WordPress Security: 22 Ways to Keep Your Website Safe

We had a client with a small e-commerce site running Easy Digital Downloads which got over 5 million requests to a single page within 7 days. The site typically only generated between MB a day in bandwidth and a couple hundred visitors per day. But out of the blue, the site instantly went to between GB of data transfer a day! If your host doesn’t have backups there are some popular WordPress services and plugins which you can use to automate the process. Kinsta has five different types of backups, including automated backups that so that you can rest easy at night. File permissions on both your installation and web server are crucial to beefing up your WordPress security.

Every piece of code on your website is a potential entry point for a hacker. I won’t shop on websites marked as insecure by my browser, and I am not the only one who won’t. According to a study by GlobalSign, 85% of online shoppers avoid unsecured websites. Keep in mind that in 2021 it is vital to have all of your sites using HTTPS and not just your login and checkout pages. A potential customer may not make it to a secure checkout if the store pages are marked as Not Secure by their web browser. The first step in your WordPress security strategy is to secure your server.

Seek Professional Help for Malware Removal

If a total site rebuild is not feasible, you should use a professional malware removal service and then harden your site’s security so you’re not hacked again. There is a good chance a hacker has compromised your website if your visitors see popups that redirect them to a malicious website. The goal of this type of attack is to drive traffic away from your site to the attacker’s site so they can target users with click fraud for Pay-per-click advertising.

Comparing the best WordPress security plugins

Most banking sites use this technique to prevent unauthorized visitors from accessing their sites, ensuring that their client’s data is safe. The backup file should include your entire WordPress installation files, like your database and the WordPress core files. In this case, you’ll need to do it via an FTP client by accessing your database and removing the plugin or theme entries manually. Adding this rule to your .htaccess will limit access to your wp-login.php to only one IP. Thus,  attackers won’t be able to get in your login page from other locations.

It’s an open‑source project that brings in all kinds of WordPress experts to put together a comprehensive list of vulnerabilities in a single database. Aside from security advantages, newer versions of PHP also boast measurable increases in performance. In some cases, merely updating PHP warmour.net has been shown to drastically improve website loading times. It’s important to understand there are different levels of SSL certificates. Enterprise‑level organizations have more stringent website security requirements, so you’ll need a higher level of SSL certificate. An enterprise‑level website deserves hosting designed for projects that require top‑of‑the‑line hardware, and that can handle massive amounts of traffic.

However, your customers may not know that the password they are using has been found in a data dump. You would be doing your customers a great service by alerting them to the fact that the password they are using has been compromised. If they are using that password everywhere, you could save them from some major headaches down the road. The easiest way to protect your website is by only giving your users the capabilities they need and not anything more. If the only thing someone will do on your website is to create and edit their own blog posts, they don’t need the capability to edit other people’s posts. After enabling the new Trusted Devices setting, users will receive a notification in the WordPress admin bar about pending unrecognized devices.

It can protect servers, specific websites, or entire groups of sites. A solid hosting provider can impact how well your site performs, how reliable it is, how large it can grow, and even how it ranks in search engines. The best hosts offer a variety of useful features, excellent support, and a service tailored to your chosen platform. WordPress encourages responsible disclosure of vulnerabilities in WordPress core, in plugins and themes available on WordPress.org, or in the wider WordPress ecosystem. Other benefits include putting you behind a proxy which helps to hide your origin IP address, although it is not bulletproof.