Securing WordPress

Securing WordPress

Securing WordPress is rather simple.  It takes a little of your time and helps to hinder hackers from hacking your WordPress website.

The first thing you should do when installing WordPress is to generate an authentication key. WordPress recently added an additional ways on top of the authentication keys to secure WordPress when. Even though you might have WP already installed like I do it is a very good idea to take advantage of Salts. Salts for WordPress equals added protection for your blog. Salts for WP can be found in wp-config.php. The new fields defined are…

define(‘AUTH_SALT’,        ‘put your unique phrase here’);

define(‘SECURE_AUTH_SALT’, ‘put your unique phrase here’);

define(‘LOGGED_IN_SALT’,   ‘put your unique phrase here’);

define(‘NONCE_SALT’,       ‘put your unique phrase here’);

Once that is finished another way to thwart hackers hacking your WP website is to update every patch. Although you might be thinking your website might break when you upgrade to the newest revision, then I suggest you to do a full database and website backup before updating WordPress to its most recent version.

Another great tip to securing WordPress is, do not give out your WP revision number. This is especially important if you don’t upgrade every revision. The more information the hacker has the easier and quicker it will be for them to exploit your website.

One of the most useful addons to secure your website is called Login Lockdown. What this cool little addon by Michael VanDeMar does is it restricts the amount of times a hacker can guess your user name and password to your WP Addon login. This effectively locks them out when they guess the wrong password. It is also fully configurable were you can set how long to lock out them out too which is very useful.

Let’s be totally honest if a hacker wants to brute force your website then they will and can gain access to your website. These tools and techniques effectively slow down the hacker.

That leads me to the best way to secure WordPress and that is with you doing frequent backups of your entire website. This will ensure if a hacker does hack your site you will soon be able to get it up and running because you have an updated backup all ready to replace any and all of the corrupt files.

About Scot Manaher

Scot Manaher has written 111 post in this blog.

Scot is a blogger that loves writing about SEO, Internet Marketing and Work at Home opportunities. He owns and operates Niche Website Strategy and the Web Content Course system. He is also the Marketing Manager for The Content Authority which is a premier article writing service.

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