To harden WordPress website security, keep WordPress updated, remove unused plugins and themes, use a trusted security plugin, choose secure hosting, enable CDN protection, and follow security best practices.

WordPress powers over 40% of websites worldwide, making it one of the most popular (and most targeted) content management systems on the internet. While WordPress itself is secure when properly maintained, outdated software, vulnerable plugins, weak passwords, and poor hosting environments can expose your website to cyber threats.

Fortunately, improving WordPress security does not require advanced technical skills. By following a few proven security measures, you can significantly reduce the risk of malware infections, brute-force attacks, data breaches, and unauthorized access.

1. Keep WordPress Up to Date

One of the biggest mistakes that WordPress site owners make is failing to keep their WordPress installation up to date. When new versions are released, they have generally been tested to work. However, vulnerabilities may crop up from time to time.

It is these vulnerabilities that cybercriminals often seek to exploit. One example is a Cross-Site Scripting vulnerability. A flaw in the WordPress core allowed bad actors to hijack administrator accounts.

Thankfully, this vulnerability was quickly patched. The issue underscores the importance of keeping your WordPress installation updated. These updates patch vulnerabilities and other bugs.

Updates can also sometimes bring performance improvements or add new features to your WordPress core.

Quick tip: If you are running multiple WordPress installations, you can handle updates for all your sites from your web hosting control panel. If you are a HostArmada customer, you can do that through cPanel > Software Feature Groups > Softaculous Apps Installer > Outdated Installations. 

Most Web Hosting Control Panels come integrated with an application auto-update functionality. This is much easier than logging into each individual site to perform updates, and it could save you a lot of time if you are running several WordPress websites hosted under the same account.

2. Remove Unused Plugins and Themes

Plugins and Themes are not part of your WordPress core installation but add features to your site. They help increase flexibility in your site build, since you can choose the themes and plugins that work best for your needs.

Because plugins and themes are often community-developed, not all of them are safe to use. Some are even built by a single developer seeking to address small issues. Be wary of overusing themes and plugins, since each can be a potential source of additional vulnerabilities.

If you are using plugins, they too need to be kept up to date. If you find that you have installed a plugin before that you no longer use, make sure to remove it to avoid leaving a possible security loophole.

Quick tip: Keep an eye on theme and plugin updates. If you notice any that have not been updated by the developer for a long period of time, it might be better to seek an alternative and remove the old one.

3. Install a Security Plugin

Since there are so many ways to harden a WordPress installation, it can be daunting for some users to handle everything on their own. That is where security plugins like Wordfence come in handy.

They offer in-depth security to WordPress sites and can help you safeguard from many types of threats. These can include anything from brute force attacks to bad bots. Many security plugins also work with massive amounts of community data, so they can assess threats much better than doing it on your own.

Quick tip: Be cautious about your choices and configurations, even for WordPress security plugins. Some may affect your website’s performance if not configured correctly.

4. Choose a Secure Web Host

The choice of web host is vital for any website, not just for those considering running WordPress. Web hosting providers take diverse approaches to security. Some may not offer comprehensive security, while others may work with top security brands like Sucuri to provide users with greater protection.

There are also web hosting providers, such as HostArmada, that implement robust website security features, such as Proactive Zero-day attack detection and OS Patch Management, to protect users’ websites on their cloud hosting plans. Note what options are available to you in this regard when choosing a web hosting plan. If you are new to web hosting, you may want to learn how to assess the value of a given hosting service. Even if you have solid experience with web hosting, it is always a good idea to stay informed and ahead of the industry trends.

Quick tip: Some web hosts may offer extra security features at an additional cost. Decide whether you want to pay extra or choose a more secure, all-inclusive host.

5. Make Use of a Content Delivery Network

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) help you speed up the delivery of your web pages by caching static content across their global network of servers. Because of this, they also act as a sort of ‘front line’ to your website.

This makes them the perfect solution to increase your WordPress security as well. CDNs can be used for bot filtering and for implementing firewall rules. The best part is that since these are handled on the CDN servers, your web hosting will not have to bear the load, which will be reflected in your resource usage and, consequently, in your expenses.

Even though WordPress sites are dynamic, CDNs can still be very useful. In fact, many CDNs integrate well with WordPress and can offer many advantages. They are also widely used, so learning how to configure them properly should be easy.

Quick tip: CDNs do not necessarily come with premium price tags. In fact, Cloudflare offers free accounts that work well for many sites. Most CDNs will be priced based on the volume of data they help serve.

6. Observe Best Security Practices

You can use all the security plugins in the world with poor results if you fail to follow the best security practices in managing your WordPress site. This can be pretty comprehensive, depending on how seriously you take your website security.

For example;

• Always use strong passwords (longer than eight characters, upper and lower cases, digits, and special characters)
• Avoid using the administrator accounts unless necessary
• Mask the administrative login screen
• Check your file and directory permissions
• Protect your wp-config.php file
• Disable file editing unless you need it
• Use 2FA authentication for logins
• Implement secret scanning for secure development to ensure sensitive information is not exposed in your codebase

If you just scour the web, you can easily fill pages with the number of things you can and should do simply as a precaution. In fact, many best practices in securing WordPress sites are not difficult to do, nor will they cost you money. 

Quick tip:  The list can go on indefinitely. Ideally, build a checklist of the things you want to do and keep track of it as you’re hardening your WordPress site.

Conclusion

The biggest mistake WordPress site owners can make is taking their site security for granted. Those who do typically end up blaming the software for being ‘insecure’ if anything goes wrong with their site.

As you can see from the points we have outlined here, the responsibility for the security of WordPress sites is shared in a way. However, as the site owner, you need to make the choices and put things into motion.

Cybercriminals have the advantage of needing to succeed only once to steal or otherwise wreak havoc. You need to consider the possibility that a single loophole could be a disaster for your site. Therefore, you should always keep healthy backups of your website. As we take security seriously at HostArmada, we offer free daily backups stored on remote servers with all our hosting plans.

FAQs