The main target point for hackers is WordPress. They mostly target the core WordPress file, login page, themes, and plugins. Some steps are given below which makes your WordPress website less likely to be hacked.
Plus you will find some steps that will help you to recover your website easily even if your website is been hacked.
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How your WordPress website gets hacked?
All websites on the internet are likely to be hacked. Does not matter if your website is based on phpBB forum or a WordPress, all type of websites are under contact attack.
For a single hacker, it’s an easy task to scan countless pages or attempts to login in thousands of times daily.
However, at the same time, your website can be under attack by a number of hackers.
Actually, hackers are not referred to as a person whereas it is referred to as automated software that enables crawling the websites to find out the particular weak point of your website.
The automated software programs which creep the website are also known as bots. Or you can say them hacker bots.
With the help of a Firewall, how you can safeguard your WordPress website?
The intruder which is blocked by the software program is known as Firewall. You will find one of the best WordPress plugins to set up the firewall known as Wordfence.
The main role of wordfence is to restrain whether the behavior of your website visitors is just like an abusive bot.
If some rules are neglected by the bots such as in less time, a large number of web pages are asked, then this time wordfence will block such bot automatically.
Wordfence is developed in such a way that it permits the legal bots on your websites such as Bing and Google. However, it protect a WordPress site from hackers in a great way.
Wordfence is provided with lots of features that will allow publishers to see which bots are trying to hack on your website, plus they will be able to see from where such bots are coming from.
For example from Bluehost or amazon web services, if the bad bots are coming then wordfence will allow a publisher to block the IP address from the bot coming.
User-Agents(UA)
A user agent will be responsible for identifying the details which will be sent by the browser which will justify which browser it is for example whether it is Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, or any other.
Plus it will provide information about the operating system for example whether it is operating Max OS X, Windows 10, or any other.
The user agent string is given below which justifies that the string is operating from Safari 11 browser on the browser Mac OS X.
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/11.1.2 Safari/605.1.15
To fool websites, the bots are having various user agents. For example, some of the bots will behave as it is on the Windows XP browser but they will not.
Sometimes the bad bots will also respond by modifying the user agent. Thus publisher of a website will have any authority to block the bad hacker bots in a wide range.
This feature is provided with the free version of Wordfence.
In the paid version you will come across the feature which will allow you to block complete countries. This will help you to block the website visitors of the countries which you feel you dont have legal website visitors from that specific country.
WordPress protection against exploits
If you choose the paid version of wordfence that it will help you to protect a WordPress site from hackers, undermining plugins and themes before fixing the bugs on it.
The premium version of firewalls will be updated by the wordfence researchers are soon as they find the exploits. The firewalls will be updated so that they can offer protection to their subscribers to stay safe from exploits.
Most of the time the firewalls are updated for the exploits before those problems are fixed by the plugin or theme developer.
Website Security Hardening
Another best free plugin that protect a WordPress site from hackers is Sucuri Security. It will add another layer of protection to your website.
Sucuri is governed by GoDaddy which will be responsible for blocking bad bots so that they can’t attack your WordPress website more security.
The malware scanning feature comes with this plugin which will check all files to recognized if any modification is made or not.
The features provided by the free version of Sucuri are given below
- File Integrity Monitoring
- Remote Malware Scanning
- Security Activity Auditing
- Post-Hack Security Actions
- Blacklist Monitoring
- Security Notifications
- Effective Security Hardening
The paid version comes with the website firewall.
The total logins to your website will be restricted
The bots which are continuously adding user name and passwords in the login page of your WordPress it will get blocked by the wordfence.
But if you are looking to restrict such login then you will find one of the best plugins known as Limit Login Attempts Reloaded.
By integrating this plugin the publishers will be able to block all hackers automatically who are trying to enter wring combination of names and passwords repeatedly.
For example, you can block the hacker if the person is unable to add the right combination of user name and password even after three trials.
Login blockers features are given below
- The retry attempts will be restricted while logging in IP. Thus feature is totally customizable.
- optional email notification and optional logging.
- The remaining retries will be informed to the users also lockout time on the login page will be known to the users.
- Likely to blacklist or whitelist usernames and IPs.
- Woocommerce login page protection.
- Sucuri website firewall support.
- Multiple website support with extra MU settings.
- XMLRPC gateway protection.
- Custom IP origins compatible.
- GDPR compliant.
This plugin offers a quick method to shut down hack bots that are trying to guess a password.
Backup WordPress website
It is very essential to take a backup of your WordPress website regularly. And it’s important that your website should create backups daily. By doing this you will be able to recover your website if your website gets down.
There are so many WordPress plugins that will help you to backup your WordPress website. But one of the best plugins is UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin. UpdraftPlus is used by more than two million users.
The plugin can be set in such a way that the backups will be provided by email every day or backups can be sent to Dropbox i.e. cloud storage location.
Update all plugins and themes
It is very crucial to update your WordPress website and plugins. WordPress offers a super way to update automatically all plugins which is the best feature for the business persons, or publishers, as they dont need to login and updates manually.
The publisher can ensure that their plugins are updated automatically by enabling the auto-update feature. Updating themes and plugins is important because outdated plugins can cause problems and likely to get hacked.
Look out if there any unwanted plugin
Most people continue working on a theme or plugin even after a year. If you failed to update the plugin or theme it might contain a vulnerability. Because these templates are not in much use, no bugs will be solved nor will get updated.
Most of the time hackers will buy such themes or plugins and they update them with viruses and malwares.
So it is important to check whether the plugin or a theme you are using is updated and in use.
From hackers protect your website
for most websites, just following some small steps is no sufficient to make it secure. But yes with few free plugins you can protect a WordPress site from hackers as they offer plenty of great services and features.
The top WordPress plugin we would like to refer to you are
3. Limit Login Attempts Reloaded
4. UpdraftPlus
