How To Check If Your WP Site Is Secure Or Not

In this article we will give you a tips to How to check if your WP site is secure or not. The fact that more than 40% of all websites in the world are based on the WordPress CMS shows how good and stable this CMS is. However, there is another side to the story. WordPress sites are statistically the most common target of attacks. Regardless of whether you already own your WordPress site or you are just about to create one, below we will list a few things that will help you check if your WP site is secure.

1. Does your website use secure and reliable hosting?

We start from the first and most important indicator of whether your website is secure. Without good hosting there is no good and secure website. Check if your hosting provider regularly performs hardware upgrades and software updates. It is preferable to have CDN and WAF as part of its services.

When choosing your hosting provider always look at user experiences and check the credibility of the company because bad hosting will negatively affect your business and you will have a negative user experience.

There are very good and reliable hosting companies such as Bluehost or SiteGround. which offer hosting packages that are created specifically for WordPress sites.

Their hosting packages include free CDN, free SSL certificate and they have excellent customer support 24/7.

2. Are you using the latest version of WordPress and PHP?

The second most important thing when it comes to WordPress sites is the WP and PHP version. Make sure you always use the latest version that fixes all bugs from previous versions. Attackers never stand still, always looking for vulnerabilities within code. If it is known that your current WordPress version has vulnerabilities, and you have not updated to the latest version, it is a big security issue. Attackers use various tools to scan the Internet for websites with insecure software, and then launch their attack.

Turn on notifications within the admin dashboard to always know when a new WordPress version is available. When it comes to PHP, upgrading to the latest version is usually done by administrators who are employed in the hosting company whose services you use.

Before updating WordPress to the latest version be sure to visit the your themes and plugins official sites and make sure they are compatible with new WP version. You don’t want your website to become dysfunctional. Of course, before any activities on your WordPress sites you should make a backup of the entire site and database.

3. Do you use trusted themes and plugins?

We have already mentioned that WordPress is a very secure and stable CMS. However, attackers very rarely attack a website using vulnerabilities within the WordPress code. Mostly they look for vulnerabilities within WordPress themes and plugins.

This is why it’s very important to install only verified WordPress themes and plugins. If the theme or plugin you are using has not had an update for several months, then be sure to uninstall them. Use other products that have good user reviews and that have updates several times a year.

In the image below you can see an example of what a regularly updated plugin looks like and has excellent user ratings as well as a large number of installations.

4. Does your website use SSL/HTTPS?

For online store owners having an SSL certificate is an absolute must. For those who don’t know, an SSL certificate encrypts the traffic between your hosting server and the visitor’s browser. This is very important if you have payment forms or other forms in which sensitive and private data are stored on your websites. If an attacker intercepts traffic and you don’t have an SSL certificate, then you’re in trouble. User data will be stolen and misused. However, if you have an SSL certificate an attacker can intercept the traffic but its content will be unreadable to him and he will not benefit from it.

Now we will return to the first item from this article, which is hosting. Most good and stable hosting companies offer an SSL certificate as part of their hosting packages completely free of charge.

5. Have you secured your admin login form?

A very important thing is to secure access to the login form and protect your admin dashboard. In this way you will prevent attackers from logging in as an administrator and taking control of your website.

This task consists of several steps:

– use strong passwords – never use simple passwords like names of relatives, pets and dates of birth. This information can be known by someone other than you and can be misused very easily. Instead, use online password generators to create a generic password that is impossible to guess;

– Limit login attempts – if the attacker enters the wrong credentials more than once, access to the login form will be blocked, and his IP address may be banned. A great way to get rid of brute force login attacks;

– use two-factor authentication – if the attacker guesses your credentials and enters the correct password, you will receive a confirmation code via e-mail or mobile phone. This means that even though the attacker has your password, he must have access to your mobile phone, and that is not a very common case, right? There are many plugins for this purpose, and one of the best is Wordfence Security.

6. Change /wp-admin path and admin login URL

All WordPress users know that if they add /wp-admin after their domain name the login form will open. One of the best ways to protect your WordPress websites is that when someone tries to open your /wp-admin they get a 404 page instead.

There is a very easy way to rename the /wp-admin folder and change admin login URL. For this task it is best to use the HideMyWP plugin, one of the best security plugins on the market. In addition to being able to rename specified folders and URLs, this fantastic plugin can hide the fact that you’re using a WordPress CMS and thus completely distract potential attackers from their intentions. Using this plugin you can additionally secure your WordPress site because it has a trust network and automatically blocks bad IP addresses. It has the ability to block attacks such as SQLI, XSS and many others in real time. We recommend that you try it.

Conclusion

We hope that these tips of how to check if your WP site is secure or not will protect your website. As hackers are always trying new methods and techniques to attack websites, adding as many layers of security to protect your website is the best way to make it more and more difficult for a hacker to be able to harm your website.