Last modified October 23, 2023
If you have a WordPress website, not only is it valuable to you, but you should know that it is fragile. With its popularity, WordPress is a favorite target of web hackers. It is therefore essential to understand why and above all to know how to implement simple measures to ensure your safety.
Why are WordPress sites targeted by hackers?
WordPress is the most used platform in the world for creating websites. There are already more than 75 million sites powered by WordPress and around 500 more are being created every day.
This colossal market inevitably attracts attention, good or bad. This is how hackers have made WordPress one of their favorite targets. This is made easier by the fact that WordPress is open source, open and free content. It is then easy for them to analyze the flaws.
Finally, WordPress is used by large companies, but also individuals or owners of small websites. They may think their website is too confidential to attract the attention of hackers. And they often treat their site security lightly, which makes attacks of all kinds easier.
Fortunately, there are many easy things you can do to protect your site from hackers to prevent your WordPress from getting hacked. Most cost little money and little time: you just need to have the right reflexes and the right tools.
Actions to take to protect your WordPress site against hackers
There are many tactics or techniques to secure your WordPress site, but here are the first measures that you can put in place without delay. They are all effective in protecting you from common attacks and require little specific technical knowledge.
Install a WordPress security plugin
There are several very valid security plugins like Wordfence, Sucuri or iThemes Security: they act as a sort of rampart and lookout. They will block most attacks and send you alerts. In addition, they will provide you with a summary dashboard of your out-of-date tools, security vulnerabilities on your site and threats.
Back up your site regularly
It is very important to back up your site regularly. This is the only way you will have to find your data in the event of a problem. You can do it manually but the ideal is to subscribe to a tool (a plugin or a service from your host) which will ensure backup and storage in an automated manner.
Update WordPress
WordPress has very frequent updates. Some are improvements to the tool, but others are intended to prevent security vulnerabilities. If you don’t update your version of WordPress quickly, you risk staying on an old version exposed to hacker attacks. And most of these security flaws quickly become public: they can therefore very quickly lead to massive attacks.
Set up an SSL certificate
An SSL certificate gives you an undeniable level of security by encrypting your visitors’ connection data. Just as a VPN is essential for encrypting your connection data and preserving your confidentiality, it is a guarantee of security that you offer to your Internet users. They will be even more reassured that a padlock will appear in the URL bar of your site, and no longer the words “unsecure site”. An SSL certificate is easy to install: most hosts offer this service in their services.
Hide the login page for your WordPress site
The page that allows you to connect to the back office of your WordPress site is often a page like https://monsite.com/wp-login. It is therefore easily identifiable by hackers and they can subject it to brute force attacks by automatically trying tens of thousands of passwords. To avoid this, you can change the login page of your site in a simple way. Secure plugins allow you to create a new page of this type quickly and easily.
Use a unique and strong password
Too many people simply use the term “admin” as their WordPress site login and a basic password often used on other accounts. This is very risky, because most hackers can easily find the right combination and can enter your site. You absolutely must set up a strong password (made up of letters, numbers and special characters) and a personalized identifier. These elements must absolutely be used only on your website: this will protect you in the event of data leaks if some of your usernames and passwords are compromised.
Automatically log out inactive users from your site
This is highly useful if you have a team looking after your website. It’s not uncommon for contributors to leave your site’s wp-admin panel open on their screens when they have completed a task.
This can pose a serious threat to WordPress security. Any unauthorized person can then modify information on your site, modify someone’s user account, or even disable your site completely.
To avoid this, make sure your site automatically logs users out when they have been inactive for a certain amount of time. A plugin like BulletProof Security (there are other equivalents) can help you program this function in a simple way.
Block suspicious IP addresses and certain countries
Your security plugin can allow you to detect IP addresses that are sources of attacks against your site, then block them permanently (or temporarily). You can also configure blocks by country when certain countries concentrate a large number of attacks and do not constitute a target audience for your WordPress site.
Passionate about the web and entrepreneurship, I founded Digitiz in 2016. My goal is to pass on my experience to you and to be able to save you time in choosing your tools.
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