10 Simple And Effective Ways To Secure Your WordPress Blog

The security loopholes on any website are what experienced hackers try to find to breach your WP site. If they find out that your WP blog is vulnerable, there is a huge possibility that they can do anything on your site, right from installing malware to hacking your site and redirecting traffic to theirs. Despite so many hacking attacks on WP blog sites, very few people seem to be concerned about the security of your WordPress blog. For your information, you shouldn't only worry about hacking since content theft is also becoming a huge issue and it is a matter of concern especially for blogging sites as here, the content’s uniqueness is everything. Fortunately, there are some measures that you can take on your end to keep the security of your WordPress blog in check. Here are some effective ways to secure your WordPress blog.

All the hackers know very well that admin is the default username on your WordPress blog. You need to change it asap. Along with that, make use of Captcha for making a user login. Its use will help to protect your website from brute force attacks. For implementing Captcha, you can make use of the plugin. This plugin might also help in controlling spam.

2. Hide The Version Of Your WordPress Blog

A version number is normally published by a WP site. This makes it simple for the visitors to know whether you are using the obsolete, non-patched WP edition. Well, exposing your website’s or WP blog’s website version can be an invitation to security threats and hacking attacks. Along with taking off the WP version from your site, you need to make some additional changes. You need to go to the WordPress installation directory and delete the readme.html file from that directory as it does advertise the version of your WP site. Some WP themes also contain login links for providing easy access to the login page. So if you have used such a theme, you should consider removing it.

3. Backup Is The Key

In Spite of taking all possible security measures, you can’t be fully relaxed as there is always a chance of your website being hacked. So it is better to be prepared for the worse by taking regular backups. Having regular backups is better as you can survive and recover even the deadliest hacks. So before you try making any change to your WP blog such as upgrading the WP version or installing any new plugin, make sure that you always take a backup.

4. Include Password Authentication

In your effort to find ways to secure your WP blog, this is something really important and effective. In order to keep the hackers' hands away from your WP site, you can make it tough for them to break into your site through your admin page by including password protection. Add the password protection to the “WP-admin” folder. It will make sure that if anyone has to access this folder, he/she will need to enter the correct password and username (apart from the user login). You can do this easily through the CPanel. Just log in to the CPanel and select the “Password Protect directories” option.

5. Hotlinking Disable

If someone copies your article, there are always chances that your article’s images will also get copied. After the person who copied the content from your article publishes it on his/her blog, the image URLs will point to your server. This will cause an additional load to your hosting that will ultimately result in the degraded performance of your blog. This direct copying of images from the blog of any other person is called hotlinking.

Cloudflare is the solution to all such issues. It is a good CDN. Here, our topic of interest is getting the “hotlink protection” checkbox. You can get this from your profile on Cloudflare. Click on the Security Settings and navigate to the “Hotlink Protection”. To stop the hotlinking issue, you need to turn it ON.

6. Firewall Installation

Installing the firewall can be one of the effective ways to secure your WordPress blog against hacking and other security breaches. You can consider using the OSE firewall. It includes a built-in scanner scanning your blog for any malicious codes. It also has an anti-spam feature.

7. Install Security Plugins

To keep the hackers away from your blog, you can make use of the following plugins.

A. Wordfence

This is a good security plugin that works really well in order to protect your WordPress website from hackers. It works by limiting the login attempts. It scans all those themes and plugins against your WP repository versions for changes. It checks out for any outdated plugin, scans the comments for phishing URLs or malware.

With this plugin, you will be able to put a restriction on the number of unsuccessful login attempts by that user who is trying to log into your own blog.

8. Make Wp-config.php File Secure

All your default settings and database info is stored in this file. And that is why it is the most important file in the root directory of your website. So, you need to take every possible measure to make it impossible for anybody to access it.

9. Disallow The File Editing

If anyone manages to get access to your WordPress dashboard, that person can easily make changes in your WordPress files including all the themes as well as plugins. In order to avoid this, you can set the “define(DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT’, true):” flag in the wp-config file.

10. Secure The Server You Are Using

No matter how much your web hosting service provider claims to offer highly secure network infrastructure, you should not be fully dependent on them. You need to look into the matter of securing the user data and the way they access all your private files. Always make an attempt to make your website as secure as possible.

Some Other Ways:

Above, we have discussed some of the ways to secure your WordPress blog. As changing technologies also come with new challenges and threats, you need to keep your WordPress version, all themes, and plugins updated by installing their latest releases.

Wrapping Up:

The security of your website is very crucial. If you don’t pay any attention to it, it may pave the way for hackers to hack your site. It isn’t very difficult to maintain the security of your website as you can do it by flowing the above ways to secure your WordPress blog.

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