Top 10 WordPress Security Tips to Secure Your Website (2023 Guide)

WordPress is that the most well-liked Content Management System (CMS) and over 76 million sites are built with WordPress. There are tons of themes and plugins available to customize your site as you want. But building a site is not an end. One of the most important things about a website is security. There are thousands of sites that are being hacked every day and blacklisted by Google.

So if you are very serious about your site, then you just need to pay attention to your WordPress site security. Follow WordPress security tips by the experts to keep hackers away from your site.

WordPress is a well-growing open-source platform, so hackers principally targeting on WordPress sites. You’re not free from this. Your website can get hacked if you are doing not care about your site security. Like different things, you furthermore need to check your site security frequently.

Table of Contents

1 WordPress Security Tips to Protect Your Website
2 FAQ

WordPress Security Tips to Protect Your Website

In this guide, I’m sharing the 10 Best WordPress security tips to keep your website secure from hackers and malware.

1. Use a Good WordPress Hosting

It is one of the crucial WordPress security tips you should follow to safeguard your business. Good web hosting has a major role to keep your site secure. A good hosting provides multiple security layers and monitors your site 24×7 for malware and attacks.

Most of the newbies do the first mistake when they buy cheap hosting. They like inexpensive hosting rather than decent hosting. Basically, cheap hosting doesn’t provide any good security function, and performance poor as well. This way hackers can target your site and can hack easily.

So before buying any web hosting from any company, check their hosting performance as well as security services. If they provide good security, you can go for it.

2. Keep WordPress Up to Date

If you are not updating your WordPress versions, plugins and themes, then you are staying far behind from security. Staying up with the latest version of WordPress is a good practice. With every WordPress update, there come many WordPress fixes, security improvements, bug fixes, etc. This is also similar to plugins and themes.

Updating the WordPress version is very easy and you can do it right from your WordPress admin dashboard.

First, go to your WordPress dashboard> Update. From there, you can see what needs to be updated.

3. Don’t Ever Use Nulled Theme

It is one of the important WordPress security tips to protect your website. There is no doubt that premium themes look professional and have more functionalities than a free theme.

Premium WordPress themes are paid and need an activation key to activate it. But there are so many sites that provide free premium theme/ nulled which are dangerous for your site. Many malicious codes are injected and can contain many bad links. So always avoid such nulled themes.

There are many free themes are available in the WordPress theme directory where thousands of beautiful looking theme are available.

4. Use a Strong Password

A password is the most vital part of website security. If you’re employing a plain password that is easy to guess i.e. ‘123456, abc123’, then you should change the password right away. Because this type of password are easy to guess and a Pro user can simply crack your password. Therefore, you need to use a complex password which is hard to guess.

In addition to this tip, it is recommended to use a VPN tool from the top VPN providers when you’re logging in on public Wi-Fi or unfamiliar network. This will secure your connection and your sensitive data like your password whenever you sign in to your WordPress site. NordVPN is an excellent VPN that offers many beneficial features. Read this particular NordVPN review and find out why it’s one of the most used VPN by WordPress users.

5. Change the WordPress Admin Login URL

By default, the WordPress login address is “yourdomain.com/wp-login.php” and if you have the same, you need to change it. There are a few reasons to change your default WordPress login address. First of all, if hackers anyhow target your site, they will run a brute force attack on your site and try different types of password combinations. The thing is getting too much SPAM registration.

If your site is popular, then most of the chance that you will get hundreds of thousands of SPAM registration every day. To stop this, you need to change the default login URL. More than that you can add security questions to your login page for extra security.

6. Add Limit Login Attempts

This is another best WordPress security tip that you should not miss. By default, WordPress permits users to do log in as many times as they want. So any user can use the login system without any restrictions. Sometimes hackers use a method by running software to decode encrypted data such as passwords. This is called Brute force attack.

Best WordPress Security Tips to Protect Your Website

So if you add a limit to login function on your website, users will have a limited number of attempts to log in. Once they reach their login retry limit, they will be temporarily blocked to use this login function. This will be done by WordPress login limit plugin.

7. Add SSL Certificate

These days SSL is advantageous for all sorts of sites. An SSL keeps your site secure and your site will get an SEO boost on search results.

In case you are running an e-commerce site, an SSL certificate is must and a normal SSL cost around $70-$199 per year. Generally, E-business sites collect sensitive data i.e. passwords, credit cards, etc.

So all the information between the client web browser and web server is delivered in plain text which can be discernable. So if you use SSL, the SSL encodes the touchy data which can’t be decryptable effortlessly. Along these lines, it influences your site more to secure.

8. Disable File Editing

By default, WordPress comes with an inbuilt file editing function from the dashboard which allows you to edit themes and plugins. You can access the theme editor by going Appearance>Editor. Similarly, the plugin editor can be found under Plugins>Editor.

Best-WordPress-Security-Tips-to-Protect-Your-Website-2

We suggest you disable this feature as a result of if anyhow hackers login to your dashboard they will inject malicious code your theme and plugin. So you need to disable the file editing function from your WordPress dashboard.

9. Use a WordPress Security Plugin

To make your site more secure, you can use a WordPress security plugin. A security plugin monitors your site 24×7, scans for malware and prevents brute force attacks. It’s tedious work to check your site security each time, even you don’t know which file to check and it is risky as well. So by using a security plugin, the plugin will take care of all your security. There are many free WordPress security plugins available that you can use.

10. Hide WP-config.php and .htaccess file

You can hide your WP-config.php and .htaccess file for extra protection of your site. Many times, hackers target our .htaccess and WordPress config file and destroy our site. To prevent this, you need to hide your both files so it can be inaccessible for users.

It is an advanced step, so we recommend you to take a backup of both files.

First, go to your wp-config.php file and add the following code,

order allow, deny

deny from all

</Files>

Similar way, add the following code to your .htaccess file,

order allow, deny

deny from all

</Files>

Conclusion

WordPress security is one of the important things to your site. If your site gets hacked, you will lose the website forever. So it is better if you secure your site and in this article, I have written the 10 best WordPress security tips to make your site secure from hackers.

I hope this tutorial helped you to fix your security problem. If you’re still having an issue, do let us know.

Do you have any other WordPress security tips to share?

Read Astra Theme Review: Is It The Best WordPress Theme?

FAQ

Is WordPress secure?

WordPress is a great platform to build business websites, online stores, and blogs. It is fast and flexible. Due to its open-source functionality, anyone with coding knowledge can create themes and plugins for WordPress websites and generate revenue.

Even though, we can’t say that WordPress is enough secure. Cybercriminals may hack your website through security loopholes in the backend. Make sure that your web host has 24/7 security monitoring and malware scanning features. Further, you can tighten security by installing a security plugin to limit login attempts, scan files, and take other security precautions.

Can WordPress be hacked?

Like any other website, WordPress can also be hacked. Criminals may exploit theme or plugin vulnerabilities and security loopholes to gain your dashboard access. Avoid installing cracked products and prevent unknown people from signing in to your site. Host your website on a trusted hosting service and monitor security events through a WordPress security plugin to protect your site from hacking attempts, malware infection, etc.

Can WordPress block my IP?

No. WordPress has no option to block user IP addresses. But website admins can disable your logins through third-party security plugins. They usually do this if someone makes a certain number of login attempts or tries to use an invalid username. That blocking can last anywhere from 20 minutes to a week.

10 Best WordPress Security Tips to Protect Your Website in 2024