If you’re a blogger or your career is in any way connected to blogging, there’s a pretty big chance that you’ve heard of WordPress. In fact, we’d say that it’s almost impossible that you haven’t; WordPress is hands-down the most used blogging platform today, and chances are that your favorite blog or website is using WordPress as well. It’s very efficient, very easy to use, and most of the time, very secure.
The keyword here is “most of the time”, and if blogs are your livelihood, most of the time just doesn’t cut it. WordPress does have some vulnerabilities that are potentially a reason for concern, although the dev team is pretty active in patching those vulnerabilities with updates. To be completely certain that your website’s security won’t be compromised, though, it might be a good idea to grab some third-party plugins to enhance your security. So without further ado, here are five of the best plugins for this purpose, in our personal opinion.
1. iThemes Security
This plugin does a lot of things to keep your website secure at the same time: it tracks the activity of registered users, scans malware extensively, offers a password expiration feature and more. iThemes Security will periodically scan your whole website and will warn you if there’s any obvious vulnerability or weak point, and will protect you from brute-force attacks by automatically banning all IP addresses that it catches trying to brute force your account. The development team has announced that they’re even implementing a GeoIP banning feature in the future. And finally, this plugin is also equipped with Google reCAPTCHA in order to prevent excessive spamming, which means that your comment section will remain as clean as it can be without you having to remove the spam yourself.
2.WordFence
Definitely one of the most popular plugins for security nowadays. Once installed, WordFence will check your website for any traces of a malware infection by searching the core files, the plugins and even the theme. The moment that an infection of any kind is detected, WordFence will notify you. The development team proudly claims that their plugin can make your website up to 50 times more secure than before.
WordFence protects you against brute-force attempts and offers SMS authentication, which is much harder to crack unless you let other people touch your phone on a regular basis. It detects any malicious code that could be present in comments or your post itself, and will instantly notify you by e-mail if anything suspicious is detected.
3. Sucuri Security
Another great plugin to use if you’re concerned about your website’s security. Sucuri offers a variety of ways to keep your WordPress blog safe such as file integrity monitoring, scanning for malware and firewalling. It has built-in DDoS protection as well as brute-force protection, and will keep a detailed log of all activity on the website, letting you know exactly what’s going on.
These logs are even backed up to their cloud server, so in the event that anything serious happens, you can still access your logs remotely. If you really want to go all the way, Sucuri also features a premium service for added protection, technical support and security advice from experts as well as a multitude of other benefits.
4. VaultPress
Backups are the number one way to keep your data safe these days, no doubt about it. Any serious blogger or entrepreneur will backup their data daily, lest they want to risk losing everything in the event of a DDoS or something of the sort.
With VaultPress, not only do you get security scans and technical support but also regular automatic backups to their secure servers, so you don’t have to worry about losing your data ever again. In the event that a hack does happen, their team will be on it in a moment and your website will be restored as soon as possible. They’ll also help you out with identifying potential security flaws and threats that led to the attack in the first place.
5. All In One WP Security & Firewall
This popular WordPress plugin secures your website by utilizing a multitude of security measures. One of them is brute-force lockdown, which means that, in the event that someone tries to brute-force your password, the plugin will lock the entire site down and take it offline. All In One WP Security actually forces you to use a strong password even if you don’t want to, because that is honestly the best way to keep hackers at bay.
The plugin also monitors user activity and logs IP addresses, the date and time of logins and other information that’s potentially valuable in the event of a security breach.
Summary
Hopefully now that you know about these plugins, you can utilize them to properly increase the security of your website. Internet security is not a joke these days, and you can lose everything if you’re not careful enough.
Please note, however, that while your website might be secure now, you should secure your connection as well. Never browse without HTTPS while you’re working, and you’d be smart to set yourself up with a VPN subscription as well (we highly recommend that you install a VPN like ExpressVPN). Coupled with the plugins that we’ve already told you about, these extra security measures will make sure that no unfortunate accidents will happen to your website.
Adam Ferraresi is a successful web developer from Dallas, Texas and one of the writers of wefollowtech.com. He is twenty three years old, and when he isn’t working on some interesting new article, he enjoys listening to music and watching old movies.
