The Ultimate WordPress Security Guide – Step by Step
Ensuring WordPress security is paramount for all website owners.
It’s crucial to prioritize WordPress security best practices to safeguard your website. Neglecting security measures could lead to your website being among the 10,000+ sites Google blacklists daily for malware and phishing attacks. This guide presents our top WordPress security tips to shield your website from hackers and malware.
Although the WordPress core software undergoes regular audits by hundreds of developers and is considered very secure, additional measures are essential to maintain site security.
At SmartWeb Ninja, we understand that security involves both risk elimination and reduction. As a website owner, you can take steps to enhance your WordPress security, even without technical expertise.
Why Website Security Is Important?
A compromised WordPress site can have severe consequences for your business, impacting revenue and reputation. Hackers can steal user data and passwords, install malicious software, and distribute malware to your users. In the worst-case scenario, you may be forced to pay a ransom to regain control of your website.
Ransomware attacks are prevalent, with Google warning 12-14 million users daily about potentially harmful websites. Additionally, Google blacklists over 10,000 websites daily for malware or phishing attempts. Just as business owners secure their physical locations, online business owners must prioritize WordPress security to protect their digital assets.
Keep WordPress Updated
WordPress, being open-source software, receives regular maintenance and updates. Minor updates are automatically installed, but you need to manually initiate major releases. Additionally, WordPress offers a plethora of plugins and themes developed by third parties, which also require regular updates.
These updates are essential for ensuring the security and stability of your WordPress site. It’s important to keep your WordPress core, plugins, and themes up to date.
Use Strong Passwords and User Permissions
The most common method of hacking WordPress sites involves using stolen passwords. You can enhance security by using strong, unique passwords for all aspects of your website, not just the WordPress admin area. Ensure that your FTP accounts, databases, WordPress hosting accounts, and custom email addresses associated with your site’s domain have strong passwords. While many find strong passwords difficult to remember, you can use a password manager to store and manage them securely.
Additionally, limit access to your WordPress admin account to only those who absolutely need it. If you have a large team or guest authors, familiarize yourself with WordPress user roles and capabilities before granting them access to your site.
Understand the Role of WordPress Hosting
The security of your WordPress site is greatly influenced by your choice of hosting service. A reputable shared hosting provider such as Hostinger, Bluehost, or SiteGround implements additional security measures to safeguard their servers against common threats.
Here are some ways in which top hosting companies enhance security:
- Continuous monitoring of their network for suspicious activity.
- Implementation of tools to mitigate large-scale DDoS attacks.
- Regular updates of server software, PHP versions, and hardware to prevent exploitation of known security vulnerabilities.
- Utilization of disaster recovery and contingency plans to protect data in the event of a major incident.
Shared hosting plans involve sharing server resources with other customers, which poses a risk of cross-site contamination. This means that a hacker could potentially use a neighboring site to attack your website.
On the other hand, managed WordPress hosting offers a more secure environment for your site. Providers of managed WordPress hosting offer features such as automatic backups, automatic WordPress updates, and advanced security configurations to protect your website.
WordPress Security Guide in a Few Easy Steps (No Coding)
Enhancing WordPress security can seem daunting for beginners, especially those without technical skills. However, you’re not alone in this.
We’ve assisted numerous WordPress users in strengthening their site’s security. We’ll demonstrate how you can enhance your WordPress security with just a few clicks, without the need for any coding knowledge.
1. Install a WordPress Backup Solution
Backups serve as your initial defense against any potential WordPress attack. It’s crucial to remember that no system is completely immune to breaches. If government websites can fall victim to hacking, so can yours.
Having backups enables you to swiftly restore your WordPress site if any mishaps occur. Numerous free and premium WordPress backup plugins are available for use. The key aspect to remember regarding backups is the importance of regularly saving full-site backups to a remote location, not your hosting account.
We recommend utilizing a cloud service such as Amazon, Dropbox, or private clouds like Stash for storage. Depending on how frequently you update your website, the optimal backup setting might be either once a day or real-time backups.
Fortunately, achieving this is simple with plugins such as Duplicator, UpdraftPlus, or BlogVault. These plugins are reliable and, most importantly, user-friendly—no coding skills are necessary.
2. Install a Reputable WordPress Security Plugin
Following backups, the next step is to establish an auditing and monitoring system to track all activities on your website.
This system should include file integrity monitoring, tracking failed login attempts, malware scanning, and other security measures.
Fortunately, you can easily manage this by installing a top WordPress security plugin like Sucuri.
Sucuri.net homepage
3. Enable a Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Ensuring your WordPress site’s security and maintaining confidence is straightforward with a web application firewall (WAF).
A WAF acts as a barrier, preventing malicious traffic from reaching your site in the first place.
There are two types of website firewalls:
- DNS-level website firewall: This type routes your website traffic through its cloud proxy servers. It then forwards only legitimate traffic to your web server.
- Application-level firewall: This firewall inspects traffic after it reaches your server but before loading most WordPress scripts. However, it’s not as effective as the DNS-level firewall in reducing server load.
4. Move Your WordPress Site to SSL/HTTPS
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a protocol that encrypts data transferred between your website and the user’s browser, making it more difficult for unauthorized parties to intercept and steal information.
Enabling SSL results in your website address using HTTPS instead of HTTP, and a padlock or similar icon appears next to your website address in the browser.
SSL certificates are typically issued by certificate authorities and can cost from $80 to hundreds of dollars annually. In the past, many website owners chose to forgo SSL due to the added cost.
To address this, Let’s Encrypt, a non-profit organization, offers free SSL certificates to website owners. Their project is backed by Google Chrome, Facebook, Mozilla, and other major companies.
Nowadays, it’s simpler than ever to use SSL for all your WordPress websites, as many hosting companies provide a free SSL certificate. If your hosting company does not offer one, you can purchase an SSL certificate from Domain.com, which offers the best and most reliable SSL deals on the market. Their certificate includes a $10,000 security warranty and a TrustLogo security seal.
WordPress Security Guide for DIY Users
If you’ve followed all the steps we’ve outlined so far, your WordPress security should be in good shape. However, there are additional measures you can take to further strengthen your WordPress security. Please note that some of these steps may require coding knowledge.
Change the Default Admin Username
In the past, the default WordPress admin username was ‘admin,’ which made it easier for hackers to perform brute-force attacks, as usernames make up half of the login credentials. Fortunately, WordPress now requires you to choose a custom username during installation, improving security. However, some 1-click WordPress installers still use ‘admin’ as the default admin username. If you encounter this, consider changing your web hosting provider.
Since WordPress doesn’t allow you to change usernames by default, there are three methods to do so:
- Create a new admin username and delete the old one.
- Use the Username Changer plugin.
- Update the username from phpMyAdmin.
For detailed instructions on changing your WordPress username, refer to our comprehensive guide.
Note: We are referring to changing the username ‘admin,’ not the administrator user role, which is also sometimes referred to as ‘admin.’
Disable File Editing
WordPress includes a built-in code editor that enables you to modify your theme and plugin files directly from your WordPress admin area.
However, this feature can pose a security risk if misused, so we advise disabling it.
To disable the code editor, you can add the following code to your wp-config.php file or use a code snippet plugin like WPCode (recommended):
// Disallow file editdefine( 'DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT', true );Disable PHP File Execution in Certain WordPress Directories
WordPress allows users to attempt logging in as many times as they want by default, leaving the site vulnerable to brute-force attacks. Hackers use this method to crack passwords by trying different combinations.
To address this issue, you can limit the number of failed login attempts a user can make. If you have a web application firewall in place, this is typically managed automatically.
If you don’t have a firewall set up, you can manually set this limit using the following steps:
- Install and activate the free Limit Login Attempts Reloaded plugin.
- Upon activation, the plugin will begin limiting the number of login attempts users can make.
- The default settings should suffice for most websites. However, you can customize them by visiting the Settings » Limit Login Attempts page and clicking the ‘Settings’ tab at the top.
Add Two Factor Authentication (2FA)
For top-notch WordPress security services and peace of mind, reach out to SmartWeb Ninja. Our experts are here to protect your website from cyber threats and ensure its smooth operation. Contact us now to safeguard your online presence!