How to keep your WordPress website secure

Having a website for your business is still a must in 2023, and with incredibly low-cost web design services like ours on the market, there really is no reason not to have a website. However, once you have your shiny new site, there are a few important things that you need to do to keep the website safe and secure. This is because, sadly, there are always going to be bots and humans trying to hack your site. In this article I will share a few of the main ways to keep your WordPress website secure.

Keep WordPress version and plugins up to date

A successful security breach can cause you and your customers serious problems that require significant efforts to rectify. Our websites are built using WordPress along with additional trusted and reliable third-party software (a WordPress theme and installed plugins).

Due to the popularity of WordPress, it is heavily targeted by hackers. As a result, Automattic (the company that own and run WordPress) constantly have to release updated versions. In turn, the developers of each third-party plugin also have to update them on a regular basis to ensure compatability with the latest version of WordPress. To avoid your WordPress website being vulnerable to attack, update your WordPress version, theme and plugins regularly.

Ensure you have a valid SSL certificate

An SSL certification is what gives your site an ‘HTTPS’ prefix instead of ‘HTTP’ in your browser. It’s imperative that you have a valid SSL certificate so that visitors are safe in the knowledge that any personal data they share with your website will be encrypted at all times. And if a visitor’s browser flags your website for not being secure, you can kiss goodbye to the prospect of gaining their custom.

Use Google reCAPTCHA

I highly recommend you install reCAPTCHA on your WordPress site. It’s free and only takes a few minutes to set up, but it will help protect your contact forms from spam and hacking. Whereas other forms of CAPTCHA protection force visitors to do cumbersome tasks to prove they’re human, reCAPTCHA employs advanced techniques to determine whether the user is a real person, such as analysing the way they use their mouse. Clever stuff!

Use Loginizer

When bots repeatedly try and log into your site, it’s important to have a system that detects the irregular activity and keeps those nefarious bots out. Loginizer is a great free plugin that does exactly that, protecting the core of your WordPress website with various indespensible features such as Bruteforce protection, 2FA and Auto LOCKOUT.

Back up your website regularly

It’s important to say that whatever steps you take to keep your site safe and secure, there will always be a possibility that something will go wrong. For this reason, perhaps the most important safety measure you can take is back up the website. By downloading the whole website and database to a safe place on your computer, you will at least be able to reinstall the site to its most recent state, quickly and efficiently, if the worst happens.

So, now you know how to keep your WordPress website secure

If you follow all the measures listed in this article, you can relax knowing that you’re proactively keeping your WordPress website secure from attackers. Of course, if you are a GreatSite 4U customer, we take care of all of this for you. Get in touch today if you’d like to get a quote for affordable WordPress web design.