I have heard many site owners complaining about how to secure website from hackers? The reason is that an open source script is vulnerable to all kinds of attacks if not handled properly. Is that a fact? And if so, how does one secure your WordPress website?
Luckily, the shortage of built-in WordPress security may be a myth. In fact, sometimes it’s the opposite way around – WordPress websites are far more secure than their online brothers and sisters.
Today, I planed to discuss couple of simple tricks that will assist you secure your WordPress website even more.
After implementing these tricks and you will much secure.
1. Only Choose Good Hosting Companies
You should only work with the best, high-quality, reliable and safe hosting. This piece of recommendation seems obvious, right?
More or less, everyone thinks their hosting is great until something breaks for the primary time. Within the world, not all hosting companies and hosting offerings are created equally.
If you’re taking a glance into hosting surveys online, you’ll see how different people’s experiences are in terms of overall hosting setups, quality, like security, reliability, support time, speed, etc.
Some hosts are simply sub-participants and don’t had best under stress.
The bad news here is that the majority of the time you don’t even know that your host isn’t taking your website security seriously enough. Such things increase hacker attacks, frequent downtime, low performance, might all be a results of inadequate security mechanisms in situation.
The reality is that you’re not really getting to “fix your host.” the simplest and therefore the best solution is to modify to a special host that’s safer. Generally, the more you pay, the higher your new host are going to be.
2. Secure the wp-config.php file
The wp-config.php file holds crucial information related to your WordPress installation, and it’s the foremost important enter your site’s root directory. Protecting it means securing the core of your WordPress website or blog.
Following trick makes things complex for hackers to breach the safety of your site, since the wp-config.php file becomes unreachable to them. As a bonus, the protection process is basically easy. Just take your wp-config.php file and move it to a better level than your root directory.
Now, the question is, if you store it somewhere else, how does the server access it? Inside current WordPress architecture, the configuration file settings are normally set to the best on the priority list. So, even though it’s stored one folder above the basis directory, WordPress can still see it.
3. Disallow file editing
If a user has admin access to your WordPress dashboard they will edit any files that are a part of your WordPress installation. This includes all themes & plugins.
If you disallow file editing, nobody are going to be ready to modify any of the files – even though a hacker obtains admin access to your WordPress dashboard.
To make this work, add the subsequent to the wp-config.php file (at the very end):
define(“DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT”,true);
4. Set directory permissions carefully
Wrong directory permissions are often fatal, especially if you’re working during a shared hosting environment.
In such a case, changing files and directory permissions may be a good move to secure the web site at the hosting level. Setting the directory permissions to “755” and files to “644” secures the entire file system of your website including – directories, subdirectories, and individual files.
This can be done either manually via the File Manager inside your hosting CPanel, or through the terminal (connected with SSH) – use the “chmod” command you may use putty software for this.
In order to examine the right permission scheme for WordPress or install the iThemes Security plugin.
5. Disable directory listing with .htaccess
If you create a replacement directory as a part of your website and don’t put an index.html enter it, you’ll be surprised to seek out that your visitors can get a full directory listing of everything that’s therein directory.
For example, if you create a directory called “data”, you’ll see everything therein directory just by typing http://www.example.com/data/ in your browser. No password or anything is required.
You can prevent this by adding the subsequent line of code in your .htaccess file:
Options All -Indexes
6. Block all hotlinking
Let’s say you find a picture online and would really like to share it on your website. First of all, you would like permission or to buy that image, otherwise there’s an honest chance it’s illegal to try to to so. But if you are doing get permission, you would possibly directly pull the image’s URL and use that to put the photo in your post. An important problem here is that the image is shown on your website, but being hosted on another site’s server.
From this attitude, you don’t have any control over whether or not the photo remains on the server. But it’s also important to understand that folks might do that to your website.
If you’re trying to secure your WordPress blog, hot linking is an important thing. If another person using your photo url and stealing your server bandwidth to point out the image on their own website. You’ll see slower loading speeds hence, the potential for top server costs.
7. Understand, and protect, against DDoS attacks
A DDoS attack may be a common sort of strike against your server bandwidth, where the attacker uses multiple programs and systems to overload your server. Although an attack like this doesn’t jeopardize your site files, it’s meant to crash your site for an extended period of your time if not resolved. Usually, you simply hear about DDoS attacks when it happens to large companies like GitHub or Target. They’re conducted by what many ask as cyber-terrorists, therefore the motive might simply be to wreak havoc.
That said, you don’t got to be a Fortune 500 company to be in danger.
If you are worried, we recommend signing up for the Cloudflare or Sucuri or WordFence premium plans. These solutions have web application firewalls to research the bandwidth getting used and block out DDoS attacks entirely.
8. Use two-factor authentication for WordPress security
Introducing a two-factor authentication (2FA) module on the login screen is another good security measure. During this case, the user provides login details for 2 different components. The web site owner decides what those two are. It are often a daily password followed by a secret question, a cipher, a group of characters, or more popular, the Google Authenticator app, which sends a cipher to your phone. This way, only the person together with your phone (you) can log in to your site.
I prefer employing a cipher while deploying 2FA on any of my websites. The Google Authenticator plugin helps me thereupon in only a couple of clicks.
9. Rename login URL to protect your WordPress website
Changing the login URL is a simple thing to try to. By default, the WordPress login page are often accessed easily via wp-login.php or wp-admin added to the site’s main URL.
When hackers know the direct URL of your login page, they will attempt to brute force their way in.
They plan to log in with their GWDB (Guess Work Database, i.e. a database of usernames & passwords; e.g. username: admin and password: p@ssword … with many such combinations).
At now, we have already restricted the user login attempts and changed usernames with email IDs. Now we will replace the login URL and obtain obviate 99% of direct brute force attacks.
This small trick restricts an unauthorized user from accessing the login page. Only someone with the precise URL can roll in the hay.
The easiest thanks to change your login URL is to use the aptly named plugin WPS Hide Login. It’s very simple to use; just enter your new login page URL and save the changes. You’ll set the URL to anything you would like.
10. Make backups regularly to protect your WordPress website
No matter how secure your WordPress website is, there’s always room for improvements. But at the top of the day, keeping an off-site backup somewhere is probably the simplest antidote regardless of what happens.
If you’ve got a backup, you’ll restore your WordPress website to a working state any time you would like. There are some plugins which will assist you during this respect. As an example, there all-in-one plugin.
If you’re trying to find a premium solution then I like to recommend VaultPress by Automattic, which is great. I even have it found out so it creates backups hebdomadally and anything bad ever happen, I can easily restore the location with only one click.
I know some larger websites run backups every hour, except for most organizations that’s complete overkill. To not mention, you’d got to make sure that most of these backups are being deleted after a replacement one is formed since each computer file takes up space on your drive. That said, I’d recommend weekly or monthly backups for many organizations.
On top of the backups, VaultPress also checks my site for malware and alerts me if anything shady goes on.
As web development company, we also provide WordPress web designer and developer services, please check them out as well.
Conclusion on how to secure your WordPress website
If you’re a beginner then that was tons to require in. However, everything that I discussed during this article may be a step within the right direction. The more you care about your WordPress security, the harder it gets for a hacker to interrupt in.
If you wish to design and develop a wordpress website or implementing wordpress security you may consider WordPress Development Company
Have some time? Visit our website or LinkedIn page to know more.
