How You Can Prevent Your WordPress Website From Being Hacked
Making a business website in WordPress the best gift you can give to your business. But what if your site got hacked, because you forget to pay attention to its maintenance. You must be aware of how to secure WordPress site from hackers?
Regular maintenance will protect your site from hackers and won’t let your website in danger. There may be several content management system but no one can match the standard of WordPress. In 2019 WordPress powers 34% of the internet which is 4% increased from the previous year.
It is vastly superior and beloved by every second person and if you want to make a count of CMS built site, then 60% of CMS sites built in WordPress.
As it is the most reliable CMS but I have heard numerous website owners have a complaint about the security of WordPress.
This can be happened because of improper maintenance of your WordPress site. Avoiding site maintenance is like you are avoiding your business. You may not have any idea that your small mistake can cause a big disaster with your site.
But by paying small attention and care you can protect your website from hackers. Or can hire a professional maintenance company that will give take care of your site and lets you focus on your business.
Suggested Read: – What is WordPress Maintenance? And Why You Really Need It?
Though WordPress is an open-source CMS but might get hacked easily if you don’t bother about its maintenance and security.
With security, I didn’t mean a building a bricked wall and sit inside the wall and protect your business and site from hackers.
It means you need to do certain hacks on a regular bases to keep your website safe. So let’s have a quick discussion on the hacks that you need to do to prevent your website from hackers.
1. Why Website Security Matters a Lot?
Have you ever check how secure your WordPress site is? If not, then it’s high time to pay attention to the security of your site.
If your site is not that much secure, then there are high chances of hacking. Your site might get hacked by anyone.
To save the existence of your website and business you need to protect your WordPress site from hackers. I am going to introduce some of the main reasons which will describe why your website needs to be secure.
1.1 You Might Lose Your Online Presence
Your business is the first thing that got impacted by hacking. You might be thinking how? So let’s have a close look.
Your website is the first impression of your online business and when it got hacked by hackers your all personal stuff goes in their hand.
They can access your website by the way they want to and can get all the necessary information about your site.
1.2 Cleaning a Website is More Expensive then Protection
A hacked website not only leaves its impact on your business and site but also harm your pocket. There is numerous information available on the internet which will give you the instruction about how to clean your site.
But cleaning a WordPress Malware is not an easy task and you cannot do it by yourself. This is the reason it will cost you a bit higher.
You will need a professional hands to clean your site and makes it running smoothly on internet. A skilled person will know what things needs to be done in site and how it will done.
When some thing bad will happen to your business you’ll need to be more conscious about it.
1.3 Impact on Your Business Reputation
It takes many years to build the reputation of your business but it takes a few minutes to ruin that reputation. You will get very few chances to build a strong reputation.
But a hacker can ruin this reputation in just a few minutes. When a customer visits your site and finds some viruses and some malware in their device, they will never come back to your site.
There are many web browsers warn customers to an infected website. This results that your customers got scared and will never visit your website.
1.4 Your Website Might Get Blacklisted
Every year thousands of the websites got blacklisted by Google. When your site got blacklisted search engines start expelling your site from their list.
It’s not only about your website, but every website also loses almost 95% of its organic traffic when got blacklisted by Google.
Suggested Read: – Top Reasons Why Your Website Traffic is Going Down
Try not to protect your website from hackers because websites got sites got blacklisted when they have something dangerous for users.
2. Important Tips: How to Secure WordPress Site from Hackers
2.1 Stay Updated
Protection always starts from home, and when it is about your bread and butter then you should be more focused. You have to stay updated with the hacking threats so that you can secure your website from hackers.
I am not saying to go deep and grab all knowledge the whole things but at least you should update yourself with the basic knowledge of what to do when it’s being hacked.
But here by staying updated I mean don’t give any chance to hack your site. Do some security checks regularly and let your business grow.
2.2 Keep Your Eyes Open While Choosing Plugin
There are thousands of themes and plugin available for WordPress which allows you to extend and customize your site. Customization of the site is necessary but this never come at the price of your website’s security.
Do you know that plugins can be the reason behind website hacking? So one should pay attention while choosing a plugin for your website. Hackers are smart enough to discover which plugin you have used on your website.
It doesn’t bad if you become choose at the time of choosing a plugin for your website. Be selective, check the reviews of the plugin before installing it into your website.
Also, need to check how many downloads are done in the plugin and when it was last updated.
The increased number of downloads and recent plugin updates shows the popularity of plugin which means you can use it on your website.
Suggested Read: – 7 Best WordPress HelpDesk Plugin to Manage Customer Support
2.3 Take Backup of Your WordPress Site
Taking a backup of your site is the first step you can take against WordPress attacks. It is good to stay safe before any disaster will happen to your site.
Backup works as a lifeline for your website, they allow you to quickly restore the data of your site at the time when something terrible happens.
There are numerous free and paid WordPress backup plugins available online which you can use in your site.
But you need to pay attention that when it comes to taking a backup, you need to regularly save the complete site backups to a remote location.
Suggested Read: – How to Backup WordPress Site
2.4 Make Changes in Your Login/Password
This is another best option to protect your website from being hacked. Hackers are smart enough to know that the default WordPress login is admin.
To secure yourself you should need to make some changes in this and try something that would be hard to guess.
Many beginners don’t use a strong password for their site and this leads to the disaster. To prevent this issue and you need to make a strong password that another person doesn’t break.
Or try to often change your password, this changing password session will confuse the hacker and they won’t able to access your site.
2.5 Use Your Email for Login
Login with the user name is the most common thing with WordPress. Use your email id to prevent yourself from being hacked it is the smartest and the secure approach to preventing yourself from hackers.
Users’ names are very easy to crack and can be easily predicted by anyone. But the email ids are quite hard to predict.
As you know the WordPress user account is organized with a distinctive email address.
There is a great number of plugins that permit you to set up login pages so that you can use email id to log in.
2.6 Choose a Secure Hosting
Choosing a good hosting company for your WordPress site maintenance is the smartest way to secure your website from hackers.
You don’t need to do anything just hire a company and they will keep their eye on every small change of your website.
It doesn’t matter how much you have to make effort to secure your website from code level but you might forget the fact that a huge part of the security lies on the server where sites are hosted.
Hiring a good hosting company not only cares to your site from hackers but also give focus on every small update of your website. So that your site runs smoothly and secures from unfavorable hackers.
2.7 Hide Admin and the Login Name of Your Website
Making a WordPress site might be an easy task but you need to do some extra efforts for the prevention of site.
It is very simple for a person to find your site’s admin name and if he/she will succeed to find the name they will easily hack your site.
They just need to add author=1 after your URL and the member who seems upmost likely the admin.
Have you ever imagine how easy if would be for a hacker to go with the brute force when they find the username of the admin.
By hiding admin and the login name of your site, you are completing one more step for the security of your WordPress site.
2.8 Never Make a Login on Public WiFi Networks
By making a login on a public network, you are indirectly giving your credentials to anyone else who might be running packet sniffing software.
Never makes login to the public network if you don’t have an SSL certificate installed on your site.
SSL encrypts the username and password of the network. Then go with the VPN (Virtual Private Network) service to encrypt your traffic on the network.
Summary
Don’t let yourself indulge only in the business part. You must need to pay some attention to the security part of your website because once it got hacked, you’ll be lost your business existence.
But what if after following every step yet your site got hacked. Then what you have to do in this scenario? Well as per my point of view, in that case, you can take the help of the hosting companies.
Hosting companies will help you to find the answers of how to secure WordPress site from hackers?
I am not saying all these hacks are meaningless and not worth it. But mistakes can be held by anyone, so for the prevention of mistakes, you can hire a professional hosting company. They will give you every possible help which you are seeking for.
But don’t let your website go in that situation where you need to hire a hosting company to try to do all the necessary things which will help to protect your website from hackers.