Wordpress Security Best Practices In 2019: A Guide

A simple network that helps to connect only a few systems has now become a web center piece with interconnected networks, users and numerous devices. But as the internet takes shape, its security is becoming a major concern for everyone. Search engines like Yahoo, Bing, Google have already blacklisted thousands of websites for the signs of security and malware threats.

With so many activities performed online every day, like shopping, trading, running a business, storing data, it is very important to protect your power packed CMS website against attackers.

WordPress is the most popular CMS and is used by 26% of the web which makes it the most hacked CMS platform.

This piece of writing will dive deep into the best security practices in 2019 that ensure high WordPress security. Let’s discuss it in details here!

Keep Your Wordpress Platform Updated:

Like all other applications or software, the community of WordPress development is also constantly working on upgrading the platform, building better features and fixing the bugs. Keeping your platform outdated will put you at a higher risk, as there will be loopholes that might expose your website to cyber threats. So ensure that your core application is upgraded on a regular basis. This will prevent your hackers from violating your weaknesses.

Invest In A Reliable Wordpress Hosting Service Provider:

Your WordPress hosting service often plays a great role in the security of your site. A good and reliable hosting provider will always take extra measures to protect the servers against common WordPress threats. They will continuously monitor their network for any suspicious activity and they also keep their server hardware and software updates to prevent hackers from exploiting the sites.  

If you are really concerned about security, then you should stay away from any free web hosts that won’t charge anything.

Opting for a professional WordPress service provider can safeguard your investment by focusing on its security.

Use Two Factor Authentication for Your Wordpress

To make your WordPress website safe from cyber criminals, introduce a two factor authentication module on your WordPress login page. In this case, your users will provide the login details for two different components.

The owner of the site decides what these two are, it can be either a regular password followed by a secret question or a set of characters, or a secret code etc.

Choose Some Safe Security Wordpress Plugins:

WordPress allows a lot of customizations, so after selecting the basic theme for your website and setting the display options, you can then search the marketplace for plugins and extensions that are focused on improving the site’s security.

Enabling any security based plugin for your WordPress site will help you monitor the incoming traffic and block any suspicious threats.

Enable An SSL Certificate:

While you browse the internet on your mobile device or your computer, you will find a small padlock icon that appears in the URL in the address bar. This means that the page that you are presently viewing is protected with an SSL certificate, which acts as a defense against cyber attackers.

When the browser is connected with an SSL enabled site, the hackers won’t be able to decode any traffic being intercepted. Many hosting companies now offer free SSL certificate for your sites.

Add User Accounts Only After Verification:

If you have a WordPress blog, that has multiple authors, then you have to be more careful with people accessing your admin panel. Since there are many people accessing your site, it could make the website more vulnerable to many WordPress security threats.

You should use a plugin that ensures that the password is strong and before adding user accounts, carry a thorough verification for them.

Limit Your Login Attempts:

By default, your WordPress will allow the users to try to login as many times as they want. This will easily make your site vulnerable to any brute attacks. The hackers try to crack the passwords by trying various combinations and this can be fixed by limiting the failed login attempts that a user makes. This will help you to restrict any unauthorized access to your website.

Keep A Backup Of Your WordPress Website:

Even if you have considered all the measures to secure your website, chances may still be there that there is a weak spot. So as a precautionary measure, it is a good idea to maintain a backup of your website periodically.

This will ensure that in case of any problem, you can always get your website back. Nowadays, you can opt for secured cloud services like Google Cloud, Azure that helps to maintain multi-location backups.