You’ve got a great looking website poised to help your business, but you may also be asking, how do I secure my WordPress website? Obviously, your website is meant to be inviting and help generate new revenue for your business, but how do you keep out the bad actors? There are 3 main ways to secure your website: a reliable web hosting company, a reputable security plugin, and you & your users; let’s start with the first.
Reliable Hosting Company
Many WordPress websites are build on shared hosting servers, meaning that your website is most likely on a server with many other websites and if any of these become infected, so could yours. A good hosting company will keep their servers secured, monitor network traffic for malicious attacks, and provide WAFs (Web Application Firewalls) among other things. For hosting providers, I suggest SiteGround web hosting services; not only do they provide essential security measures on their servers, their hosting plans are very affordable and offer free TLS certificates, which are used to encrypt traffic to/from your website to increase privacy.
Reputable Security Plugin
A security plugin is a great second layer of defense for WordPress websites. Security plugins can help to secure your site with various tools to harden your website and prevent intruders from accessing your website. I recommend Wordfence but Sucuri is another good plugin with its own set of pros and cons. Wordfence offers a free and premium tier and some of their features include: Endpoint Firewall, Security Scanners, Country Blocking, Two-Factor Authentication, and prevention of DDOS attacks. Before deciding on a security plugin, determine you needs and choose one that fits your requirements. If you need help, contact me and I can help you choose one that suits your needs.
You and Your Users
The last and easiest way to secure your website is for you and your users to follow stricter security guidelines. Most WordPress sites have the login panel installed at a default URL, such as domain.com/wp-admin. Knowing this, many attacks start here with brute force attacks where an attacker runs a password cracker to try and figure out the password. If users are using basic passwords made up of words, even with a combination of letters and numbers, password crackers can crack these passwords fairly easily in a short amount of time. Here are some ways to prevent easy password cracking: use unique passwords that do not use any type of word or sequence, enable login limits where users may only attempt to login a certain amount of times before the account is locked, and enable two-factor authentication.
Summary
As you can see from the above, securing a website is a cumulative effort between tools and users. However, if you can secure your website with these basic setup tips, it will go a long way in securing your website from threats. If you have any questions, please contact me and I will work with you to secure your website.