How to Protect Your WordPress Website from Being Hacked

Building a user-friendly and SEO-compliant website is hard; but you know what’s even harder? Keeping it secure. With more and more websites falling prey to the hackers, it’s become imperative to know how to make your safe from the potential security threats. In this post, I’ll run you through a list of plug-ins that will keep your website safe from the potential hackers.

If you have a website built with WordPress, you can take several steps to protect it from hackers.

Hackers can gain access to your back-end in the following ways:

WordPress Login Credentials

WordPress tends to create a default username while installing WordPress software website. Many webmasters don’t bother about changing the default username leaving an easy clue for the hackers. In this scenario, all the hackers need to do is guess the password by running some sophisticated password hacking software tools.

The first thing you need to do to protect your website from hackers is to change the default username and use a new one. You can do so by creating new account and attributing admin privileges to that account. Then you can delete the default admin account which was automatically created during WordPress installation.

Beefing up your passwords is the key to reducing the odds of your website being hacked. However, many webmasters tend to keep a highly guessable password as a part of their admin credentials. Always follow the golden rules of buidling rock solid passwords in order to avoid any chances of hacking of your website.

FTP Login Credentials

Hackers may gain access to your FTP login credentials as well. If they are able to do so, they will take control of your website in a way that’ll make it hard to recover from. So be careful about protecting your FTP login credentials. The best practice is to keep changing the FTP passwords once in every quarter of a year.

Once the hackers can gain access to our website’s backend, they can take several actions including injecting malware into your website which may affect your website’s performance on Google because Google has a way to find out if a site is safe for browsing.

How to Protect Your WordPress Site from Hackers

Take the following steps to protect your WordPress login credentials:

Use Two-Step Authentication: Unlike the traditional way of using just a username and password, use a second layer of security. Choose one of the top authentication plugins to beef up your security. Even if a hacker managed to hack your password, he would never have access to your smartphone app where your second layer password is being generated every minute.

Use Clef: Clef is a cutting-edge WordPress security authentication app that makes it the hardest for any potential hacker to gain access over your WordPress site. Clef doesn’t rely on any pass code to begin with – it uses a digital signature mechanism that replaces your traditional WordPress login panel. With Clef, you needn’t even worry about remembering your passwords anymore. Just use your smartphone to app to unlock the door of your WordPress site. Quite innovative and very hacker-hostile.

Perform a Monthly Audit: We live in a digital world where we use our passwords at several places without realizing the potential danger associated with it. For this very reason alone, we must conduct a monthly audit on our emails to see if we have shared any critical data with any person. Better still, we can reset the password for all important emails associated with our web services and reset their individual passwords as well. While this might seem like a lot of work, but done only once a month, this could help strengthen the WordPress site.

Audit Your Plugins: You generally need to keep your applications, themes, and plugins up to date. You also need to ensure that you’re using only secure (maintained) themes and plugins, and that you never install a theme or plugin that you can’t trust. If a hacker has already hacked an application, they can add back doors that are hard to find.

With the hackers getting smarter than ever and the evolution of super-smart cutting-edge password hacking software tools, it’s pretty tough to not get hacked. But with the above steps in place, you can remarkably decrease your odds of being hacked.

About Susanta Sahoo

I'm the founder and content marketing head at Top League. Our team can help you build great content that helps you rank high on Google and generate high-quality leads. Get in touch with us and let's discuss your project. I'm on LinkedIn & Twitter, just so you know.