WordPress is the most popular website management system. A lot of individuals, small to medium size businesses use WordPress to build all kinds of websites, blogs. WordPress is powerful, flexible and yet extremely easy to use. Over 60 million people have chosen WordPress to power their websites. Because of its large user base, WordPress is targeted by many hackers for long time. Do not think your site is not popular enough to invite hackers or it is not an ecommerce shopping store that hackers will not be interested. Hackers covet your WordPress sites for all kinds of evil purpose. Even if your site store no valuable data or sensitive information, they can still use your site to spread malware so anyone visits your WordPress site may get their computers infected, other websites hosted at the same server as your site might be infected, your website may be closed down by your ISP or web hosting service provider. A lot of viruses spread around the web through all kinds of websites, emails, apps and other internet medium. Now you may ask being a non-tech savvy, how can we tell malware or malicious code from our WordPress pages or scripts, how to prevent our WordPress sites from hacking without technical knowledge? Like we mentioned above, WordPress has a huge user base. In fact, it is said to power more than 20% of the whole internet. Thus we have a lot of WordPress users with limited coding knowledge. A large portion of WordPress users, bloggers even administrators do not have professional skills to fight against all kinds of code issues, website security problems. Here we will share with WordPress beginners some easy ways to prevent WordPress hacking.
4 Easy Ways to Prevent WordPress Hacking
Update WordPress & Plugins
When you have used WordPress for sometime, you will know this content management system rolls out new updates or versions very frequently. When you open the release archive of WordPress, you will get a very long list of all WordPress versions have been released. Only the latest WordPress versions are actively maintained. Hackers will make use of the vulnerabilities of old WordPress plugins and bring your site down or gain illegal access. Thus you have to update WordPress in time. Fortunately WordPress system is so powerful, it makes the update of WordPress so easy. You can refer to this guide and see how to update WordPress, plugins and themes from WordPress dashboard.
Change default WordPress Admin Username & Create Strong Password
Hackers use automated tools and try numerous times to log in your WordPress dashboard with a combination of username and password, which is called brute force attack. Hackers have a very large database with all kinds of usernames and passwords. You should use complicated username and password other than ordinary credentials. By default all WordPress installations have ‘admin’ as its administrator account username. This username is risky though. You can change a different username for your WordPress administrator account during the installing of WordPress. If you overlooked it, you can go to create a new administrator account from WordPress dashboard. Then go to delete the default WordPress admin user account or downgraded it to a WordPress role with very limited privileges. See this guide to change WordPress admin account and username. Are you using a single word or your birthday as your password? Change it immediately. If your password is stolen, you are locked out of the WordPress control panel, go to reset it immediately. Here is the guide you can refer to recover lost WordPress password.
Install WordPress Security Plugins
Many security plugins for WordPress can limit the times you can try to login in a certain period of time. Jetpack is a complete plugin with numerous features with the options to turn on or off them. It is developed and maintained by the WordPress team who create the WordPress system. If you have installed this plugin, you will notice a “prove your humanity in WordPress login” screen. Everyone has to manually do a math captcha before they can log in WordPress control panel unless you have manually added their IP addresses to the whitelist from WordPress dashboard. This can defend against brute force attack. Also it will monitor and block the unauthorized login attempts. You can find the stats within your WordPress dashboard.
Secure WordPress hosting server
The latest but not the least, you have to choose a secure WordPress hosting server for your sites. A reliable web hosting can secure your WordPress site. This part is normally overlooked. In fact a good WordPress hosting service can greatly save your time and energy in maintaining your websites. For example, Arvixe offers DDOS attack protected hosting. Bluehost is the favorite WordPress hosting by thousands of individuals and small businesses for its excellent WordPress hosting service. They will scan their servers including your files to find, and remove it. They will check outdated plugins or WordPress versions. Their support team will send out your notice if your WordPress version or plugins are too old. If some severe security risk exists in your WordPress site, they will update your WordPress version for you, send you emergency update notice so you know which plugin has what kind of potential risk and instructions to update the plugin. See this important WordPress security update notice as an example. What’s more they have built in a wide variety of auto installers you can make use of. For example the auto installer for WordPress can help you set up WordPress site automatically.
If your sites get hacked, a good web hosting vendor will help you to find and remove malware, restore site from your own backups or backups created by your web hosting. Remember that you are not alone. Your web hosting will monitor the status of your site, they will scan server to ensure no sites are infected by virus, they will back up the server and your websites regularly. If you are looking for a reliable hosting for your WordPress or other sites, you can refer to this web hosting package for beginners. For about 4 dollars per month, you can get the best-in-class WordPress hosting service. If you plan to hosting multiple or many websites, you can choose the plus hosting package, which allows you to host many domains and websites with no extra fee. Their pro hosting plan even offers free SSL certifacte, which is essential for online store. SSL certificate is also a nice addon to your website security and search engine ranking. So even if you do not want to run an ecommerce site, you can still use SSL to protect your WordPress or other sites. If you want the best WordPress hosting experience, they have the managed WordPress hosting which is for sure the best in the industry. Other than running WordPress on shared servers, your sites will be running on WordPress optimized VPS servers with abundant server and bandwidth resources for business sites and websites with high traffic.
