March 19

Must to follow 6 DIY Steps to Beef Up Your WordPress Site Security

If you're a WordPress user, then probably you would have heard a lot about a major website getting hacked or how sensitive information is being compromised. The open source nature of WordPress makes it an easy target for people (including hackers, malicious users, etc.), looking forward to steal data from sites with an easy entry point.

Through this post, I intend to talk about 6 DIY steps following which you can protect your WordPress site from unauthorized access

1. Creating Strong Passwords

Now, this is the most obvious step involved in the process of securing a WordPress website that you shouldn't procrastinate. There are many hackers out there who persistently attempts at identifying or already know about your username. But, you cannot let them determine your password. And so, make sure to create strong passwords (ideally the one that is difficult to crack but at the same time is easy to remember). I will highly recommend using a password that uses the combination of letters, characters and numbers (e.g. maria91x or something else as per your own requirements).

2. Changing Your WordPress Username

Almost all of the WordPress users know that the default “username” of every WordPress installation starts with “admin”. So to beef up security, make sure to change your site's username to a different name. Luckily, you can find several online tutorials and basic guide for reference to understand: how you can change username of a WordPress site.

3.Keeping Up with Updates

WordPress constantly releases updates not just for introducing new features, but also for fixing security issues – that is to fix bugs and patch security loopholes. As we had discussed previously that WordPress is open source, and thus an easier target for hackers.

The sooner you update your site the better, as the security fixes to deal with WordPress vulnerabilities that existed in the previous versions are also rolled out with those updates.

4.Monitor Your Website Regularly

Another viable step that you should follow to keep your WordPress site secure requires you to monitor it for hidden malware. Most of the hackers share a common purpose – to inject malware into WP powered sites. This clearly suggests that monitoring your site for malware is vitally important. For this purpose, you can use a system that monitors your website constantly for malware (ideally the one that could perform detect security breaches by diving deep into your site's file structure). Sucuri Inc. has earned great reputation for offering an effective solution for malware protection and server-side scanning. The Sucuri Security WordPress Security plugin is a must-have tool for users who want to harden the security of their WP site.

5.Choosing the Right Web Host

If you take your WordPress website security seriously, then you should avoid hosting your site on a shared server. This is simply because, the security risks already existing in your WordPress installation gets multiplied by the risks inherent in other sites running on the same server. You can opt for your own VPS, but it can be too expensive for you (and doesn't suit sites that does not necessitate massive traffic). So, if you're hosting your site on a shared server keep in mind to choose one having less number of hosted websites.

6.Changing File Permissions

While maintaining WordPress security, changing file permissions on a WordPress site are usually the last thing on our mind. However, just like any other security measures, proper file permissions also plays a critical role in ensuring your site's security. Remember, while setting up file permissions the value of CHMOD should be set to 744, so as to make your WordPress directory (or folder) read-only to all of the users except you.

A word of caution, make sure to access your FTP client and click on any WordPress file/folder and then click on "File Permissions" to check if it is set to “777”. If not, you would lucky if your website haven't been hacked, or else change the CHMOD value to 744.

Wrapping Up!

If you're a security-conscious WordPress user, and want to keep your site secure from any hacking attempts or brute-force attacks, then this post will help you learn about 6 of the most basic DIY steps worth reading.

Author Bio:

Edward Jones holds an impressive amount of expertise in major CMS platforms including Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla and Magento. You can go through his write-ups for gathering a greater insight into the popular CMSs available today. If you need to hire wordpress developer then simply get in touch with Edward.