Protect Your WordPress Blog from Hackers
WordPress websites have always been a target for hackers looking to have some fun at the cost of damaging and defacing websites and blogs.
I know firsthand what it feels like to get your blogs hacked.
It happened to me two times in less than 4 days and I was beyond being mad, especially after the hosting company informed me that they had NO backups of my blogs.
For a hacker, it is also worth investing their time and money to identify vulnerabilities.
Millions of site’s across the world use WordPress, and being able to compromise one of them may lead the hacker to be able to replicate it for other sites with the same vulnerability as well.
There is a website (WPvulndb.com) that lists all of the known exploits and vulnerabilities of WordPress and categorizes them under WordPress Core, Themes, and Plugins.
There are various options with developers that are very responsive and are actively concerned with your security needs.
Plugins
Many of the free plugins for WordPress, may be outdated, vulnerable, badly coded, and may no longer be supported by any active development team.
This means that using such a plugin may be detrimental to your website’s security and may lead you to be a hacking victim due to the flaws in that plugin.
Always install plugins that have good reviews, good ratings, are compatible with your current version of WordPress, and are regularly updated by an active developer team.
You want quality plugins and not quantity.
You can see the plugin details and inspect them before integrating them with your website.
Themes
The same applies to WordPress Themes as well.
Always read the theme reviews and see their rating before you choose a theme.
Also, just because you pay for a theme does not mean that it is more secure or has no vulnerabilities, the only advantage will be that you will be able to contact the developers to patch your theme or update it.
Bad coding in the themes may lead your site to become slow or open it up for hackers to exploit.
Updates
Always keep your WordPress version, themes, and plugins up to date.
You can do this manually or if your web host provides you with an auto-installer, you can allow the auto-installer to update WordPress, the themes, and the plugins.
Keeping your site in sync with the latest version will prevent hackers from exploiting old vulnerabilities, for which a fix is already available and installed.
Keeping updated software can go a long way in ensuring security.
Backup
Always backup your site regularly and maintain a remote backup location in case of a disaster or damage to your site.
Keeping a remote backup location is ideal so that you “do not keep all your eggs in one basket”.
Make sure that your backup is easy to restore in the event of an emergency.
While you can back up parts of your website separately i.e., Database, Files, Image, etc. you can also have a compressed zip backup of your entire website in a single file.
Auto Installer software allows you to schedule nightly backups and set the backups to happen automatically.
Testing
Don’t forget to test your website for any known exploits or vulnerabilities before the hackers do.
There are numerous free online tools, as well as WordPress plugins that will scan your website and suggest some security measures.
They will also alert you of any major flaws in the system and will also indicate any outdated WordPress versions.
It is best that you protect your website or blog before the hackers gain access and have a field day destroying all of your hard work.
