Top 10 Security Tips to Keep Your WordPress Site Healthy
As we go through the winter months and whether changes, many of us go to our local pharmacy and take advantage of a flu shot. We do this because maybe we have had the flu before and the second of pain from the jab is nothing in comparison to the hours and days of sickness from catching the flu bug.
As everyone’s grandparents tell them, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Keeping strong cyber security hygiene to prevent hacks saves you from expensive remediation costs, compromised data and a weakened WordPress immune system. Did you know that breached sites are more likely to fall victim to additional attacks?
Follow these 10 WordPress security tips to keep your site from falling ill from malware this winter season.
1 – Use MFA
Having one or two additional pieces of information to authenticate an identity takes just an extra minute of a user’s time and makes a huge difference in preventing hacks. Alex Weinert, director of Microsoft’s Identity Security Division states that their research found that MFA reduces the chance of an account being compromised by 99.9%.This is one of those small changes with a profound impact that is worth implementing. Multi-factor authentication would require that the attackers have physical access to your mobile device to authenticate, making it one of the most robust security features that can be employed.
2 – Keep WordPress and Components Updated
Because roughly 40% of the world’s websites run on WordPress, it makes financial sense for hackers to target it. The benefit of having such a large open source community is that vulnerabilities or regressions identified in WordPress Core and popular WordPress plugins are quickly spotted, but this only benefits those that keep their sites updated or those that subscribe to some sort of service that alerts them of any vulnerability or updates them for them.
Check out the changelog to see exactly what is included in each update, so you don’t pass up important security patches. Hackers know how to exploit vulnerabilities in themes and plugins and gain entry through these outdated components. Keeping your site updated keeps you out of the hacker’s radar for longer.
