It is true WordPress marketing is one of the most powerful marketing tools available on the internet today, but it can be abused.
What is even better, is against popular belief, WordPress can be used for more than just blogging. You can even create your website through WordPress.
There is nothing worse than one day you try to login to your blog’s admin to either check on something, to add new content, or make changes and find out that you have been hacked.
Your reaction will be
1. You are mad
2. You are pissed
3. You yell, scream and swear
4. You flip off your computer
5. You wonder how did it happen
6. Then you wonder what do you do
When you are using WordPress, there are a few security measures that you should be aware of or you can risk being deleted from the Google search engine.
1. Plugins:
You need to be sure that you check all plugins before you add them to your site.
A lot of the third-party plugins sometimes are created by untrustworthy people. They create them to steal your blog or site.
Some of these plugins have also already been banned from Goggle, for your protection and if Google sees that you are using them they will delete your site from their search engine as well.
2. Recent Version:
Make sure that you are using a recent version of WordPress. This is because every software has bugs or errors that are corrected each time a new version is released.
When you use the latest version of WordPress you are avoiding these issues. You need to understand though that even the most recent versions can have errors; so you need to be careful.
A good practice to get into is before you download the most recent version do some research.
Look for possible problems that others have encountered. If there seems to be a lot of problems do not download it till they have the issues resolved.
3. Admin Account:
All hackers know that a new WordPress blog has a user admin feature. This feature will allow you to do just about any administrative job available on the WordPress software.
Slow these would-be hackers down by removing your admin feature. Instead, create WordPress admin privileges by using the administration feature.
After you have done this then you will need to log out of WordPress and log back in.
Then you should delete the admin user. The new admin user should be different from your original one.
4. Password Protect:
You need to be sure that you password protect your WordPress software the minute you install it. This will give you an extra layer of protection against would-be hackers.
Please note though if you have a weak password the hackers can still break through so come up with one that contains a combination of both numbers and letters.
The harder you make the password, the less chance the hacker has of gaining access to your WordPress site.
5. Rename Your Database Tables:
Hackers who attack your site will need access to the database table names.
WordPress allows you to change your table names to prevent these would-be hackers from attacking your tables.
These are just a few of the security measures, which you can use to prevent your WordPress from getting banned from Google, when you are hacked.
There are many others available and you can find them by typing in security for WordPress into any search engine.
Practicing these steps now can save you a lot of trouble and money later.
Another very important thing to consider is having a plugin installed that not only allows you to back up the database but also every WordPress file and folder.
The plugin must also allow for you to be able to restore everything from the backup, in the event you have any problems.
This will also prove to be very helpful if your Webhost does not have backups of your files or the backups are OLD and pretty much useless.