How to secure your WordPress site?

WordPress security is often referred to as “hardening.”. After all, the process is like adding reinforcements to your castle. It’s all about securing the gates and putting guards on every tower for better monitoring and protection against external threats.

WordPress is the most popular blogging and CMS tool on the Internet. Part of its popularity is its ease of use. That is exactly what makes it a prime target for hackers. Do you have a WordPress blog or website? Then this article will help you. None of these solutions guarantee 100% protection but some protection is always better than no protection against hackers, viruses, malware, adware and ransomware.

Tips for better WordPress security:

1. Keep your WordPress site and plugins up-to-date. Consider Automatic Core Updates. This is very simple and there are plugins like WP Updates and others to help you.
2. You may want to create a child theme before making any changes to your functions.php file.
3. If somebody is offering Premium (Paid) plugins for free, don’t buy/download them. Quite often they would be modified and infected with malware.
4. Keep Track of Dashboard Activity. This is also great for security because it allows you to connect the dots between a specific action and a specific reaction. So, if a certain uploaded file caused your site to break, you can investigate it further to see if it contained malicious code. Suggested plugin: WP Security Audit Log
5. Avoid using the admin username of ‘admin’ and you must use strong passwords
6. Pick the Best Hosting You Can Afford. Good hosting companies have strong protection of their own and you are less vulnerable.
7. Spam Protection. For Comment Spam, a good plugin is Akismet. For form spam, a good plugin is SI Captcha.
8. Clean your site – remove unnecessary files, plugins, themes and older backups.
9. Use a good security monitoring software like Wordfence or LifeLock. There are others too. Some have a free basic version and a more robust paid version.
10. Do daily backups through your hosting company or a third party service. If you get hacked, you can recover using your backups. No backup, no recovery.

I hope this helps.

Do you have some additional suggestions? Feel free to mention them in the comments below.

Stay Safe!