Did you know that 44 percent of hacking is caused by outdated WordPress sites? While WordPress itself is safe, that doesn’t mean that your website is resistant to cyber attacks. Indeed, it is imperative that you implement safety measures to boost your site’s security. If you are a WordPress agency, you know how important it is to keep your clients’ sites secure. Let’s take a look at some tips to keep your WordPress site as secure as possible. 

About WordPress Security

While WordPress itself is safe, it’s up to the site owner or manager to continue keeping it safe. As the top CMS (content management system) in the world, WordPress regularly updates its plugins, themes, and core to ensure that vulnerabilities are fixed. However, site owners or managers must implement those updates to protect their site. When cyber criminals discover these vulnerabilities in patch updates, they often take advantage of this information to hack hundreds to thousands of WordPress sites. 

Luckily, there are key steps that WordPress users can take to increase their site’s security. Let’s take a look at those tips below.

Tips to Keep Your WordPress Site Secure

1. Choose a High-Quality Managed WordPress Hosting Provider

Before you implement any of the other steps, one of the most effective things you can do to protect your site is to choose a high-quality managed WordPress hosting provider. This provider should be reliable, well-rated, and offer professional-grade security measures to safeguard your website. While there are plenty of free or cheap providers, keep in mind that these companies tend to cut corners when it comes to managing and protecting your website.

When you choose a quality provider, you will have peace of mind knowing that they will regularly run updates and malware scans, as well as secure your server and website from malicious activity. This will help protect against criminals gaining access to your site, stealing users’ sensitive information, or breaking the site.

2. Set up a SSL Certificate and Enable HTTPS

By 2021, users expect their website experience to be fast and secure. This requires a website to enable HTTPS or HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure, which is an encrypted version of regular HTTP. HTTPS ensures that the data that moves between a user’s browser and the website they are on is safe from malicious bots trying to steal the information. Users can look for the padlock symbol next to a site’s URL to determine if the site is safe to explore. 

To set up HTTPS, you will need a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate. This certificate tells visitors that your website is safe and their information will be protected. If a website is still using HTTP, most browsers will give a not secure warning sign to users. Indeed, most users will quickly leave your site to avoid staying on an unsafe site any longer. 

Aside from users, search engines also favor sites that have HTTPS enabled and use SSL certificates. This means that your site’s SEO rankings and overall site success can also be harmed by not following this security protocol.

3. Only Use WordPress Plugins and Themes that Are Regularly Updated

In general, WordPress plugins and themes that receive regular updates are usually more secure than those that haven’t been updated in a year or more. A good rule of thumb is to avoid installing any plugin or theme that hasn’t been updated within the past six months. This shows that the developers are not actively maintaining the plugin or theme, which is not good for site owners using it. Indeed, an outdated plugin or theme can lead to serious security risks that hackers can take advantage of.

Additionally, it’s a good idea to check out a plugin or theme’s overall ratings. This will help you get the big picture of what other users have to say about this plugin or theme. If you don’t have the time to regularly update your site’s core, plugins, and themes, remember that a managed WordPress hosting provider will take care of these routine maintenance tasks for you. 

4. Protect Your Site’s Login Page

Some users may not realize it, but hackers can easily figure out how to login to a WordPress site when the default WordPress login page is not changed. If you re-use simple passwords, this will make it fairly easy for cyber criminals to figure out. To prevent this from happening, consider the following suggestions:

  • Update your WordPress login page URL to something besides www.yoursite.com/wp-login.php.
  • Limit the number of login attempts possible in a given time (i.e. 3 attempts within 20 minutes).
  • Set up a reCAPTCHA to prevent bots from breaking into your site. 

5. Manager User Permissions

Whether you own a small agency or global agency, you likely have a team of web experts that have different roles. To manage hundreds to thousands of client sites, it’s likely that your team has assigned user roles on clients’ WordPress sites. It’s a good idea to only grant someone enough user permissions to do their job. This can help prevent security risks, such as one person with full access to a site getting their user account hacked, rather than 10 workers with full access to a site getting hacked. By knowing exactly who has access to what, it can make it easier to address and fix security issues if they arise.

If you are new to WordPress user roles, check out the five core roles that are offered and what each role entails.

  • Administrator: This user has complete access to all site content, plugins, themes, and settings. They can edit, publish, and delete posts, as well as update content.
  • Editor: This user can make changes to all content, comments, and related settings. However, they cannot change plugins, themes, or site-wide options.
  • Author: This user can edit, publish, and delete their own posts.
  • Contributor: This user can edit and delete their own posts.
  • Subscriber: This user can view a site and leave comments on posts.

As you can see, there are several measures you can take to increase your site’s security. If you own a WordPress agency, but don’t have the time to take care of these essential routine tasks for your clients’ sites, consider working with a white label WordPress partner like AweWP. Our WordPress experts are dedicated to keeping your clients’ sites fast, secure, and optimized.