5 Things You Can do to Secure Your WordPress Site

Making sure your WordPress site is secure from hackers is important. Being hacked is no laughing matter. It can result in a loss of all your data, the collection of your personal information and that of your customers or followers, and it can put you at risk financially. Let’s look at 5 things you can do to help secure your WordPress site.

#1 Fix Any Malware Issues

Find a way to clean up detected malware issues. It’s common for blog owners to underestimate the cost of being down related to security problems or the time it takes to deal with an issue. Sucuri is a good solution for removing malware. 

#2 Choose a Host Provider

If you have your blog on a server that is shared your security risk goes up tenfold. Consider the risk to your blog and then multiply that risk by the number of other sites and blogs on that server. That’s what your risk is. A dedicated server or VPS may be more than you can handle, but another good choice is WordPress hosting that’s managed. It’s certainly worth the cost as you get better security, better support, a faster site and automatic backups. 

#3 It’s Time to do Some Site Clean Up

You need to keep your blog nice and tidy. Remove old plugins you aren’t using. Delete themes you no longer use. Host websites that are in development on a different server than websites that are live. 

#4 Control Sensitive Data

When you are doing your site clean up, make sure you aren’t leaving behind any sensitive data for the world to be able to gain access to. Check all of your php files, because these are like road maps to your site setup and give a hacker all of the information they need to ‘bust in.’

Don’t keep your backups on the server with your site files. That’s just encouraging a hacker to download them and use them to hack you’re the site. Disable directory browsing to stop a hacker from seeing the blog’s folders. 

Be careful when you are using the CPanel file manager and having it save copies of your important files temporarily. You are much better off using secure file transfer protocol. 

#5 Don’t Let Your Guard Down

This might seem obvious, but it’s not always practiced. You need to be vigilant about staying on top of everything on your site. This will decrease the risk of being hacked.

by David Simon