Complete Guide To WordPress Security

A compromised WordPress site can be extremely detrimental to your business’s revenue and reputation. Hackers can steal user data and passwords, company trade secrets and strategies as well as install harmful software and disseminate malware to your users.

If your website is a business, you should pay special attention to the security of WordPress. As is the case with physical store owners, it is your job as an online business owner to protect your business website.

In some instances, in the event your WordPress website is hacked or compromised, addition, you may be legally held accountable for failing to properly secure your WordPress site.

A Worst-case scenario, you may be forced to pay ransomware to hackers to reclaim access to your website and data.

Google announced in 2022 that over 50 million internet visitors had been notified that the website they were visiting might contain malware or steal their personal information.

Backing up your data is your first line of security against a WordPress attack. Bear in mind that nothing is completely secure.

Backups enable you to swiftly recover your WordPress site in the event that something goes wrong.

In searching for a Backup Solution, the most critical point to remember about backups is that you must store full-site backups to a distant place on a frequent basis (not your hosting account).

We recommend storing it in a cloud provider such as Amazon, Dropbox or Google Drive.

Depending on how frequently your website is updated, you might need to create daily backups of your site

Fortunately, this can be accomplished easily through the use of plugins such as UpdraftPlus or Duplicator Pro. They are both dependable and, perhaps most importantly, simple to operate.

Security plugins add very little security to WordPress. Rather than that, they tend to create an illusion of security. And on numerous occasions, they have contained security flaws themselves.

Security plugins affect areas that a plugin should not touch, and they attempt to do far too much.

There is nothing that a WordPress security plugin accomplishes that cannot be accomplished more effectively and properly in other methods. Security plugins affect areas that a plugin should not touch, and they attempt to do far too much. When a security plugin contains an error in a function that interacts with a normally innocent region, it can have disastrous repercussions.

The simplest method to safeguard your site and maintain confidence in its security is to utilize a web application firewall (WAF).

A website firewall prevents harmful traffic from reaching your website in the first place.

Website Firewall at the DNS Level — These firewalls route website traffic through their cloud proxy servers. This enables them to transmit only legitimate traffic to your website’s web server.

Application Level Firewall — These firewall plugins monitor traffic after it reaches your server but before it is processed by the majority of WordPress scripts. This approach is not as effective at decreasing server load as the DNS-level firewall.

If you want to be safe and secure with WordPress, the most critical thing you can do is to keep WordPress up to date with plugins and themes. When WordPress gets compromised, it almost often occurs as a result of an insecure plugin. Avoid falling behind on even a single update. Occasionally, writers will withhold information about whether an update contains a security patch. Keeping everything up to date is critical for your WordPress security.

Your WordPress hosting provider is critical to the security of your WordPress website. A reputable shared hosting service, such as Bluehost or Siteground, goes above and beyond to safeguard their servers from typical threats.

Here’s how a reputable web hosting business protects your websites and data in the background.

They check their network for suspicious behavior on a constant basis.

All reputable hosting firms have technologies in place to defend against large-scale distributed denial-of-service attacks.

They maintain current versions of their server software, PHP, and hardware to prevent hackers from exploiting a known security weakness in an older version.

They have disaster recovery and accident policies in place that enable them to protect your data in the event of a significant accident.

With shared hosting, you share server resources with a large number of other clients. This introduces the possibility of cross-site contamination, in which a hacker could use a neighboring website to attack yours.

Utilizing a managed WordPress hosting solution ensures that your website is hosted on a more secure environment. Managed WordPress hosting companies protect your website by providing automatic backups, automatic WordPress upgrades, and more comprehensive security configurations.

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a data encryption technique that encrypts data sent between your website and the user’s browser. This encryption makes it more difficult for an intruder to probe around and grab data.

WordPress Hosting Providers such as SiteGround, will provide you with a free SSL certificate to use on your WordPress site when you sign up for any of their plans.

It is imperative that you use SSL on your site because if you dont, not only will your users feel uneasy about visiting such sites but Search Engines and Web Browsers now days, display a warning message before allowing you to visit a site with no SSL certificate.

XML-RPC was enabled by default in WordPress 3.5 to facilitate the integration of your WordPress site with third-party web and mobile applications.

Due of the strength of XML-RPC, it can dramatically increase brute-force attacks.

For example, if a hacker wanted to try 500 different passwords on your website in the past, they would have to make 500 distinct login attempts, which the login lockdown plugin would detect and deny.

However, with XML-RPC, a hacker can utilize the system.multicall method to attempt thousands of passwords in only a few queries, say 20 or 50.

This is why we recommend disabling XML-RPC if you are not utilizing it.

There are three methods for disabling XML-RPC in WordPress, which we discussed in detail in our step-by-step explanation on how to disable XML-RPC in WordPress.

Tip: The.htaccess technique is the most efficient because it consumes the fewest resources.

Alternatively, you can just install the Disable XML-RPC plugin. All that remains is to activate it. It does the exact same function as the preceding code.

How to Disable XML-RPC in WordPress Using.htaccess

While the aforementioned method is sufficient for many, it can be resource intensive for attack-prone sites.

In those instances, you may wish to deactivate all xmlrpc.php requests in the.htaccess file prior to the request being given to WordPress.

Please Note: If you’re using the web-application firewall mentioned earlier, then this can be taken care of by the firewall.

Simply copy the following code and paste it into your .htaccess file:

# Block WordPress xmlrpc.php requests

<Filesxmlrpc.php>

order deny,allow

deny from all

allow from 192.281.2.1

</Files>

A content security policy is a piece of code that controls the loading of dynamic resources. In summary, it can identify and block dangerous XSS assaults. As such, putting one in your header is a critical security measure.

While this procedure may appear complicated, it is actually rather simple. All that is required is the addition of some code to your WordPress files. As such, you’ll need to ensure that you’ve configured and connected to your site’s file transfer protocol (FTP) client before proceeding.

To begin, connect to your FTP server using your FTP client. Then, within your root folder, locate the .htaccess file.

Scroll down to the bottom, past the # END WordPress statement and on the next line, copy and paste the following code from :

Content-Security-Policy default-src ‘none’; script-src ‘self’; connect-src ‘self’; img-src ‘self’; style-src ‘self’;

For a complete list of the different ways to secure both the .htaccess file and the wp-config.php file please check out our next article,For a complete list of the different ways to secure both the .htaccess file and the wp-config.php file please check out our next article, Securing the .htaccess for a very thorough list of code snipets to insert in the respective files.for a very thorough list of code snipets to insert in the respective files.