Unlocking Top WordPress Security Tricks For Your Website In 2021
July 8th, 2021
With the pandemic being around for such a long time, office, service sector, education, entertainment, and whatnot, you name it, and everything is just a click away on the Internet.
Moreover, the Internet has seen such a fast advancement in new technologies being introduced to match up with the everyday requirements of our daily lives. Hence, today’s Internet also has many, not so tech-savvy users, and for them, technologies like Content Management System (CMS) have come like a boon.
Opening a blog or a website has become so convenient. CMS platforms not only have a user-friendly interface, but it also offers an array of choices of themes making your website and blog even more attractive.
Its hassle-free features allow you to make any future changes that you wish to make to your website, say content or design, with much ease. In addition, an array of plugins offer so many features making your life even simpler.
The CMS market has many reputed companies like WordPress, Magneto, Ozcart, Shopify, etc., trying to make a mark in their own right, with each one having its own set of positives and negatives.
Users are also becoming more and more aware, and competition in this segment gives you good choices to make between them like plans they offer, various themes, security features, or even add-ons.
Research by W3Techs comes to the conclusion that WordPress takes the topmost seat of 41% among the world’s 10 million most visited websites, both using CMS or not. Also, WordPress takes the major slice of the market share of 64.7% among the CMS platforms.
Although WordPress gets the privilege of being the most popular CMS among users, it is, at the same time, the most hacked platform. According to a study by Sucuri in 2019, among the most hacked websites, WordPress accounted for a whopping 94%.
So, is WordPress not a safe platform? To be satisfactorily able to answer this question, many things need to be focused upon. WordPress is not an unsafe platform, and two major weak links contribute majorly to cyberattacks it faces.
WordPress being the most popular, users’ bad security practices like using outdated versions of WordPress and plugins, poorly managed login credentials, the availability of numerous plugins with their vulnerabilities makes it more susceptible to hackers’ foul play.
The WordPress team releases security patches to cover up any vulnerabilities and work proactively to secure the platform against any potential cyberattacks. Being an open-source program, a big community works around the WordPress platform, fixing these vulnerabilities as soon as they are discovered.
So, what are the best and most effective WordPress Security Tricks that will seal your website against any dangerous potential cyber threats from cybercriminals? Let us now try to get deep into some most important and effective WordPress Security Tricks.
Seal Your WordPress Website With SSL Certificate Security
Want to seal your WordPress website against any data breach? Buy SSL Certificate to encrypt all the communication between the user’s web browser and web server by changing the website protocol from HTTP to secure HTTPS.
The SSL Certificate thus provides complete protection to admin and login data and prevents attacks like Man-in-the-Middle attacks and hence, any misuse of this crucial user’s information by the hackers to carry out financial frauds.
An SSL Certificate secured website introduces a visual symbol of trust, a padlock before the URL of the website that helps to build a relationship of trust with your visitors.
Investing in a cheap SSL Certificate not only gives your WordPress website an effective security solution, but at the same time, it authenticates your website and helps you gain a better ranking on the Google Search Engine Result Page. SSL Certificates can be bought from many reliable SSL Certificate providers
Choose A Good Hosting Provider
Research well and then settle for a hosting provider that has a very strong security policy. Choose a good host that supports WordPress and has a foolproof WordPress Firewall in place.
Always choose a host with a good reputation, this ensures fast and reliable service, and usually, they have SSL Certificate security as a part of their plan.
Check for security features like regular malware scanning, backups, DDOS protection, automatic software updates including operating system, security software, WordPress, etc.
Another important safety feature that the host should pay attention to is proper account and WordPress website management.
This means that the host server should have an architecture where each account and WordPress website is isolated so that no cross-contamination occurs in case of an attack wherein one infected website is used to infect the adjoining sites on the same server.
Use Two-Factor Authentication To Keep Your WP Account Safe
The use of two-factor authentication to keep your WordPress account safe is an absolute must to secure your accounts against any brute force attack from hackers.
This verification involves a two-step verification of the account. The first one involves verifying username/password, whereas the second step involves verifying the login using, say, a code sent to your email or phone.
Plugins such as Google Authentication, DUO Two-Factor Authentication are most popularly used to enable two-factor authentication.
DDOS Attack Awareness And Protection Against It
The Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) attack aims to tarnish the company’s credibility by making its services unavailable to its customers. It also works by asking for a ransom for reversing the attack.
Hackers use multiple systems and programs to send abnormally heavy traffic to overwhelm the server or network, causing it to crash and your website becomes unavailable to your regular customers.
Many reputed hosting companies protect against DDOS attacks as part of their security plans. For others, protection against DDOS attacks consists of having web application firewalls that help to analyze the bandwidth being used by attacks and then blocking out DDOS attacks.
Pay Attention To Database Security
It always pays well to give utmost attention to improving your WordPress database security.
Firstly, have an unpredictable database name rather than a very obvious name for your database; if your website name is ABC walls, then the default database name would be wp_abcwalls.
Changing your default database name will make it difficult for cybercriminals to recognize and access database information. Secondly, not to use the default database table prefix as wp_, but instead, you could change it to say, 14xw_ as this will give you better security from hackers.
It would be best if you disabled hotlinking
Hotlinking is a concept where you pick any image from the Internet and use its URL directly on your website. What happens is that, though this image will be displayed on your website, it still uses the original location resources, which might have to foot extra bandwidth bills and hence hotlinking amounts to stealing someone’s bandwidth. Hence, it is always advisable to disable hotlinking by either editing your .htaccess file or configuring your CDN.
Update To The latest PHP version
Always be aware of the version of PHP used by your hosting provider, as it is essential to keep your website safe. Moreover, it helps you to boost your website’s performance.
Running your website with older versions will make you vulnerable to cyber threats that can have serious consequences. Each PHP version has validation and full support for two years; now, PHP 7.1 or below no longer enjoys security support.
Securing Your wp-config.php file Is Very Crucial.
The wp-config.php file contains critical details of your WordPress website’s configuration and other crucial installation particulars of your website.
Hence, securing these files is most important as any data breach by hackers can cause havoc. Simply storing the wp-config.php file to any folder one step above the root directory can make it unavailable to hackers and keep your website safe.
Always Hide Your WordPress Version Number
The latest version number of your WordPress is mentioned in the website’s source view and can also be found at the bottom of the dashboard.
Hackers may misuse this version number to plan a well-targeted attack on your website, using the known vulnerabilities of the version being used.
This is why it is always advisable to keep updating to the latest version of WordPress and hide your version number with the help of various security plugins available.
You can also manually hide the version number.
As WP Beginner suggests, consider adding this function to your site-specific plugin or code snippets plugin:
function wpbeginner_remove_version() {
return '';
}
add_filter('the_generator', 'wpbeginner_remove_version');
Use Of Password Manager Is Always Advisable
Changing passwords from time to time, taking care to think about strong passwords for your different accounts and remembering them while maintaining its security lest it falls into the hands of exploits and be misused.
This certainly is a lot of hard work, so to make things simpler, a password manager is a solution to all these password management issues. There are many Password Managers to choose from, like Bitwarden, LastPass, IPassword, Dashlane, etc. They not only generate strong passwords for you but also keep them secured in a vault.
In conclusion, we can say that be consistent with WordPress security checks and always be vigilant regarding the security of your website. Having gained a complete insight into the most important and effective WordPress security hacks discussed above, it is about time to make them a part of your WordPress Security best practices, and you are good to defend your website against any potential cyber threats.
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