Website security is always the talk of the town in the Digital Marketing field. If the study reports are to be believed, Google blacklists around 10,000 websites every day considering that they are unsafe for the visitors.
Hence, if you are a website owner, you by no means can ignore the security of your website. After all, you definitely desire to give your visitors a secure browsing experience.
As much as maintaining the website’s security is essential, knowing how to do it is important and tough. This blog is meant to help you out make your website secure and hence ensure that it doesn’t get penalized at least due to poor security.
How do you keep your WordPress website secure?
Checkout some of the best ways to keep your WordPress website secure below.
1) Don’t be lazy with updating WordPress: WordPress comes with several improved features and enhanced security with every update. It also recognizes and releases bugs, if any, and ensures that they don’t persist anymore.
Hence, never avoid WordPress updates at all. You might feel that WordPress update is actually redundant, but the reality varies.
Not updating WordPress at the right time might mean a major loss for you, and it might even mean a serious compromise with your security.
Updating WordPress would take only a few seconds, but with the benefits it offers, and with the security, it strengthens, doing so is absolutely necessary and justified.
2) Install SSL certificate without fail: SSL is one of the best ways to secure your website and ensure that the visitors experience safe browsing here.
SSL certificate shields the data transfer between the browser and the server. Additionally, ensure that you use an efficient and trusted hosting service provider. Oftentimes, in the lure of cheap plans, the website owners go with the wrong hosting, which makes them regret it later on.
Installing an SSL certificate would ensure a major favour in your Google rankings too. Google loves the website that is SSL certified, and hence having the SSL certification would make it easy for Google to get your website ranked.
3) Use two-factor authentication: Two-factor authentication implies two distinct forms of verification in order to log in to a website dashboard. Using this way of security is one of the most simple, yet very powerful ways to shield your website.
Two-factor authentication not only improves your website security but also gives you and your team amazing flexibility, which is a major benefit in this post-pandemic world.
With two-factor authentication, even if the account password is cracked by illegal elements, your account would stay secure, as they will have to pass through two verification stages.
Hence, if anything, two-factor authentication has only benefits to offer.
4) Limit login attempts: If you don’t make any changes to the settings, WordPress allows the uses with the number of login attempts.
However, we recommend you limit the number of login attempts to three or a maximum of four login attempts. After these many login attempts, the user would be banned to sign in for time being, and you would be notified about the unsuccessful login attempts via text.
It will help you to stay alert and hence change the login credentials. Setting the log-in limit attempts is one of the most powerful, yet the most underused ways to increase the security of a WordPress website. Hence, if you are a website owner, ensure that you don’t miss out on this trick at all.
5) Be right with password setting: Next, you need to be right with the account password. Don’t get lured with easy to remember easy passwords. Easy passwords are often easy to guess.
If required, you can note down your password so that remembering it isn’t big trouble for you. But just for the sake of remembrance, don’t compromise with your website security at all. In simple words, avoid using anything like “12345678” or “admin”, or “password”.
We highly recommend you keep changing your account passwords. It would make it more and more difficult for spammers and other illegal attackers to attack your website, hence increasing security.
6) Security scans are always helpful: Those security scans reminder might frustrate you, but they are essential.
These security scans like antiviruses can scan and rectify the potential security and remove them.
Hence, next time when you the security scans remind you about the scheduled scans, don’t ignore them at all. Be a bit patient and allow those scans to do their job. Some of the most popular security scan are Wordfence, Sucuri, etc.
7) Don’t compromise with hosting: Oh, these temptations of going with cheap plans and lucrative offers! They might sound pleasant at the initial level but is a deep source of trouble at the later stage.
Yes, you might have to expand your investment a bit, but this investment would be absolutely worth it.
Some of the most popular hosting service providers are A2 Hosting, Siteground, Digital Ocean, etc. Ensure that you use only recognized and trusted hosting service providers. Pat’s Marketing is a prominent web hosting service provider. Reach out to us for trusted hosting services.
8) Disable access to file editing: Whenever you create a website on WordPress, there is a code editor function that allows you to edit the WordPress theme and plugin.
We advise you to disable this option. Keeping this option checked might give hackers a pathway to add illegal codes to your theme and plugins. To do so, go to your File Manager in Cpanel or using WP File Manager plugin. Open wp-config.php from root directory and add this line define(‘DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT’, true);
You might find this step a redundant one, but if missed out on, the damage due to the same might be mighty.
9) Use the firewall effectively: A firewall is another reliable and very powerful way to protect your websites from illegal attacks.
The firewall ensures that the malicious activity stays away from your website. With Firewall, the direct connection between your network and another network won’t be established, which would keep the spammers and malicious activity away from your website.
Installing a plugin like Web Application Firewall, Jetpack, Ninja Firewall, Cloudflare, Wordfence, etc. is a reliable way to keep your WordPress website secure from malicious activities.
10) Use the right WordPress theme: You might feel that the WordPress theme can’t do anything wrong to your WordPress website, the reality stands on the other side.
If the WordPress theme you select doesn’t match the WordPress standards, your website gets exposed to the chances of several illegal attacks. Hence, do your own research, see which themes actually match the WordPress standards, and ensure that the theme you select is actually secure for your website. Also, you get major help with website SEO.
You now know the most reliable ways of keeping your WordPress website away from potential threats. Keeping the above tips in your mind and nailing them would ensure your website security to a great extent.
If you want to ensure that the website designed for your business is top-notch and no security threats trouble it at all, you can count on Pat’s Marketing, one of the best website designers in Toronto. Our experienced team ensures that your WordPress website satisfies every security criteria and hence stays away from all sorts of threats. To connect with our top-notch team, call us at 888-488-7287 (toll-free).
