerable to hacks and exploits. In our role as website support specialists, we secure WordPress sites from all such impending threats.

Tips to secure WordPress websites

Here, we’ll discuss some tips that would help you secure your WordPress websites from hacks and vulnerabilities.

1. Secure your local machine

A loop hole or vulnerability in the local machine can help attackers to gain access to your blog. So, the first thing you need to do is to secure your PC with strong anti-virus software and access restrictions.

2. Keep the WordPress updated

WordPress often releases new versions and security patches, which contain feature updates and security fixes. Whenever the update notification pops up in admin panel, don’t ignore it!

It is the most effective way to secure your site from attacks, and yet so many people leave their site without updates, for the fear of breaking their themes and/or plugins.

At Bobcares, our website technicians are specialized in updating the WordPress software without affecting the functionality of the site or the plugins and themes in it.

We also have our 24/7 security specialists who keep track of all security news and patch our customers’ websites pro-actively, whenever an exploit or threat is detected, to avoid a hack.

3. Secure the WordPress software

You need to make sure that your web host implements basic security features and that it has good reviews among users. Web server software such as Apache, PHP, etc. should be the latest secure versions.

Caution must be exercised while installing modules and plugins that are vulnerable and outdated, as they can be open the doors to hackers to get easy access to your site.

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4. Backup regularly

Backups are those knights in shining armour at the time of a disaster! You always should have an up-to-date backup of your WordPress site, in case something goes wrong and you have to restore your blog.

You can do backups manually, or you can sign up to a paid service or simply get a plugin to do this for you. But just running the backup process is not enough. You need to confirm that the backups are indeed useful.

We have a backup management system which takes backups periodically and test them for adequacy and completeness. We also perform test restores to confirm that they serve their intended purpose.

5. Delete the unused plugins

There is no point in holding those Plugins that you don’t use at all. Unused and outdated plugins can attract attackers to your site. At the same time, there are many indispensable plugins that help secure your WP site.

Some commonly recommended plugins for your WordPress site include:

1. AntiVirus: This plugin protects your blog against exploits, malware, and spam injections. It scans your theme’s files and notifies you if anything suspicious is going on.

2. Online backup for WordPress: You can use a schedule or perform backups by hand, and have them sent to your email address or made downloadable. The plugin backs up the database as well as the file system.

3. Secure WordPress: This plugin performs a number of security tweaks to your blog to protect it.

4. BulletProof security: It provides protection against XSS, RFI, CRLF, CSRF, Base64, Code Injection and SQL Injection hacking attempts, one-click .htaccess protection, wp-config.php protection and loads of other tweaks.

5. Hide login: You can use it to hide your login page. In other words, it creates a custom login URL, admin URL (instead of domain.com/wp-admin) and a logout URL.

[ A single misconfiguration may break your site! Click here for a customized and error-free website to help you boost your business. ]

6. Custom secret keys for wp-config.php file

The confidential details for the WordPress site, such as database name, username and password, are stored in the wp-config.php in your WordPress root directory.

Secret keys are one of the bits of information stored in that config file. It is always advisable to change the default secret keys to something that is more secure, as hackers might be able to retrieve the default one easily.

7. Change the database prefix

The basic setup for WordPress is the same across lots of sites, especially if you use a one-step install wizard through your webhost. This may be very convenient, but lots of common setup values like the database prefix(es), are easily known to all.

If the database prefix is not changed, the table names of your site’s database can be quickly detectable for malicious users who’re trying to hack your site.

In the websites that Bobcares technicians manage, changing the database prefix is one security feature that we implement to protect the WP databases from hacks.

Here, we saw some basic security features to secure WordPress websites. In our website hardening process, we perform a 360 degree hardening process which includes auditing and securing all services.

In addition to the security updates done, acting promptly in case of an attack and protecting the website from further abuse, is a task we perform while assisting websites in hack recovery attempts.

Bobcares helps online businesses of all sizes achieve world-class security and uptime, using tried and tested solutions. If you’d like to know how to make your websites error-free, we’d be happy to talk to you.