WordPress is one of the most popular website-building platforms in the world. It’s highly customizable and incredibly user-friendly, meaning that rather than having to hire external workers to create your company website or blog, it’s pretty easy to do it yourself. That said, to the untrained IT worker or novice site-builder, there are a lot of mistakes and problems that you might encounter if you don’t know what you’re doing when building your WordPress site. Here are some things that you need to make sure you’re doing if you want to keep your site safe from hackers:
– Use a strong login combination. When you’re creating the username and password for your account, make sure it’s nothing that someone could easily hack—and realize how easy it is for people to hack accounts these days! That means, don’t stick with that default “admin” username, and don’t use the same login that you use for every other site! After all, if your account details get leaked on another site, you don’t want to have to worry about your blog being hacked as well. And if you don’t take the time to change that “admin” password and come up with a unique and secure password, it’s possible that a bot could try dozens of passwords and eventually come up with the correct one to log in to your site.
– Use safe plug-ins and extensions. A lot of the flexibility that you get when working with a WordPress site is the ability to use different plug-ins and extensions to really make the site your own. There are plug-ins for nearly everything, offering everything from tracking views to creating contact forms to improving site speed and much, much more. But if you aren’t working with add-ons from trusted sources, you might find that they’re infecting your site with malware that affects either you or your site visitors, or compromises the personal information of anyone who interacts with the site. When you’re installing add-ons, make sure they’re from sites that have already generated a good following, both in downloads and reviews.
– Use the available security plug-ins. With such a popular content management system, there are bound to be a lot of security plug-ins that take the existing platform and make it even safer. Learn what plug-ins are best for your site and why you should be using them. There are even a lot of free, reputable plug-ins out there, so you’d be silly not to use them! These can help you limit the number of login attempts, check for malware on your site, and many other things. Again, you need to make sure your plug-ins are coming from reputable sources, but as long as you make sure to check the ratings and read through the reviews, you should be able to find plug-ins to protect your site against most of the attacks it might encounter, making you much safer in the long run.
– Protect everything from your computer as well. One common mistake with WordPress security is to protect everything from a domain level and forget to protect things from your computer, but there’s a chance that your personal information and details are being leaked whenever you use the internet. To prevent this from happening, you should be using a VPN, such as ExpressVPN, which will provide a tunnel between your computer and the site that you’re accessing, making sure those sites can’t see your full browser history or the passwords you use for other sites, as well as keeping your true location a secret. This will give you a much safer internet experience and is something that will keep your WordPress site much more secure.
– Protect your devices as well. If you’re working or blogging on the go, you might not just need to protect your computer; depending on what you’re doing, your tablet and smartphone may need to be secured as well. This is especially critical when you’re using public WiFi, but it’s equally important for home networks. Wherever you are, you want to make sure you’re not compromising important data about yourself or customers—if you do so, you may see your site taken over or might lose the trust of your customers! Again, use a VPN to make sure you have a safe connection to the internet that isn’t sharing unwanted data with third-party users.
– Check up on your site. After all the time and energy you’ve spent building your website, you’d be silly not to check back every once in a while to make sure everything’s running smoothly—but this is precisely what a lot of people do. Obviously it’ll take a little while out of your day to check back frequently, and most times, you’ll find that nothing’s changed anyway. But if you don’t check back, you’ll likely be unaware if someone has taken over your domain name or done something else malicious to your site. The longer you wait, the less likely that you’ll be getting your site back in one piece. Make sure you know what’s going on and stay in frequent communication with your domain registrar to ensure that your site stays safe.
Although these days it’s easy to read a few tutorials and build a website, it can be difficult to do this properly if you’re unaware of the security risks and pitfalls that face you if you opt to do it all on your own. There are a lot of people out there who thrive on hacking into sites and stealing personal information, which isn’t something you want to have happen to you! That said, a few quick tricks and your website will be all ready to go with minimal security risk. Make sure you’ve taken the time to read up on the problems that might befall you, but don’t worry too much. In most cases, it’s easy enough for nearly anyone to keep their WordPress site secure from hackers!
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