WordPress is the most popular website platform in the world, making up 30% of all websites and 60% of all Content Management Systems. Due to its ubiquity, it’s also the most prone to hacker attacks. Here are five strategies for keeping your WordPress site as secure as possible.
Choose a trustworthy web host.
It all starts with hosting, because your host is quite literally the safekeeper of your website. In its day-to-day operations, the average website gets tons of suspicious traffic from bots, crawlers, and potential hackers. Your host’s firewalls are the first line of defense against these attacks.
At CanSpace Solutions, we monitor our servers and client accounts 24/7 and when we notice a traffic spike that looks suspicious, we respond accordingly to ensure that the website stays online.
Go with a reliable theme.
Unless you’re designing the look of your WordPress site yourself, you’ll likely go with one of the thousands of themes available online. These themes run the gamut from free options of dubious origin to ones built by trusted providers who do charge for them.
With security in mind, we would advise you to spring for a professionally-designed theme, because these are much more likely to be built with security in mind. Three providers to check out are: Themify, Genesis, and Thesis.
There are many other reasons for going with a professionally designed theme, such as site loading speed, SEO features, and the ease of making edits to the design.
Get an SSL certificate.
These days, SSL is the standard rather than the exception. Proof that this is the case is that most browsers these days will freak out and call your site “untrustworthy” unless you’ve got one. The SSL certificate encrypts all traffic between your site and the end user, ensuring that even if the information is intercepted that it won’t be usable.
CanSpace Solutions provides a free, high-quality Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate absolutely free with all our hosting plans!
Keep up with WordPress updates.
Updates to WordPress happen for all kinds of reasons, but sometimes they address important security issues. So, while it may be a pain and while you may dread the day when one of the updates will break your site, installing all the latest updates is nonetheless an important thing to do.
Use two-factor authentication.
All the security measures in the world won’t mean much if a hacker can steal your password and log into your hosting or WordPress account and claim your site. That’s where two factor authentication comes into play. By using a code sent to your email address or mobile phone, 2FA ensures that the person trying to log into your site is in fact you.
At CanSpace Solutions, we believe good security should be one of the cornerstones of a modern web host. Check out our hosting plans to see all the different features we offer!
