How to secure a WordPress website from Getting Hacked?

How to secure a WordPress website from Getting Hacked?

WordPress is a regular target for hacking. Hackers are targeting the theme, the core WordPress files, plugins and even the login page. These are the steps to take to make it more likely to be hacked and to have the option to recover easier if it should still happen.

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How Hackers Attack WordPress

All websites on the internet are under constant attack, whether it’s a phpBB forum or a WordPress website, all sites are being tested by hackers. It’s not uncommon for a hacker to examine a large number of pages or attempt to login in many times each day.

And that is only one hacker. Websites are under attack by a several hackers simultaneously.

Normally it is not a person who is attempting to hack you. Hackers employ automated software to crawl the web to test for specific weaknesses in website.

These mechanized software programs crawling the web are called bots. I call them hacker bots in order to recognize them from scraper bots (software that is trying to copy content).

Protect Your WordPress Site with a Firewall

A firewall is a software program that blocks an intruder. As I would like to think, the best WordPress firewall is a plugin called Wordfence.

What Wordfence does is to check if a site visitor’s behavior matches that of an abusive bot. If the bot breaks certain rules, such as requesting too many pages in a short measure of time, Wordfence will automatically block the bot.

Wordfence is also customized to permit genuine bots like Google and Bing on the site.

There are advanced features that let a publisher see what bots are attacking a webpage and to see where the bot is coming from, as if it’s terrible bot originating from Amazon Web Services or Bluehost for instance. Wordfence gives the publisher the ability to block the bot by their IP address, the whole IP address range or even by a fake browser user agent that the bot is using.

WordPress Defense Against Exploits

Furthermore, the paid version of Wordfence will shield you in advance from many bargained themes and plugins before those plugins are fixed.

When Wordfence researchers are aware of an exploit they will update the premium version of the firewall to provide subscribers with protection from those exploits, sometimes weeks before the exploit is fixed by the compromised theme or plugin developer.

Site Security Hardening

Another free plugin that gives an extra layer of protection is called, Sucuri Security. Sucuri (owned by GoDaddy) helps the WordPress security to block awful bots from taking advantage of certain kinds of attacks. It additionally has a malware scanning feature that checks all files to check if they’ve been changed.

Sucuri will alarm you each time somebody login into your site, helping publishers to recognize if a hacker is signing in. Sucuri can also alert a publisher if a file was changed, something that hackers do.

These are the features of the free version of Sucuri:

• “Security Activity Auditing
• File Integrity Monitoring
• Remote Malware Scanning
• Blacklist Monitoring
• Effective Security Hardening
• Post-Hack Security Actions
• Security Notifications”

The paid version of Sucuri includes a website firewall.

Limit Logins to Your Site

WordFence can block bots that are consistently filling in user names and passwords in the WordPress login page.

But if you want to focus on limiting those logins, there is a plugin called, Limit Login Attempts Reloaded that allows publishers to automatically block all hackers who enter a set number of failed name and password combinations. For instance, you can set it to block hackers after three attempts to guess the password.

These are the features of the login blocker:

• “Limit the number of retry attempts when logging in (per each IP). This is fully customizable.
• Informs the user about the remaining retries or lockout time on the login page.
• Optional logging and optional email notification.
• It is possible to whitelist/blacklist IPs and Usernames.
• Sucuri Website Firewall compatibility.
• XMLRPC gateway protection.
• Woocommerce login page protection.
• Multi-site compatibility with extra MU settings.
• GDPR compliant. With this feature turned on, all logged IPs get obfuscated (md5-hashed).
• Custom IP origins support (Cloudflare, Sucuri, etc.)”

The Limit Login Reloaded plugin provides a fast way to shut down hack bots that are trying to guess a password.

Update all Themes and Plugins

It’s essential to consistently update all themes and plugins. WordPress gives an approach to update all plugins automatically, which is helpful for publishers or organizations who don’t sign in and do updates regularly.

By empowering the autoupdate feature a publisher can be guaranteed of having the most up to date software. Having an obsolete plugin is one of the main sources of being hacked.

There are reasons not to enable the auto update feature, but the negatives tend to happen rarely. For instance, an updated plugin may be incompatible with other plugins.

But for websites that don’t change frequently, the autoupdate feature is probably a good thing to enable.

Protect Your WordPress Site from Hackers

For many websites, simply taking these small steps to secure a website is enough to keep the sites from getting hacked. The free versions of these plugins give a remarkable measure of security and the premium versions give much more protection.

There are numerous security type plugins and a portion of those have really contained weaknesses themselves. According to me Wordfence and Sucuri are the top choices for WordPress security.

We at CodeLedge, are Sweden’s best choice for WordPress development services. We are the experts at making a website secure and easy to load. Feel free to talk with us at hi@codeledge.net or get a quote from here.

Citations

WordFence Security
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordfence/

Sucuri Security
https://wordpress.org/plugins/sucuri-scanner/

Limit Login Attempts Reloaded
https://wordpress.org/plugins/limit-login-attempts-reloaded/

UpdraftPlus
https://wordpress.org/plugins/updraftplus/