5 Simple Steps to Secure Your WordPress Web Blog

Security of the website should be the main concern of any bloggers and webmasters, especially self hosted WordPress blogs. This kind of web blog is more defenseless than any kind of third party hosted services such as blogger.

Besides, as one of the most frequently used CMSs, it often becomes the major target for any website hacking attack. The higher traffic gained by your WordPress blog, the higher risk your blog for being attacked. So how to increase the security of WordPress web blog?

Various different methods could be applied to make your WordPress web blog more secure. Some of those various methods are quite simple but really effective in increasing the security level. Some of those simple methods are presented in the following steps:

Step 1 – Do Backup

Yes, all bloggers and webmasters know the importance of backing up their installation. The thing is that only some of them perform the backup regularly. What about the rest?

Unfortunately, large number of webmasters and bloggers make the backup of or their installation really rarely. Indeed, WordPress comes with export function for the posts of the blog themselves. However, making your own backup into your WordPress folder is also important. Only relying on hosting company to backup your site is really not enough.

Useful backup plugins: DBC Backup, WP-DBManager, WP-DB-Backup

Step 2 – Check for Update

Since WordPress is regularly updated, some of its security system might be regularly improved, too. For this reason, you need to keep your version up to date to get more advanced functions for the security system.

Staying update is quite easy. Have a look at your Admin Dashboard then you could check on the latest update. Usually, you will receive a message encouraging for update when your current version is not the latest.

Step 3 – Do Not Keep the default Admin Username

Keeping the admin name as “admin” gives great chance to the hackers to attack your site.

You could choose one among two options to do something about this problem.

• First, you could delete or change the admin name.
• Second, you could simply create new user for admin and demote the account of “admin” to the subscriber only. This way, hacker will think that the admin account does exist and they could not make any change to your blog.

Learn more about this tip: Changing Your Username In WordPress

Step 4 – Secure the Password

The basic thing to keep in mind to secure your WordPress web blog is never use birthday date or name as your password (You can try to use the online password generator). Hackers could easily crack this kind of password. Instead, you should use a blend of small letters, capital letters, punctuation, and also numbers. Ensure to make a really unique and difficult one.

Step 5 – Using WordPress Security Plugins

You could find various different selections for WordPress security plugin, such as WP Exploit Scanner as well as WP Security Scan. Installing those plugins will be really useful to secure your WordPress web blog. WordPress 3.1 and beyond comes with Lockdown plugin in its default.

If your budget allows, don’t forget to checkout the security plugin from WordPress developer.

Those are not the only tips you could apply. You could also find many other methods, but never take those five tips aside. Despite its simple and trivial sounds, those 5 tips work really great to secure your WordPress web blog.