WordPress Security Tips And Strategies

WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system online where millions of users online promote their businesses, blog about personal interests, and share their ideas. Creating a WordPress blog can be somewhat overwhelming to the beginner, but can also be fun in terms of finding the right theme, background, and fonts for your blog or website, but there’s one aspect of WordPress often overlooked, security. WordPress security is essential for any person using it to protect their content from being pirated by others looking to steal their intellectual property, especially for monetary gain.

As a information security professional, it’s only fitting for me to discuss some basic WordPress security tips and strategies I use that can help you protect your content from getting in the wrong hands. Many of the WordPress security tips that I will discuss are common with any online content whether you use WordPress or not. It’s important, especially for internet and affiliate marketers who rely on their content to attract leads to their business. Implementing these WordPress security tips will help in preventing your WordPress content from being compromised. Security is never 100% preventable, but these tips will deter anyone from accessing your WordPress blog or website.

Basic WordPress Security Tips

I wanted to take a moment and go over some really great WordPress security tips that can keep your content within the three pillars of security: Confidential, Integrity, and Availability.

Changing Your Default Username – One of the most basic security tips is to always change your administrative password when starting a new blog. Many times the default username of ‘admin‘ is a common way most hackers use to access people’s WordPress content. Changing your default username is one good way in deterring a hacker from attempting to gain access.
Hide Your Version of WordPress – One of the best ways for hackers to gain access to your content is showing the version of your WordPress blog. If a hacker knows what version of WordPress your using, they often times know what vulnerabilities are associated with that version number. A good WordPress security tactic is to enable the security feature that hides your version of WordPress from being shown on your blog ( I will do a separate post explaining how to do this).
Limit Login Attempts – Hackers will attempt to use brute force and dictionary attacks to figure out your WordPress password. Limiting failed login attempts is another great way to prevent hackers from compromising your admin account to your blog. There are really good WordPress plug-ins that can give you this security option. Just do a plug-in search for ‘Login Lockdown’. This is a plug-in I use for this.
Backup Your WordPress Content – I can’t stress this WordPress security tip enough. Having your content backed up is critical, especially for internet marketers. You rely on your content to generate leads for your business. What happens when an attacker gains access to your blog and implements a virus that completely erases all of your months or even years of valuable content online. This can be devastating when so much work has gone into your blog. Again, there are several different WordPress plug-ins that you can use to backup your content. This is a vital WordPress security tip of them all.
Always Remember To Upgrade Your Version of WordPress – To piggyback off of WordPress security tip two. Maintaining the most up to date version of your WordPress blog allows for known vulnerabilities for the previous version of WordPress to be fixed with security patches. WordPress is constantly updating their content management software to provide a more safe and user friendly platform. Keeping up with your WordPress updates is also vital to the security of your content online.

These are five really great WordPress security tips that you can implement to keep your content safe from potential attackers. In future articles I will discuss more ways of protecting your blog and/or website content from being attacked. If you have any other known WordPress security tips to share, please do so here on the blog. I hope you find this information helpful.