Why protect your WordPress site?
The website isn't just your place online. It is the virtual living room where you welcome your customers, make them feel that they are in the right and safe place.
Suffering a security attack on your site is tantamount to having your house robbed by thieves. They may not have taken your jewels and keepsakes away from you, but you will no longer find privacy and integrity.
The sites that are subjected to cyber attacks can suffer financial losses, even important ones, due to the loss of user trust. Not to mention the serious reputational damage that the site suffers.
Here's what can happen if a hacker takes over your website:
Makes your site or e-commerce inaccessible
It can steal your and your customers' information such as passwords, sensitive and personal data;
Can upload illegal content to your site;
It can install malicious software and distribute malware to your users.
As in all aspects of life, bringing the risk back to zero is almost impossible, but there are some precautions and attentions that you can put into practice to take care of your site in order to keep it safe for you and your customers.
Some of these are very technical procedures, which must be performed correctly to avoid the risk of creating even more damage. These are steps that I take care of myself in the maintenance of the sites for my customers ( which you can find here ), in order to guarantee them a correct security of the site, without wasting precious time with boring technical aspects.
How to secure a WordPress site?
1.Install secure plugins
Plugins are fundamental tools for every site, but they must be used correctly and also require constant and careful maintenance. I dedicated an entire article to this theme, as well as recommending the 5 best for each WordPress site.
2.Keep it up to date
Updating the theme you use for your site, the version of WordPress and the plugins on your site, is a fundamental operation to protect your website. According to Wordfence, over 55% of attacks come from vulnerabilities in outdated and outdated plugins. Have you noticed that updates on your site happen very frequently? This is because developers are always working to create functionality improvements and improve security.
3.Install the SSL certificate
By doing this on your hosting, your site will appear with the wording "https" and will be recognized by browsers as a secure site. This guarantees the encrypted transmission of all information exchanged between the website and the browser of those who visit it. You can learn more about this topic in the article " Https: the protocol that puts the lock on your website "
4.Use strong passwords
To access your site management panel, avoid using weak and easily memorable passwords such as “123456”, “qwerty”, “password”, “iloveyou” (which are among the most used passwords of 2020 according to SplashData ).
A strong password must have at least 10 letters of which:
To create a very strong password I recommend you to use an online generator that creates combinations of letters, numbers and symbols in a totally random and random way, like LastPass
5.Professional Hosting
Entrusting your site to professional hosting brings many advantages: one of them improves the security of your website. Hosting is the service that hosts your website online. The hosting I work on for myself and the one I always recommend to my clients is Siteground .
In addition to the privacy and security damages I told you about, hackers also overwrite and delete all content on your website. For this reason, having an updated and complete backup will allow you not to lose all the work you have done on your website.
With all this attention you will be able to complicate the life of those who want to access your site without permission and with bad intentions. By putting them all into practice, you can protect your work and keep your customers 'and users' data safe. This is a fundamental aspect to be able to work ethically on the web and to maintain (or create) a strong online reputation. I know some of these tips are very technical, but don't worry. You don't have to do it all alone: I'm here to help! And to do it best you can choose the website maintenance that is most effective for your needs, among those I propose on my website.
