Hackers, viruses & spammers are the bane of the internet. Of course, you hope that you don’t have to deal with them, but if you are going to be online for years to come, you may going to end up dealing with one sooner or later.. This is why it is important that your blog is secure. Having a blog that is not secure is like having your door unlocked at your house with no security system. You hope nothing is going to happen, but you can’t be sure. Let’s go on to talk about 5 ways to secure your blog.
1. Secure the Login
Everyone (including hackers) knows that the default login site on WordPress is wp-admin. If you keep your login site as wp-admin, this shows hackers the door to your website. They might not have the key yet, but they do have the ability to keep trying keys and creating new keys to see if they can get in your site. These brute force attacks can cause serious problems so make sure that you change this as soon as possible.
2. Have An Automatic Backup System
You’ve put a lot of work into your blog and not securing it would be like putting your valuables out on the street hoping that a truck won’t run over them. The site can break. There are hackers, fires and more that could take down the files on your site. You don’t want to have to deal with that. The best thing that you can do is ensure that you have a backup of your site. There are plugins like BackUpBuddy that will allow you to set up automated backups, meaning one less thing you have to worry about.
3. Protect Your Content
If you know how to copy and paste then you know how to steal copy off of websites. How many people do you think have stolen copy from your website? You might be surprised at just how many people love your content enough to copy and paste it to their site. As long as you’re getting a link, you’re probably okay with that, but many people do not link back or give any credit at all.
You can use Tynt to see how many people are copying your page. Aside from that, you can also cause a link to be generated when someone copies your content. True, they can delete it, but if they want to be honest, they will keep it and this can help you with backlinks.
4. WordPress Security Scanner
While errors and attacks might go unseen to our eye, you can use a security scanner for WordPress to ensure that there is nothing going on with your site. Keeping your site safe doesn’t have to be a difficult process. If the scanner finds something that needs fixing, you can start working on the solution instead of just hoping that no one is attacking your site.
5. Only Install Trusted Plugins
If you are plugin install happy, you need to stop right now. Just because plugins are available through search in WordPress, that doesn’t mean they are high quality or trustworthy. Since WordPress is an open source and free CMS, users from all over the world are able to create plugins that you can then download through your WordPress plugins section, or files from an outside website.
You need to check to make sure that the plugins you are using are reputable and up to date. The plugins should be tested with your current version of WordPress and have a recent update. If the plugin has not been updated for 2 years, that is a sure sign that you do not need to install it. You want to only install plugins that are safe for your website. If a plugin is outdated, this is a vulnerability that hackers can use to get into your site.
Add Security Plugins
Find a trusted security plugin to install to your WordPress to protect you from attacks. If you do not have security on your WordPress website, you are open to attacks and will have to deal with them on your own. Making sure that you have this type of protection can be as simple as downloading and activating a plugin like WordFence.
WordFence helps to protect against malware and is a firewall. It is basically like the alarm and an attack dog for your site.
Conclusion
Site security is important whether you are processing sensitive information or not. You might not think site security is important to you if you have a blog that does not collect user information. User information isn’t all that you have to worry about. You need to worry about your site being corrupted and having downtime, your sensitive information being taken, etc. Make sure that you guard yourself against attacks so that you do not have to worry about them.
When you have a secure site, you can put effort into it without worrying that everything that you worked so hard on is going to be taken away by a hacker on the other side of the world. You have control over what happens with your site and you’ll be able to continue its growth without incident.
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