5 Common WordPress Security Mistakes You Are Making

There are some common WordPress Security mistakes that every other website owner is making which can result in website hacking and malware attacks. You may loose your website for forever if not making sure that your website is secured properly and regular backups are created.

Is WordPress easily hacked?

Quite often, outdated software has vulnerabilities. So when WordPress users use outdated core, plugins, themes and other software they expose security holes for hackers to exploit. Unfortunately they do so quite often; outdated vulnerable software is one of the most common causes of hacked WordPress website.

Let's see how can we protect our WordPress websites.

1. Ignoring WordPress theme and plugin update notifications

WordPress plugins & themes get updated after a certain time of interval when developers update the code in it. So, it is always recommended to update the plugins and themes once the update is there. It will remove all the old coded files from your WordPress site and prevents it from getting hacked.

Sometimes it is a bit frustrating to always keep updating plugins & themes, but now you can enable auto-update them. Now you don’t have to always log in to the WordPress website and update the plugins & themes. Always remember to update every plugin you have & theme you use.

This will help you to keep your website optimized and secured.

2. Using the default WordPress login username “admin”

One of the most popular ways for a hacker to gain access to your website is by using “Brute Force Attack”. This kind of attack involves a hacker finding your login page and using software to try and “guess” your credentials.

Always remember while installing WordPress from your hosting, to change the Admin username & password to something strong that can’t be guessed by anyone. You can use the password generator used by hosting providers that generated more powerful passwords.

The best thing you can do is changing your login URL of WordPress Admin from “www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin” to something that you will like. For this, you can take the help of any developer if you don’t want to use plugins for this or you can easily do it by using freely available plugins in WordPress.

3. No website backup or Creating backups on your hosting only

Backups can save you thousands and thousands of dollars in website cleaning and recovery fees. Always create a backup on your personal drive or system.

It is recommended that backup should be taken every week (if data changes daily) or monthly as per the requirements. You don’t have to every time log in to WordPress and take a backup from there. There are some plugins that do the work automatically.

There are many plugins available in WordPress but my favorite is Updraft. This plugin will help you to create a backup and save it to your Google Drive, DropBox, and many other platforms. You will need need to set up the details for linking the virtual storage with the plugin.

Once done setting up, then just select when you want to take backup daily, weekly or monthly and save all the settings. Now, this plugin will automatically take backups and store them in your virtual storage.

4. No WordPress security plugin

Install the best security plugin to keep your website protected from any kind of hacking or malware attack. I have work on many WordPress websites and have seen that most of them don’t have security plugin, and these website faces some security issues once they start growing.

Always use security plugins that help to protect websites from every type of hacking technique. Even you can restrict login attempts so that anyone can’t keep trying different combinations of passwords on the website. These plugins also have firewall features that disable every type of external attack.

Many plugins are available in WordPress for security but you can use Wordfence or Ithemes security these are the best plugins and have many installations & reviews as compare to other plugins.

5.No using SSL/TLS certificates on your WordPress site

SSL is not just a thing required for SEO, it keeps the data transfer safe from your website to the webserver. Nowadays every hosting provider provides FREE SSL with their hosting packages because it is important for ranking & security purposes.

If your website doesn’t have an SSL yet, then you must enable it it shows a green lock on a browser that also helps your website to gain user’s trust. Something written like “not secured” on a browser when someone visits your website that gives a bad impact to a website and the user will think twice before doing anything on the website.