5 practical ways to enhance the security of your WordPress website

WordPress is by far the most popular blogging platform.

Because of its popularity, it has also brought positive and negative impacts. The fact that almost everyone uses it makes it easier to find vulnerabilities. WordPress developers do a lot of work and release fixes and patches as new bugs are discovered, but that doesn’t mean you can just install it and forget about it.

In this article, we will provide some of the most common ways to protect and strengthen your WordPress website.

Always use SSL when logging into the backend

It goes without saying that if you don't plan on just doing a casual blog, you should always use SSL. Logging in to your website without an encrypted connection exposes your username and password. Anyone sniffing the traffic may discover your password. This is especially true if you use WiFi or connect to a public hotspot, where you have a higher chance of being hacked. You can get a trusted free SSL certificate from here.

Carefully selected additional plug-ins

Developed by third-party developers, the quality and security of each plugin is always questionable, and it only depends on the experience of its developers. When installing any additional plugins, you should choose carefully and consider their popularity and how often the plugin will be maintained. Poorly maintained plugins should be avoided as they are more prone to bugs and vulnerabilities that can be easily exploited.

This topic is also in addition to the previous topic on SSL, as many plugins contain scripts that make requests over insecure connections (HTTP). As long as your site is accessed via HTTP, everything seems fine. However, as soon as you decide to use encryption and force SSL access, you immediately cause the website's functionality to be broken, because when you access other websites using HTTPS, the scripts on these plugins will continue to serve requests over HTTP.

Install Wordfence

Wordfence Developed by Feedjit Inc., Wordfence is currently the most popular WordPress security plugin and a must-have for every serious WordPress website, especially those using WooCommerce or other WordPress e-commerce platforms.

Wordfence is more than just a plugin as it offers a range of security features that strengthen your website. It features a web program firewall, malware scanning, real-time traffic analyzer, and various other tools that can improve the security of your website. The firewall will block malicious login attempts by default and can even be configured to block access to entire countries by IP address range. What we really like about Wordfence is that even if your site is compromised for some reason, such as a malicious script, Wordfence can scan and clean infected files on your site after installation.

The company offers both free and paid subscription plans for this plugin, but even with the free plan, your website will still get a satisfactory level.

Lock /wp-admin and /wp-login.php with additional passwords

Another step in securing your WordPress backend is to use additional password protection for any directories (i.e. URLs) that you don’t intend for anyone to use except you. The /wp-admin directory belongs to this list of key directories. If you do not allow regular users to log into WordPress, you should restrict access to the wp.login.php file using a password. Whether you’re using Apache or Nginx, you can visit these two articles to learn how to additionally secure your WordPress installation.

Disable/stop user enumeration

This is a fairly simple way for an attacker to discover valid usernames on your site (i.e. find out the admin username). So how does it work? this is very simple. Just follow the main URL on any WordPress site with /?author=1. For example: wordpressexample.com/?author=1.

To protect your website from this, simply install the Stop User Enumeration plugin.

Disable XML-RPC

RPC stands for Remote Procedure Call, a protocol that can be used to request services from a program located on another computer on the network. For WordPress, XML-RPC allows you to publish posts on your WordPress blog using popular web blogging clients such as Windows Live Writer, which is also required if you use the WordPress mobile app. XML-RPC was disabled in earlier versions, but as of WordPress 3.5 it is enabled by default, leaving your site open to greater attack possibilities. While various security researchers suggest that this isn't a big issue, if you don't plan to use the web blog client or WP's mobile app, you should disable the XML-RPC service.

There are multiple ways to do this, the simplest is to install the Disable XML-RPC plugin.

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