Today WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) globally. It powers over 40% of all websites. Its ease of use, flexibility, and vast array of plugins make it an ideal choice for both beginners and experienced web developers.
However, with its popularity comes a downside—WordPress is also a prime target for hackers and malicious attacks. That’s why ensuring your WordPress site is secure is very important.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll cover the essential steps that will help you improve the security of your WordPress site. By following these best practices, you can protect your website from potential threats and keep your data—and your users’ data—safe.
Table of Contents
Best Practices to Improve WordPress Website Security?
1. Always Keep WordPress, Themes, and Plugins Updated
It is the simplest and most effective way to secure your WordPress site—keep everything updated be it WordPress theme or plug-in. WordPress regularly releases updates to patch security vulnerabilities, same goes for themes and plugins.
Always run the latest version of WordPress. Updates often include security patches for vulnerabilities that hackers might exploit. Set your site to auto-update for minor releases, but always review and apply major updates to ensure compatibility with your theme and plugins.
Outdated themes and plugins are common entry points for hackers. Regularly check for updates and apply them as soon as they’re available. If you’re using a plugin that’s no longer maintained or hasn’t been updated in a long time, consider finding an alternative.
2. Use Strong Passwords and Two-Factor Authentication
One of the easiest ways a hacker can use to gain access to your WordPress site is “weak passwords”. A strong password with two-factor authentication (2FA) helps enhance better site security.
A good password should consist of a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, at least one digit, and special characters. Avoid common phrases or other forms of easy-to-guess information, such as “admin123”.
Two-factor authentication(2FA) adds another layer of security in WordPress, which is that the user must enter a second source of identification—a code from their phone, for example—along with their password. There are several plugins available that make it easy to hook up 2FA on your WordPress website.
3. Make a Limit for Login Attempts
By default, WordPress has unlimited attempts at the login process. This makes your website vulnerable to attacks when hackers try to guess your password by numerous attempts. The limitation of attempts will prevent such cases.
A plugin like “Limit Login Attempts Reloaded” offers a limited number of login trials that one can carry out in a single IP address. If these limited attempts fail, it will prevent further access temporarily, making it difficult, or even next to impossible, for hackers to access the site.
4. Change the Default Login URL
The default URL for the login page of WordPress is “/wp-admin” or “/wp-login.php”. Because everybody knows about this, it becomes the target for brute-force attacks by most hackers. Changing the URL will keep potential attackers from locating the login page easily.
How to change the Login URL?: There are quite a few plugins available that change the default URL to a unique one, “WPS Hide Login” being one of them. Now, that certainly will not scare away a potential hacker. But then, it makes life slightly difficult for them as it is a time-wasting process for a hacker who is trying to find your login page.
5. Plan For a Regular Back-Up
Backups are essential to make even when you have the best security setup. In the worst case of security compromise, the backup would help you restore your website to the state it was in before.
Make sure to use a dependable backup plugin, such as “UpdraftPlus” or “BackupBuddy“, for your site. Let the backups contain the database, files, themes, and applications. Those must be relocated offsite to save cloud storage to ensure that they cannot be reached in case of compromise to your site.
You should plan for automated regular backups. This can be a daily, weekly, or monthly backup. Also, from time to time, check and test whether you can restore the backup correctly.
6. Choose a Secure Hosting Provider
Your choice of hosting has a great impact on the security of your WordPress site. A good hosting provider offers in-built security features and proactive monitoring.
Choosing a reputable host is important to secure a WordPress website. Choose an appropriate hosting provider, that takes security on priority, providing features like SSL certificates, firewalls, malware scanning, and updates. Managed WordPress hosting, such as WP Engine, Kinsta, or even SiteGround, has leading security measures in place by standard.
Make your site run through HTTPS by installing an SSL certificate. Most reputable hosting providers include a free SSL certificate in their plans. HTTPS encrypts data between your users and your server, making it harder for attackers to intercept.
7. Implement a Web Application Firewall (WAF)
A WAF will act as a web application firewall between your website and all the threats roaming around, filtering away those threats even before they hit your website.
Cloud-based WAFs from services work in real time by monitoring traffic. Such WAFs can also stop known threats such as DDoS, SQL injection attacks, or cross-site scripting.
Alternatively, security plugins can be integrated to include options, such as Wordfence or iThemes Security, where WAF is a part of their feature list.
Apart from extending protection by a firewall, this software provides other security, such as malware scanning and defense from brute force.
8. Secure Your wp-config.php File
The “wp-config.php” file is one of the most critical files in your WordPress installation. It contains sensitive information, including your database credentials. Securing this file is crucial to protecting your site.
By default, “wp-config.php” is located in the root directory of your WordPress installation. You can move it to a directory above your root directory, making it harder for hackers to access.
To improve WordPress security, ensure that the “wp-config.php” file has the correct file permissions. The recommended permission setting is 400 or 440, which restricts access to the file.
If you’re using an Apache server, you can add a rule to your “.htaccess” file to deny access to “wp-config.php”. Simply add the following code:
<files wp-config.php>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>
9. Disable File Editing in the WordPress Dashboard
WordPress allows administrators to edit theme and plugin files directly from within the dashboard. While this is a nice feature, in terms of convenience, it is a huge security risk if an attacker happens to pop his way into your admin area.
To disable file editing, the following line can be added to your “wp-config.php”:
define('DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT', true);
This will only stop anyone from editing theme and plugin files within the WordPress dashboard, making malicious code injections into your site least likely to occur.
10. Security Vulnerability Monitoring of Your Site
Proactive monitoring helps you find security issues before they turn into serious ones. Regular scanning for vulnerabilities and suspicious activities is what you need to keep your WordPress site secure.
Install a good security plugin—for example, “Wordfence” or “Sucuri Security“. These plugins help you monitor your website for malware, login attempts, and other potential security issues.
You need to set up your website in Google Search Console. This will give you all the required insight into your website performance and notify you instantly of any security issues for hacked content or malware detected by Google.
Conferences may be conducted for regular security audits of your site. Check for outdated plugins, themes, and other potential vulnerabilities. If possible, have a security expert review your site from time to time to ensure everything is in order.
11. Limit User Permissions
No WordPress site should have full administrative access for all users. Limiting the users’ permissions may decrease the chances of accidental or malicious changes to your site.
You can be able to assign user roles in WordPress; every role has different permissions, and you should only give users access to those resources pertinent to their job.
Give the role of content creators to an “Editor” so that you only reserve an “Administrator” for use by whoever has to oversee the whole site.
You may want to periodically review user accounts on your site. Delete any accounts that you no longer need and make sure each user has an appropriate role given to them.
Not keeping the default “admin” as the username of your admin account. It is one most common targets for brute-force attacks. Create a unique username that isn’t easy to be guessed.
12. Disable XML-RPC if Not Used
XML-RPC in WordPress is a feature that allows your site to communicate with other systems, such as mobile apps, remotely. Well, it turns out this is one of the most targeted features by hackers, making large brute-force attacks against it.
If it’s not needed by your site, then you should disable it. You can simply do so by putting the following inside your “.htaccess” file:
# Block WordPress xmlrpc.php requests
<Files xmlrpc.php>
order deny,allow
deny from all
</Files>
Alternatively, you can disable this feature using plugins like “Disable XML-RPC“.
13. Implement Security Headers
Security headers are one of the defensive measures in your WordPress site against various kinds of attacks, including XSS, clickjacking, and other code injections. In the setting of these headers, you inform browsers of the behavior required with your website and what is allowed, giving an extra layer of security.
This header helps prevent XSS attacks by allowing you to set from which sources content can load on your site. It’s a bit hard to set up, but it’s very effective in preventing XSS vulnerabilities.
This header gives protection against clickjacking attacks because this defines in what context your website can be hosted in an iframe on another website. You can specify this header with the values “DENY” or “SAMEORIGIN” to limit this.
The STS header enforces the browser to use interactions with your site over HTTPS exclusively, thus hindering attacks regarding downgrading and hijacking cookies. This is important for a site that has just migrated from HTTP to HTTPS.
You can set these headers by adding rules to your “.htaccess” file if you run an Apache server, or your “nginx.conf” file if you are using Nginx. Alternatively, there are plugins, such as “HTTP Headers,” designed to offer an easier way of managing security headers without having to make edits to server files directly.
14. Secure Your WordPress Database
The entire content, settings, and user data of your site are all stored in the WordPress database. Securing it is one of the most vital activities that could help your site avoid some of the many probable threats.
By default, WordPress creates all tables in the database with “wp_” as the table prefix. Most SQL injection attacks target this table prefix by default. You will make it much harder for an attacker to guess the name of your database tables if you change it to something unique, say “xyz_“.
To ensure your WordPress database security, your database should be secured with a strong and unique password, just like your WordPress admin account. Make sure that your database username and password will not be easy to guess.
The database user account, which WordPress is using, should be leveraging only the minimum privileges. That’s generally SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE privileges for your site’s database, with others like DROP or ALTER being added only if needed.
Keep your database on your regular backup list. If something bad happens, you will require a recent backup to restore your site as quickly as possible.
15. Disable Directory Browsing
With directory browsing enabled, a list of all files and folders on your server is available to your visitors unless an index file exists. This can be a potential source of sensitive information for a potential attacker.
Now, to disable directory browsing, add this line in your “.htaccess” file:
Options -Indexes
With that, unauthorized viewers will not be able to view the contents of your directories.
How does SupportFly Help You with WordPress Security?
Remember, security is an ongoing commitment. Regular updates, proactive monitoring, and educating your team-the sum of all these parts make for solid WordPress security. Stay vigilant, keep improving those security levels, and your WordPress site will be secure in the rapidly changing digital landscape.
Need to build a secure and high-performance WordPress site?
SupportFly specializes in WordPress web development and provides custom-tailored solutions focusing on security, speed, and user experience. From a new website to upgrading your current one, our expert team works diligently to ensure your site is protected against threats while still maintaining smooth functionality.
Conclusion
There is a lot more to improving the security of a WordPress site than just installing a couple of plugins. You must be deed smart about all the steps you take to make your website as much secure from all the potential threats as it might face.
Everything discussed in this guide will help you greatly minimize the chances of having your website compromised. Let SupportFly help you create a standout, secure WordPress site.
