We spend a lot of time investing in securing our clients WordPress websites so that they don’t get hacked. Its one of those things you never think about until it happens to you.
So if you’re doing it yourself here is a little helping hand
3 Things you REALLY ought to do which will help to keep you safe
1) Back up your site regularly
‘Regularly’ depends on your website and how many times in a month you update it. If its a static website that never gets touched then once is enough, but these days most websites are updated frequently so pick a schedule to suit. It could be that you get into the practice of backing up after every update. The easiest way to achieve this is with a plugin as you can schedule the backups (good if you don’t remember yourself) try this plugin to back up to Dropbox. A very neat solution
2) Update your Core wordpress / themes and plugins
If the developers are releasing new versions, its because they need to fix a bug. Quite often it could be a vulnerability that could be exploited by people who want to hack into websites (9 times out of 10 its not personal!!) so please keep everything up-to-date. Before you do it though, make sure you have a backup – just in case!
3) Put on a security plugin
For a free plugin you should use this one here within a few clicks you will hide the most sensitive areas of your website to hackers. – Do be very careful though on existing sites as the changes it makes are very complex and you may break your site (hence take a back up!) But even if you just apply strong passwords and a login lock that will help.
There are lots of things you can do to help yourself (remove the admin user for a start!) but if you apply these 3 things that don’t actually take too long you’ll have done a good job in trying to protect your website.