Installing a WordPress usually involves choosing a theme, adding some plugins, styling the site for your brand and adding the content . What a lot website owners overlook when installing WordPress is the security of their site. For many, WordPress security may seem daunting but it’s easier to learn than you would think.
The first step when it comes to reducing the risk of your WordPress website being attacked is to ensure that you and anyone with administrator (at the very least) access to your website has a strong username and password. A common mistake site owners make is choosing “admin” or “administrator” as their username – a username well known to hackers leaving them only a password to guess when attacking your website. If you have not set a strong username when installing your WordPress website you will be unable to change it via the WordPress dashboard. Instead you will need to access your database via PHPmyAdmin, find the users table and edit your username there.
Strong passwords should also be a requirement for anyone logging in to your website – passwords that do not contain names, business or website names or easy to guess common passwords.
Your second port of call when securing your website should be installing a firewall or security plugin. Many of these are available for free on the WordPress plugin repository and require very little configuration in most cases. These plugins will monitor your website for suspicious activity and thanks to their network of installs, are able to identify and block malicious traffic from attempting to access your website. It is essential that these plugin notifications are monitored as they will notify the second they notice anything untoward happening on your website.
The 3rd step involves taking advantage of the free and regular updates released by the WordPress community. Security flaws and potential vulnerable code is identified and patched every day and WordPress will notify you when things need updating. The majority of the time this update process can be as simple as clicking a button however occasionally an update can cause errors or break the functionality of your website which is why you should always take a full backup of your website files and database before launching the updates.
These are only 3 quick steps you can take to ensure that your WordPress website gets off to the best start and will help prevent your WordPress site from being hacked. Whilst these steps won’t make your site 100% secure it will definitely reduce the odds significantly.
