5 Things You Can do to Secure Your WordPress Site

Making sure your WordPress site is secure from hackers is important. Being hacked is no laughing matter. It can result in a loss of all your data, the collection of your personal information and that of your customers or followers, and it can put you at risk financially. Lets look at 5 things you can do to help secure your WordPress site.

#1 Fix Any Malware Issues
Find a way to clean up detected malware issues. Its common for blog owners to underestimate the cost of being down related to security problems or the time it takes to deal with an issue. Sucuri is a good solution for removing malware. 

#2 Choose a Host Provider
If you have your blog on a server that is shared your security risk goes up tenfold. Consider the risk to your blog and then multiply that risk by the number of other sites and blogs on that server. Thats what your risk is. A dedicated server or VPS may be more than you can handle, but another good choice is WordPress hosting thats managed. Its certainly worth the cost as you get better security, better support, a faster site and automatic backups. 

#3 Its Time to do Some Site Clean Up
You need to keep your blog nice and tidy. Remove old plugins you arent using. Delete themes you no longer use. Host websites that are in development on a different server than websites that are live. 

#4 Control Sensitive Data
When you are doing your site clean up, make sure you arent leaving behind any sensitive data for the world to be able to gain access to. Check all of your php files, because these are like road maps to your site setup and give a hacker all of the information they need to bust in.

Dont keep your backups on the server with your site files. Thats just encouraging a hacker to download them and use them to hack youre the site. Disable directory browsing to stop a hacker from seeing the blogs folders. 

Be careful when you are using the CPanel file manager and having it save copies of your important files temporarily. You are much better off using secure file transfer protocol. 

#5 Dont Let Your Guard Down
This might seem obvious, but its not always practiced. You need to be vigilant about staying on top of everything on your site. This will decrease the risk of eing hacked.
