Best Tips To Protect Your WordPress Website

Table of contents:

• How to check if my website is using WordPress
• Why should I keep my WordPress websites up to date?
• How to update WordPress?
• WordPress website security starts with these 5 tips!
• Is WordPress secure?

Introduction

There are a lot of different website platforms out there, but WordPress is one of the most popular.

WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that allows you to create a website or blog from scratch, or you can use a pre-made theme to get started. WordPress is free to use, and there are thousands of free themes and plugins available. You can also find paid themes and plugins if you want to add more features to your website. WordPress is easy to use, even for beginners, and it’s a great way to create a professional-looking website or blog.

So, if you’re looking for an easy way to create a website, WordPress is a great option. Many web hosting providers offer a one-click installation of WordPress, making it quick and easy to get started. Plus, WordPress is open source and free to use. This makes it a popular choice for small businesses who want to create a website on a budget.

Besides, WordPress’ backoffice administration interface is very user-friendly, making it easy for non-technical users to understand and operate the CMS.

Although WordPress is commonly known as a platform for small businesses and personal bloggers, it can also be used by enterprise clients. WordPress is scalable, flexible, and SEO-friendly, making it a great option for businesses. Additionally, WordPress has powerful features like a media library, content previews, page revisions, and a user management system.

If you’re a small business owner looking for a new website, you may be wondering whether to buy a ready-made WordPress theme or go for custom theme design and development. While ready-made themes can be a quick and easy option, business customers often opt for custom themes to get more granular control over the appearance and code. This can be a great option if you want your website to really stand out from the crowd.

If you already have a website for your business, it is highly likely that your company website has been created using this content management system (Given that WordPress now powers over 35% of all websites on the internet).

How to check if my website is using WordPress

If your company’s website was developed by an external agency, and you are unsure of the technology that was used, you can find out by taking the following steps:

• Go to the BuiltWith site
• Enter your website URL
• Read the report and see what technology your site uses
• Check the CMS section and see if the WodPress name appears

Why should I keep my WordPress websites up to date?

As new security vulnerabilities are discovered every day, it is important to make sure your site is up-to-date with the latest version of WordPress. This will ensure that your site is as secure as possible.

Your website is crucial to your business – it’s often the first thing a potential customer will see. If your site is hacked, it can cause major disruptions, even if you have a backup policy in place. Recovery can take some time, so it’s important to be proactive in preventing hacks.

When your website is hacked, it may not look any different at first. However, there may be some subtle changes that you can look for, such as new or unusual content appearing, or changes to the way your site usually looks.

There is a possibility that malicious code has been injected into a file on your website, which has then generated links that Google has indexed. If you visit your website and do not notice anything out of the ordinary, try searching for your site on Google using the “site: yoursite.com” command. If you see any strange URLs appear in the results, it is possible that your site has been hacked. Other types of hacking can result in changes to your website’s content or redirecting visitors to other websites.

If you suspect that your site has been hacked, it’s important to act quickly in order to minimise the damage.

If your website has been compromised, this can affect other sites that are on the same server. Your hosting provider may decide to suspend your account if it is on a shared server. At a minimum, you will spend a good amount of time and energy to restore the situation.

Now you may be wondering: Is WordPress safe? The answer to whether WordPress is safe is a resounding yes – as long as you take the appropriate steps to ensure that your website is secure. There are a few key things you can do to make sure your WordPress site is as safe as possible, starting by keeping your WordPress installation up to date.

How to update WordPress?

There are two ways you can update WordPress, the manual way and the automatic way.

The manual way is more time-consuming, but it can also be safer. It allows you to review and validate the new version before you release it to your live enrironment. With this, you ensure your site doesn’t crash when updating.

Ideally, you should follow an industry-standard continuous integration workflow to manage your WordPress updates. This typically involves creating and maintaining a development environment, where updates are first made and any bugs are fixed. Once the development environment is stable, changes can be deployed to a testing environment. Ideally, a copy of the live database should be brought into the testing environment to ensure accuracy.

WordPress website security starts with these 5 tips!

If you’re running a WordPress website, it’s important to take steps to keep it secure. By following these tips, you can help protect your site from hackers and other security threats.

1. Keep your WordPress platform up to date

One of the most important things you can do to keep your WordPress site secure is to keep your WordPress platform up to date. By ensuring that you are running the latest version of WordPress, you can help to protect your site from potential security risks. Additionally, keeping WordPress up to date can also help to improve the performance of your site.

2. Choose a good hosting provider

If your website is loading slowly, one potential bottleneck to investigate is your hosting provider. You can use tools such as Pingdom to evaluate how your server responds when your website is called. If you find that your server is slow to respond, you may need to upgrade your hosting plan or switch to a different provider.

It’s also crucial to regularly review your server to ensure it’s running the correct versions of PHP and MySQL. PHP and MySQL are two of the most popular web programming languages, and keeping your server compatible with the latest versions can help improve your website’s speed and security. Checking for updates and making sure your server is configured correctly can save you time and hassle in the long run.

If you’re looking for ways to optimise your website’s performance and security, you may want to check out some of the tools that your hosting provider offers. For example, many hosting providers offer server caching mechanisms, like Sucuri or Redis, that you can activate from your control panel. Additionally, you can sign up for a service like Cloudflare, which offers extra security and performance features, and add their plugin to your site. By taking advantage of these tools, you can help ensure that your website is running as smoothly and securely as possible.

Unless you use a managed service, you need to ensure that your server has the latest security patches.

We recommend Pantheon.io as the best hosting for WordPress. They provide superior performance, security, and scalability to protect your WordPress website.

Things that we like in Pantheon:

• You have a single panel to manage all your servers.
• By default, you get 3 servers out of the box, for development, staging, and production. They all include an SSL certificate .
• You can see the status of each server, and password protect them as needed.
• You can create backups, and restore your site to a previous version with one click.
• The WordPress core, as well as the plugin code, is write-protected in live and test environments. This feature protects against unauthorized updates that can result in compromise.
• You can update your WordPress to the latest version with the click of a button.
• Then you can deploy your code to test and sync the production database, so you can safely review the new version.
• You can create a branch of your project to develop new features or change your site. This allows you to continue doing normal work on your site while the new version is developed.

3. Install an SSL certificate

Usually this comes with your hosting provider. If not, you can check Cloudflare for a free SSL certificate.

4. Use strong passwords

You should always use strong passwords to access your server and control panel. There are good tools to generate strong passwords and storing them securily. When possible add a 2 Factor Authentication mechanism for an added security.

This is the easiest step you can take to reduce the chances of your systems being compromised.

5. Install a security plugin

Some hosting providers come with some pre-defined security plugins, such as Sucuri or Wordfence. Alternatively, check out the free All In One WP Security & Firewall plugin, which comes with features like renaming the login page, limiting the number of login attempts, adding captcha and honeypot components to your forms, hide WordPress references in your code, disable editing of theme files, etc.

Is WordPress secure?

Any website has the potential to be hacked, and WordPress is no exception.

While no system is 100% secure, WordPress has a large community around it to ensure that vulnerabilities are fixed as quickly as possible. New versions are released all the time, most of them to fix minor bugs or to increase performance. But there are also important security releases that you want to make sure are applied to your website as soon as possible.

If you keep the WordPress platform and server well maintained and updated as explained above, all should be good.

Do you need a WordPress development agency?

An outdated or poorly performing website will cause people to leave your website with a poor first impression of your business. If it gets hacked, you may lose up to 98% of your website traffic.

Our website maintenance plans are aimed to protect your site from cyber threats by keeping your security systems up to date. When you maintain your security protections, customers will feel more comfortable making purchases on your site.