Wordpress Hardening Best Practices and Cyber Security for Wordpress
Wordpress Hardening Best Practices and Cyber Security for Wordpress
Hundreds of WordPress sites are hacked every day. Which means that thousands of WordPress sites are attacked daily, some of them are not vulnerable as the others.
Statistics say that 98% of successful cyber-attacks against WordPress sites happen because of outdated plugins and themes.
When plugins and themes are outdated, they are not getting important updates which may include security fixes and patches, one of the most important reasons why analyze and track WordPress plugins is to monitor available updates and newly disclosed vulnerabilities.
You might be asking yourself "Is a secure site also a good performing website?"
WordPress security and WordPress performance are two main topics that bother website owners every day.
Everyone wants a fast and secure website that would require almost no maintenance, for some unknown reason, a lot of website owners thinking that safety and speed are two incompatible things.
Even though this is a widespread belief, we would like to prove that this is "Fake News".
In the real world, attempting to make the site safer also has a positive effect on its speed.
So, let’s take a look at the steps you can take to enhance WordPress security while speeding it up noticeably.
WordPress security and speed enhanced by CDN and WAF
Content Delivery Network (CDN) or Web Application Firewall (WAF) should be on your must-have list.
In both cases, you have better DoS/DDoS resilience with better speed figures at the time of the attack. If the DoS/DDoS attack is not significant most of your users will not notice any speed drop. Perfect tools to enhance WordPress security and its speed.
WordPress Security Best Practices
Here are our tips regarding Wordpress Security, also called "Wordpress Hardening".
Optimize performance
Hackers use your website to run malicious activities.
They need to use your website’s resources to carry them out. This will overload your server and bring down the performance of your site.
Once you harden your site, you will be protected from hackers and you can focus on ensuring your website runs at its best performance level.
Implement 2-Factor Authentication
One of the most common ways hackers break into websites is through the login page.
They use a technique called brute force attacks wherein they use bots to guess the login credentials of a website.
Limit Login Attempts
There’s a reason why websites, especially banks, give users only three attempts to get their username and password right.
After that, they are given the option of ‘Forgot password’ or they can even get locked out of their accounts.
This is essentially to eliminate bruteforce attacks and reduce the success of hackers and fraudsters.
Block PHP Execution in Untrusted Folders
A PHP function is a block of code written in a program that can be executed to perform a certain task.
Once a hacker gains access to your website, they can create their own folders, or they can insert their PHP functions into your existing ones.
To prevent such a hack, you can block the execution of PHP functions from any unknown folder. And you can also disable the PHP executions in places where it doesn’t need to happen.
Change Security Keys
To log in easily, WordPress stores your credentials so you don’t have to enter your credentials every time you want to login.
But what’s important here is that it’s stored in an encrypted form.
Set up a Web Application Firewall
A firewall will block hackers even before they visit your website.
They do this by tracking IP addresses – a numerical identifier assigned to every device that’s connected to the internet.
Keep WordPress updated
Update your plugins regularly, no matter if it is a security or a maintenance release.
It is important to keep up with the latest WordPress updates, make sure your WordPress site and theme is running on the latest version.
By the way, don’t forget to back up your WordPress files and database before making any changes, it could save you a lot of time in case of emergency.
We hope you succeed in achieving excellent results in optimizing your site
If you need any help in protecting your Web Assets, Applications or Websites, contact us now!
