How To Secure Your WordPress Website

Why Website Security is Important?

The grounded rules of operating a website is security and protecting client’s data away from the occurrence of the human-error and the prevention of a hacker. Hacked WordPress sites can cause serious damage to your business’s revenue and reputation. Hackers can steal passwords, user information, installation of malware, and even distribute malware to your client.

Worst, you might even pay for the ransomware to hackers just because of regaining access to your site.

Online scams are far more common than you can imagine. According to Google’s report in 2016, it indicated that more than 50 million website users were warned that those websites contain malware or steal information.

In addition, Google has detected approximately 20,000 malware sites and approximately 50,000 phishing sites per week.

Therefore, it is important to pay extra attention to the security of your WordPress website. Here are the suggestions for you to enhance the security of your WordPress website.

9 Actions To Secure Your WordPress Website

1. Using strong passwords equals stronger protection. The most common WordPress hacking attempts are using stolen passwords. The more complex the password you have, the higher the security you can be guaranteed. Hence, you can make difficult and unique passwords for each login of your website. For example, WordPress admin area, FTP accounts, database, WordPress hosting account, and your custom email addresses in your site’s domain name.When there are lots of passwords corresponding to different platforms, it is difficult to remember all those passwords. In this case, you can use a password manager so that you don’t need to remember passwords anymore.
2. Backing up all the data allows you to quickly restore your WordPress site in case of the data loss. There are many free and paid WordPress backup plugins application that you can use. You should regularly save full-site backups to a remote location, which is a kind of disaster recovery service.
3. Setup an auditing and monitoring system that keeps track of everything that happens on your website. This includes file integrity monitoring, failed login attempts, malware scanning, etc. In addition, these WordPress updates are crucial for the security and stability of your WordPress site. You need to make sure that your WordPress core, plugins, and theme are up to date.
4. Using a web application firewall (WAF) is the easiest way to protect your site. A website firewall is able to block all malicious traffic before it even reaches your website.
   • DNS Level Website Firewall –similar to traditional firewalls, able to blocks/redirects end-users from accessing malicious sites. DNS Firewall is applied at a different layer and phase, namely threat intelligence data feeds are applied to the domain name system.
   • Application Level Firewall – These firewall plugins examine the traffic once it reaches your server but before loading most WordPress scripts. It runs by monitoring and possibly blocking inputs and outputs that do not conform to the firewall configuration policy.
5. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a protocol that encrypts data transfer between your website and the user’s browser. This encryption makes it harder for someone to sniff around and steal information.  SSL ensures the safety of your website. You will see HTTPS at the beginning of your website address, with a padlock sign next to it in the browser.
6. Change the “admin” username, the default WordPress admin username is well-known for every beginning of user. Since usernames make up half of login credentials, this made hackers easily attacks the website. You should change a custom username at WordPress.
7. Limited the login attempts. WordPress has the default setting for unlimited password failure that allows users to try to login as many times as they might forget about the password. But this convenience also put the safety of your website to the risk. Hackers can crack the passwords by trying to login with different combinations accordingly.  Therefore, it is suggested that limited password attempts or using the web application firewall mentioned earlier.

8. Two-factor authentication technique adds an additional layer to secure the authentication process by dual-security check. Generally, most of the user is lack of the sense of data protection, which is only relying on the single and simple password typically that will increase the risk of offensive hacking.  In contrast, the two-factor authentication is required multi-security to prove the identity that is the real owner of the website distinguished from the hacker. Actually, you need to install and activate the Two Factor Authentication plugin to your WordPress site, which can effectively enhance the security of your website.
9.  Automatic inactivity logout in WordPress, when the user inactively logout the account of your WordPress website, keeping the login position would potentially increase security risk, such as hijacking your website, changing passwords, or making changes to their account.  One step in protecting client data is implementing an automatic inactivity logout and This is why many banking and financial sites automatically log out an inactive user. On your WordPress site, it is suggested to install and activate the Inactive Logout plugin. Upon activation, visit Settings » Inactive Logout page to configure plugin settings.

The Role of WordPress Hosting

Your WordPress Hosting service plays the most important role in the security of your WordPress site. Dataplugs takes extra measures to protect our servers against common threats.

Here are our summaries for a good web hosting to protect your websites and data:

• – Keep tracking to monitor their network for suspicious activity.
• – Good hosting companies have tools in place to prevent large scale DDOS attacks
• – Keep their server software and hardware up to date to prevent hackers from exploiting a known security vulnerability in an old version.
• – Always ready to deploy disaster recovery and accidents plans.

So far, we have shown you the basic steps to build a secured website. Hopefully, you will find your own way to build a perfect website eventually. We also have the knowledge base about WordPress and Best WordPress Plugins in 2019  if you need detailed instructions. If you have any questions, please contact us by email at sales@dataplugs.com.