WordPress security 101: Your guide to a secure site
WordPress security 101: Your guide to a secure site
While WordPress offers a reliable base for your website, the fact is that hackers are always changing their strategies. Here are some of the key things you should be doing to stay one step ahead and make sure your site is protected from cyber attack.
Key plugin: Wordfence
Wordfence is the most downloaded WordPress security plugin for good reason. It does the heavy lifting when it comes to securing your site, continuously monitoring, patrolling and blocking today’s ultra-advanced cyber attacks, hacks and online security threats.
What else can I use to protect my site?
Along with using an intrusion detection and prevention system like Wordfence, these key steps will add additional layers of security:
- Keep your WordPress core, themes and plugins up to date. This is your most important security step. A product like Wordfence will provide email alerts when a theme, plugin or WordPress core needs updating.
- Use strong passwords for all user accounts.
- Choose a reputable hosting provider where websites on shared servers are isolated from each other.
- Remove any old, unmaintained web applications, along with old backups, from your website.
How do I backup my site?
If you’re unlucky enough to be hacked, backups are one of your most important tools. Having the ability to restore your website to its “pre-hack” state makes it easy to eliminate malicious code and get everything back to normal quickly.
We recommend selecting a hosting provider that automatically backs up your site daily and retains backups for at least 30 days. This 30-day retention is important – in some cases it will take a number of days before you detect that your site has been hacked, making those older backups crucial to be able to return to a clean slate.
We also recommend you keep a secondary backup of your website through a source like iThemes BackupBuddy, which can be set to back up your site automatically.
When in doubt, get advice
Finally, if you’re in ever doubt about whether your WordPress site is 100% secure, don’t leave it to chance. Get the advice you need to make sure your site is always safe.
Contact us if you’d like to know more.