How secure is my WordPress website?

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) on the web, powering millions of websites. While this open-source platform offers a wealth of features and customisation options, like all platforms it can also be vulnerable to malicious attacks and security risks. So how secure is your WordPress website?

The answer to this question largely depends on how you set up and maintain your WordPress website. While WordPress itself is secure, there are several factors that can make your website vulnerable to hackers, including poorly configured settings, themes or plugins that expose vulnerabilities or lack of security measures taken by the developer. To ensure your WordPress site is as secure as possible, it’s important to take some basic steps.

Keep Everything Up To Date

Before doing anything make sure you’ve backed up your site files and database as updates can sometimes cause things to go wrong. That being said you should be you’re running the latest version of WordPress. This is important because older versions of WordPress may be vulnerable to exploits and security risks. Additionally, you should make sure all of your plugins and themes are up-to-date as well.

Don’t expose anything in your wp-config.php

When working on a WordPress site developers often has debug mode turned on to troubleshoot issues. This is fine locally how ever when the site is live it could display error messages that expose details about the website and server.

To turn this off find the following line in your wp-config.php and ensure it is set to false.

define( 'WP_DEBUG', false );

While your there you should also add the line…

define( 'DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT', true );

This removes the ability to edit the sites files from the admin area. Theres no real need for this and exposes the opportunity for a hacker that has somehow logged in to cause far worse damage.

Protect against a brute force attack

Brute force attacks are attempts to gain access to a website by repeatedly trying different passwords and usernames. Brute force attacks can be particularly dangerous for WordPress websites, as hackers can easily try hundreds or even thousands of combinations in a matter of minutes.

To protect against brute force attacks, it’s important to use strong passwords and you could also consider two-factor authentication. Additionally, use a security plugin that automatically locks out users after a certain number of failed login attempts. This will help protect your website from brute force attacks and keep your data safe.

Hide WordPress

Attackers will have a head start in finding vulnerabilities if they know what platform the site is built on. There are a few things you can do here…

1. change the database tables prefix from wp_ to anything else
2. Hide the wordpress version which gets output in the html
3. Change the url of /wp-admin to something else like /site-login or something more cryptic

Forms

Form submissions are one way attackers can execute malicious code, steal sensitive data, and launch phishing campaigns. You should be able to trust that the theme or plugins you use for forms will sanitise user input, use captchas and other best practices to prevent these kinds of attacks.

Other Measures

In addition to the above it makes sense to have strong passwords, to be using https, an up to date version of php and to make regular backups incase you do have to deal with an attack.