Five Of The Best Plugins To Secure WordPress

WordPress is a great system, which is run on millions of sites across the globe. However, such massive popularity breeds security risks so securing your WordPress site is extremely important. Here are five of the best plugins to secure WordPress…

Cloudflare

Cloudflare is a double whammy, as not only does it help secure your WordPress site my monitoring the traffic that hits your site, learning from it, and mitigating any threats by blocking the access before it hits your site. It also helps speed up your site by the use of content caching and a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

Cloudflare can be a bit of a faff to setup, but once it’s running it really helps things along. Once Cloudflare is setup and working, remember to install their plugin so that they can keep track of any IP changes so that you stay protected.

Lockdown WP Admin

Lockdown WP Admin is a great plugin to secure WordPress, it allows you to both hide and rename the default /wp-admin URL that is used by default. Because all default WordPress sites will use a URL like website.com/wp-admin for their admin backend on WordPress, it makes it very easy for hackers to find your login screen in order to try and hack into your site.

Once you’ve setup Lockdown WP Admin, ensure you set your admin backend address to something completely random, using /admin or /wordpress won’t do it, as these are easily guessed. Why not try something like /table, or /bananas as these will be much more difficult for hacker to guess, yet still simple to remember.

UpdraftPlus Backup

Using plugins to secure WordPress is only part of the story. You also need backups; that way, if your site does somehow get hacked then you have a complete backup you can revert to. UpdraftPlus has saved my skin on more than one occasion. A while back I wrote a more in-depth review about UpdraftPlus.

Backups are arguably the most important thing you can implement on your WordPress site; I can’t recommend them enough, if you take do nothing to secure WordPress, please ensure that you have backups as you never know when you might need them.

User Locker

By default WordPress is vulnerable to brute force hack attempts as there is no limit to the amount of times a user can attempt to login before an account is locked out. This means that a hacker can try, and try, and try without being locked out of your WordPress site.

User Locker stops this from happening by limiting the amount of login attempts that a user can try. So if a user incorrectly enters the wrong password more than a certain amount of times, then their account will be locked out and they will be required to use the forgotten password link to unlock their account (it sends an email to the users email address).

Wordfence Security

Wordfence Security is an incredibly powerful plugin that actively scans the content that’s hitting your site for malicious actions like virus’ and hacking. It will then take action to prevent damage to your site. You can also use Wordfence Security to run regular scans of your WordPress installation for vulnerabilities. If it finds any then it will alert you via email so that you can pro-actively take action.

Wordfence Security can also be used to block IP access to your WordPress site should you notice something that Wordfence hasn’t picked up on. Finally, Wordfence has a live traffic monitor; this comes in very useful during an attack as you can see in real-time what’s happening with your site.

Conclusion

Installing plugins to secure WordPress is a great start, but the best way of avoiding security breaches is to be vigilant at all times. Forgetting to do the basics like having complex passwords, or renaming the default “admin” account to something else will leave your WordPress site (or any site/service for that matter) extremely vulnerable.

There are many plugins to secure WordPress available on the market today. However, I’ve personally found these the best, and easiest to use. Is there a plugin to secure WordPress that you swear by? Why not tell us in the comments section below…