This days a lot of people are using the WordPress platform for their blogs and websites. Maybe you are too; but the thing is, do you have a secure WordPress? Just imagine having a website that is powered by WordPress, has got high traffic, and generates a lot of revenue, hacked by some hacker who places different “viagra” links all over your website. Or maybe they chose to replace the affiliate links you placed on your site with theirs. Imagine the kind of drop you’ll have in revenue; a few days of this hack could cause you a few thousand dollars, and that’s if you discover in just a few days. Besides that, if your blog is a popular one, imagine the embarrassment and humiliation you’ll feel. For this reason, you need to make sure you have a secure WordPress site.

To make secure your WordPress site, you need to consider the tips below;

UPDATE YOUR WORDPRESS, ALWAYS

You don’t have any reason to stay on the old WordPress whenever there’s a new one. Updates from WordPress usually contains vulnerability fixes, bug fixes, and they also cover most of the security flaws that were discovered by the wide WordPress community. Same thing goes for the update of themes. It is efficient and easy. As a matter of fact, updating your WordPress is the easiest and best way to prevent your website from threats and malicious activities, which mostly are as a result of not fully updated and compromised applications, exploitable php scripts, website, etc. There are likely vulnerabilities which serve as potential security holes. An attacker -mostly an automated spider- can simply use these older versions to access your website.

BACKUP YOUR DATABASE

Yes, this might be something you have heard before, but thing is, it is a very important step to having a secure WordPress. You need to make sure to backup your data regularly else your regret is eventual. You stand the risk of losing all of your work should you ever be hacked. Also, anytime you make changes, you need to make your backup. Backing up can be done manually or through the use of a plugin.

DON’T THINK ABOUT USING ADMIN AS YOUR USERNAME

This is another important step to securing your WordPress site. A lot of attacks target the WordPress’ default username with brute force, password breaking bots. Changing your administrator or admin username from the WordPress Administration Panel is a very crucial step to having a WordPress site that is very secure. What you need to do is;

Click on mysql tool, your phpadmin. Then find your database, select wp_users and search for admin. Once you’re under the user login tab, change it to something else.

HAVE A STRONG PASSWORD

Your password needs to very strong. Having a combination of multiple lower and uppercase letters as well as symbols such as ‘@%$&!*()”, is the best idea. Go to users, from there to your profile, then change your password via the New Password option at the bottom. Having your password written as suggested earlier will make it very hard to crack by any hacker. Also, endeavor to do the same to the password of your ftp Cpanel hosting account and make sure you don’t use the same password like the one you used in WordPress.