Five Ways To Secure Your WordPress Site and Keep it Safe and Sound

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How to Secure Your WordPress Site? Five Ways to Keep it Safe and Sound

WordPress is a CMS platform that is flawlessly crafted for both bloggers and e-commerce players. However, for any Internet technology, security is a major issue. Irrespective of its bespoke features, WordPress isn't without imperfections. The CMS has its own set of flaws which are hard to ignore.

While WordPress is gaining immense popularity, it should come as no surprise that these websites are popular target for hackers and some pesky users. The advancement of hacking tools has also made it easy for hackers to gain backdoor to a WordPress site and cripple its legitimacy. WordPress sites are lagging behind when it comes to security, often due to the lack of vigilance and knowledge among its users. A staggering amount of WordPress sites are becoming victims of unpleasant cyber attacks, compelling lots of users to come forward and protect their site from potential threats.

This post discusses some general tips and tricks that you can implement to safeguard your WordPress site against hacking, malware, or spam attacks. The tips mentioned below are quite easy to follow and will surely help you steer clear bad guys to a great extent.

Let's know about them in detail.

1. Embrace WordPress Updates

Running the latest version of WordPress is the most basic and obvious security measure that users can implement very easily. Running an outdated version will never help you when it comes to security as hackers are quick to attack these websites. When you update a software, you not only make it secure, but you also get a gift of better features, bug fixes, and other improvements. This is important to ensure a sustainable future of your website.

2. Use Plugins and Themes That Encourage Trust

With the help of a technique called plugin enumeration, hackers can easily find out the number of plugins your WordPress site is currently using. The technique can be used to break into your site and make it vulnerable to security attacks. To avoid this, make sure you reduce the plugin installation to the minimum. Choose only those themes and plugins that are actually required and simply get rid of the ones that are no longer useful. Be selective, before installation, read all the instructions and check when your chosen theme or plugin is last updated.

3. Move Over With Default Username

The “admin” username that's created by WordPress during installation contain security vulnerabilities, so make sure you change it immediately if you are still using it. Hackers are smart enough to know about the default WordPress user name and they quickly burst into those websites which do not change it.

If you change your username to something else, then it would protect you from becoming the next victim. There are two methods using which you can easily change the “admin” username.

First way is, just create another admin user and assign then give it some admin permissions. Now, you can login with a new username and delete the old one.

The second way is, if your user is assigned with multiple pages and posts and you don't want to assign them again, you can change the username through PHPMyAdmin. For this, just sign in to your cPanel and go to PHPMyAdmin. Click on the WordPress database and look for WP_users. Select the “admin” user, and change the user_login field with the name you want to change.

4. Limit the Power of Inactive Users

Administrators, who have the authority to edit content, assign roles, and assign roles are more exposed to the possibility of being harmed. And, if you have multiple users under you, keeping a track of everyone activities is quite daunting. In fact, out of them, there are so many users who end up choosing weak passwords, and thus become victim to malicious or other cyber attacks. If you have a list of inactive users in your WordPress database, just switch their role to 'subscriber'. This will limit their powers and authorities for making any change within your website.

5. Switch to Complex Security Keys

Just like passwords, security keys are yet another important aspect of a WordPress site. These keys help you to keep vandals away and augment the security level of your website. You site should use unique, random, and lengthy security keys. You can make use of special characters and several other random combinations to make it as complicated as possible.

To Conclude

Strengthening the security of a WordPress site shouldn't scare you. It's indeed very easy, all you need is to have a strong knowledge about some handy facts that help you uplift the security bar of your website. 

Author Biography:

Jack Calder is a exploring expert in Markupcloud Ltd, a nice company involved in the process of convert psd to html in few time. Jack is a lover of web development languages, he uses to develop various things in it. Connect with Jack

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