Haven’t you heard the old adage that prevention is better than cure? Well, it’s true, especially in regards to website hacks. Do you know that bots are written in order to exploit the known vulnerabilities such as outdated plugins, weak passwords, poor quality web hosting and themes? And if your website gets hacked, it can actually be a huge mess to fix it! It can take hours. Also, if Google decides to backlist your site, your SEO can take a back seat. Worried? Here’s the good news! It is quite easy to prevent WordPress hacks. Of course, you need to act fast. So what are the measures that you need to take to prevent WordPress hacks? Read on.
1. Replace FTP with SSH
Do you think that FTP is extremely secure and no one can hack it? Then you are wrong. Generally, your FTP credentials are not encrypted and it is quite easy to capture. So now you know that FTP is not that secure! If you are looking for an alternative, we suggest that you use SSH as it uses a straightforward algorithm in order to encrypt all the data that is sent though it. And this includes files too.
2. Use secure hosting server
Did you know that by the year 2013, more than 41% of websites were hacked only because of server vulnerabilities? This happened mainly because most of the blogs or websites are hosted on shared servers. So, in case one site on a shared server gets infected, each and every other site starts posing risk. What can you do to prevent this from happening? Well, choose a secure and reliable host. Managed and VPS hosting decrease the chances of breach. However, if shared hosting is right for your business type, make sure to check their security before subscribing. Also, know about their maintenance schedule.
3. Backup your website
Well, this is something that a lot of people tend to overlook. Don’t do this mistake. Otherwise, in case a malicious attack succeeds in taking your website down, you will lose months of hard work. And that too, because you didn’t keep any copy of it. What to do? Buy an external hard disk and backup your entire website regularly. This way, no one can access to your important files and they will be kept safe on an offline medium.
4. Use the latest version of WordPress and plugins
Are you using WordPress for some time now? Then you may already know that this content management system rolls out new updates frequently. How will you get to know if there is an update? Well, you will have to go to the release archive of WordPress and a long list of all the WordPress versions will be displayed. It is only the latest versions of WordPress that are maintained actively. In order to bring your site down, hackers will use the vulnerabilities of the old WordPress plugins. Using the latest WordPress version will make it difficult for them to hack.
5. Remove inactive user accounts
Are there inactive users on our WordPress site? This increases your chances of getting hacked. Users such as administrators, who have the ability to modify or make changes to the content, can be considered as one of the weakest points of any site. This is mainly because, they select weak passwords. In case it is necessary to keep inactive users in your WordPress database, what you can do is change their role to “subscriber” so that there will be limited actions that they can perform.
Making your WordPress site secure is not that difficult but fixing your hacked website is! Take a little more time, review your site, list out the things that you need to do and do it. Want to know more about WordPress? Stay tuned! Or, are you looking for WordPress development in India? Contact Digital Aptech now!
