How to Make Your WordPress Website More Secure

The security of a WordPress website, should you own one, should be of paramount importance. After all, if your website is hacked, there is the possibility that you could lose access or data, which could severely cripple your website for the future.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. There are some ways you can go about making your website more secure. Here is a list of some of the things to prevent a WordPress website from being hacked and make it more secure (and from learning from experience of it already being hacked).

1. Install a security plugin – There are tens, if not hundreds, of security plugins that are out there to provide your WordPress website the security it needs. This could be from stopping certain IP addresses, known from hacking, to access your website’s servers, or to prevent brute-force logins. Many of the free plugins do the job well enough. However, for more up to date malware/virus/hacking information and more features, many of the free plugins have a paid counterpart to gain such benefits.
2. Enable two-factor authentication – For the vast majority of WordPress websites, logging in will require knowing your username and password. This is not the best for security, since if such details are released, anyone has access. As well as this, brute-force logins can only happen when only a username/password is required. This is why two-factor authentication is good for security, since it requires you to type a code, sent to your own smartphone.
3. Disable wp-upload – Talking from experience, a way a hacker can influence your website is by uploading malicious code using the wp-upload function. By default, this is set as enabled. For most websites, they will not need this enabled, so it is better to disable it to increase security.
4. Don’t use ‘admin’ as administrator account – Most WordPress websites will have a personal account, as well as a basic administrator account, with access to everything. The problem is that many WordPress users have the administrator account with the username as ‘admin’. This makes it much easier for hackers to get access to the account, if they already know what the username is.
5. Back up your website daily – Just in case anything does happen, it is a very good idea to make sure your WordPress website is backed up daily. If a hacker does get access to your website and changes things, it will not be the end of the world if your website is backed up daily. This is because the hacker will only have access to the WordPress account and not your hosting account. Therefore, you can use the backups of your website, with your hosting provider, to get rid of the current ‘hacked’ WordPress and use the back up to get rid of any access for hackers, as well as cleaning your website. Many hosts back up automatically, although there are many plugins that can schedule automatic backups to the cloud as well.