These days your WordPress website security is no laughing matter – in fact, you could say it has become downright treacherous as more and more people come to find themselves left with the devastation of a hacker. Rather than being a statistic, now is a good time to take action and do what you can to protect your WordPress site from hackers. Let’s have a look at a few things you can do.
1. Protect Your wp-config.php
This is an important WordPress file and so you will ant to make sure it is protected. You can hide it so it is not available for public view just by putting a few lines of code into your htaccess file.
<Files wp-config.php>
order allow, deny
deny from all
</Files>Add this code and it will stop the wp-config.php file from being visible to public users and makes harder for hackers and robot to spot.
2. Never use “admin” to Login
One of the most common mistakes is to leave the default ‘admin’ as your login to your WordPress sight. This needs to be changed right away as this is dangerous and allows hackers an advantage. It’s very dangerous leaving ‘admin’ as your login.
3. Use SFTP
Most people use FTP to upload their files, but you really should use a Secure FTP connection so a SFTP. That way when you send your files they will be encrypted.
4. Using the Login Lockdown Plugin
Login Lockdown plugin will make sure that you remember your password. Every failed attempt at logging in is registered along with the person’s IP address and it will block the ability to login from different IPs if the login has failed after the set number of attempts, which you control. The default setting is 3 failed logins within 5 minutes per hour. You have the control to remove the blocked IP address from the plugin panel in your WordPress dashboard.
5. WP-DB Backup
You need to have backups regularly not just now and then when you think about it. This is a plugin that will do this for you and then it will send your backup to your email address and/or store it on the server. An offsite backup is wise because should your site be hacked it gives you the best chance of getting things up and run quickly.
There are plenty of things you can do to make your WordPress site more secure – these are certainly a good start!