Welcome to WordPress Security Lab. In this article we will explore the fundamentals of WordPress security from WordPress core and theme to plugin safety, to username and password best practices and database backups. Other topics will look at include layered security measures like using the .htaccess file to enable or disable features, limiting file permissions blacklisting and whitelisting IPs, disabling file editing and using HTTPS. So why is wordpress security important? – often your reputation will depend on it.
If you run a large ecommerce site and has been attacked – you can lose valuable customers and of course money. Web hosts are also likely to suspend accounts that are hacked taking your site offline. You don’t want to be wasting your time patching up your site after hacks or paying hosting when your site is down. And you definitely don’t want to loose customers and partners.
WordPress is the worlds most popular content management system now powering a fifth of all websites. It’s success is due to its intuitive interface and the fact it’s free and open source. These features provide endless options for extending functionality through the addition of plugins and the ability to customize the look and feel of your site with themes and widgets.
Is WordPress Secure?
With thousands of free and paid themes and plugins available on the web the options for creating a site that is both functional and uniquely yours are virtually limitless. But these same features are also the most common ways in which we expose our site to attacks because WordPress is open source. Anyone can easily explore the core code or search through most any of the popular themes and plugins for hacks. These are just some aspects of WordPress that are outside your control unless you have your own server for self-hosting. You also can’t control the hosting environment your site is run on. So you can do your best to choose a quality host.
A brute force attack is also outside your control while you can’t always stop them you can certainly put in place measures to limit the damage and make it difficult for someone to successfully hack your site. Even tech giants like Microsoft, Apple and Amazon have had their security breached. No site – wordpress or other wise is completely secure. What you have to do is recognize where weaknesses is exist and create an extra layers of defense to protect your content, your business and your customers in case your website is hacked. More importantly you need to use as many common sense solutions as possible to help manage the weakening of your site through human error so lets dive in and take a look at how to keep your wordpress site safe and secure.
