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Make Your WordPress Site Hack-Proof

Securing a WordPress site is something that many website owners don’t pay enough attention to – they believe the chances of their blog ever getting hacked is very low and that it’s the sort of thing that only ever happens to other people.

However, sooner or later you’re going to have problems if you don’t take precautions – in this post I cover the importance of securing your site along with eight tips that you can implement straightaway to immediately make your site more resilient and secure.

Why Does Your WordPress Site Need Securing?

This may seem like an obvious question, but it’s worth considering the risks that are posed to your site. The main risk is largely from spammers and malware hackers – the spammers want to display thousands of comments on your site that all link to adult material, online gambling, and other shady sites. Malware hackers are often interested in stealing your traffic – they want to add “redirects” to your site so that anyone visiting will be instantly redirected back to their own site. Other hackers simply want to install viruses on your site that will remove everything from your WordPress database and essentially delete your blog.

You might think that this could never happen to you, but it happens everyday to lots of site owners. Even some big well-known sites within the WordPress community have recently been hacked – for example, read this post at ThemeShaper. If it could happen here, it could potentially happen to you too – especially if you’ve taken no steps to secure your site.

Think for a second – what might happen if your site got hacked today? Would you have a backup you could use to get your site up and running again? If not, you’ve potentially just lost your whole site – if so, how recent is your backup? How much content would you lose? Also, if your site makes you money, how much cash might you lose if your site is down for a few days whilst you’re trying to recover? Consider also that if your site does go down it may have a negative impact on your search rankings which may have taken months and years to achieve!

WordPress Security Tips

Now that you know some of the risks associated with your site getting hacked, what steps can you take to make it more secure? Here are some simple tips that will help reduce the risk of your site being compromised:

Backup Regularly

This is perhaps the most important tip here – backing up your site on a regular basis (and storing that backup somewhere secure) means that even in the worse case scenario you can get up and running again. Without any backups of your site, you’ll potentially lose everything. You can learn how to quickly perform a WordPress backup on this post: Easily Complete A WordPress Backup In Less Than 5 Minutes

Update Your WordPress Version

It can be very easy to delay upgrading your WordPress installation when a new one becomes available – however, it’s important to update relatively soon after it’s released as any major or immediate security issues will likely have been fixed in the update.

Ensure That You Use A Secure Password

This is an obvious, but fundamental security tip that we all hear again and again – but many people still do not use strong enough passwords! Ensure that you use a mixture of uppercase and lowercase characters and include numbers and punctuation. Also, try and make sure that the password you use for your WordPress Admin panel is unique from any other password you use.

Delete The Admin User

All WordPress installations come with an Admin user by default – this may well be one of the first things that hackers look for when targeting your site. Therefore, to make your site more secure you’ll want to remove this user – to do this, first create a new user with a unique username – then login using your new username and then delete the Admin user. When deleting this user ensure that you pass all of the posts over to the new one you’ve created – that way you don’t lose them all!

Install Security Plugins

There are lots of WordPress security plugins that you can install to help keep your site more secure – some such as WP Security Scan and WordPress Exploit Scanner help to check your site for any vulnerabilities. Others aim to protect your site through the use of a firewall (e.g. WordPress Firewall) or through Anti-Virus (e.g. WP AntiVirus). Finally, you might also want to limit the number of attempts to log into your admin panel – the Limit Login Attempts will help here. This can be useful to block out bots that will try and guess your password through a “brute-force” approach.

Restrict Access Using .htaccess

Another effective method for making your site more secure is to restrict access to important areas. For example, you might want to restrict access to your wp-admin files to stop hackers from altering them and causing problems. You can learn more about doing this at: Hardening WordPress with htaccess.

Update Your Plugins With Latest Versions

Similarly to updating your WordPress installation, you should always look to do the same with your plugins. When a new version becomes available make sure that you install it on your site. One other tip – it’s always worth backing up your site before updating plugins – they can occasionally cause some aspects of your site to break if they haven’t been tested thoroughly before release.

Hide Your Configuration File

Another way to make your site more secure is to move your WordPress configuration file (i.e. wp-config.php) up a level from the rest of your WordPress installation. This makes it harder for hackers to access the important details contained within this file – you can get more information about how and why to do this at: Hardening WordPress.

Conclusion

If you implement some of the tips above then it will go a long way in enhancing the security of your site. It only requires a small investment of time and is well worth the effort – so don’t put it off! At the very least, always ensure that you have regular backups so if the worst was ever to happen, you can get things up and running again relatively quickly.