WordPress Security: Top Five plugins you must have to secure your website

Hello people, have you heard or tried WordPress? The world leading Content Management System that makes web development looks like eating vanilla ice-cream in a sunny afternoon. If I should give WordPress a nickname, I would call it “everyone can create a website”. Off course, with WordPress, you can create anything you imagined.

But if you have used WordPress for quite some time, and understands the concept of web development structuring and security, then you must agree when I say WordPress has some security issues by default. This, however, can be fixed by adding some lines of code in the wp-config file or by installing some plugins that would help you tackle some of the security issues. It is very important to secure your WordPress website or any other website for that matter.

Some good practices to adhere

Before we start looking into these website security plugins, there are practices that you must carry out manually when creating your website. Some of these are

Never use Nulled/Cracked themes and plugins

Some of the nulled/crack themes. There are plenty of nulled or crack theme being paraded on the internet and most of them are not genuine or safe to install on a website. Some of these nulled themes and plugins have malicious code embedded in them, which can create a backdoor for a series of attack seamlessly.

Some nulled themes will prevent you from updating your themes and plugins, which will also create vulnerabilities for attackers.

Update and Upgrade

It is very important to update/upgrade the CMS core, themes and plugins once there is an available update. These updates often come with patches and fixes of identified security issues and bugs.

5 Must have plugins

1. Sucuri –

Sucuri can be seen as the ultimate security solution for WordPress. If you are developing an e-commerce website that would have lots of traffic and transactions, I would recommend you choose a plan from the Sucuri Pro version, else you will be fine with the free version, though they will be limitations. Sucuri can scan your website core, themes, and plugins, sends you a report of successful and unsuccessful logins together with their corresponding IP addresses. The plugin is capable of detecting modifications and malicious codes added to your WordPress themes or plugins and can restrict public access to files and folders which are accessible by default.

2. Loginizer or Limit Login Attempts Plugin

WordPress is set to have unlimited login attempts by default, this means that a hacker can perform a brute force attack using multiple combinations of username and passwords without any restrictions. to solve this, you will need to install Loginizer. this plugin will limit the unlimited login attempts to a default of 3 login attempts. From the settings of Limit Login Attempts Plugin, you can set the number of allowed login retries and the lockout munites if the login attempts are exceeded.

3. WPS Hide Login

By default, WordPress dashboard can be accessed either by adding a suffix of “admin”, “wp-admin” or “wp-login.php”. This means that if a hacker gets to this page they will see your login form and off course feel comfortable to initiate their attack. With WPS Hide Login, you can change the default login URLs of your WordPress dashboard to a unique one. There are other plugins that could do this, but I personally recommend WPS Hide Login because it’s simple and straight-forward.

4. Captcha

One of the most neglected plugins by developers. Captcha is very important for every website that has a login form and contact form. Most hackers use bots to perform brute force attacks. if your website has captcha then it’s bad news for those bots and spammers. There are many captcha plugins in the WordPress repository, but I prefer Google Captcha which is easy to integrate and most recommended.

5. All in one WP security & firewall

This is a popular WordPress security plugin that checks for vulnerabilities in your WordPress website. It helps to protect against brute-force login attack, create a firewall, blacklist IP addresses, protecting your databases and can perform lockout if someone tries to brute-force. This plugin, just like Sucuri, will send email notifications and also display a graph to specifying how strong your website is.

Bonus: LoginPress

Login press is not really a security plugin parser, except if you are going for the pro version which has features that can be used to change the login URL. It can be used to change the UI of your WordPress Website login page to your choice.

Learn more about WordPress

Soutech Web Consults offer professional website design training, of which WordPress is included in the modules. You will be able to learn how to use WordPress, how to customize and implement plugins, including how to properly secure your website from potential threats.

Click to start learning while you earn and grow…