With the arrival and increasing presence of WordPress the task of publishing a website has been extended to a fairly wide audience since it does not require advanced knowledge to be able to create and maintain a page.
The downside of using this powerful platform is that it requires constant maintenance to avoid security issues. A WordPress-published page requires three types of updates:
1) The WordPress application itself. The publishing engine is constantly evolving and needs to be kept up-to-date to take advantage of new benefits and security improvements that are being implemented.
2) The theme. It is the design template (also known as Theme) on which the pages in WordPress are made. The editors who publish them are also uploading improvements that require an update every so often. This frequency is very variable, being higher in the most popular subjects.
3) The plugins. These are the plugins that allow the WordPress application to perform more advanced functions by attaching to the base application as extras. Each one of them is programmed by a different editor and the updates they publish are absolutely necessary because in many cases they cover security holes that hackers usually sneak through.
Updating all this will have our WordPress in good condition and it is more difficult to arise problems. It is still not foolproof and to be really calm we should implement some additional security measures.
As WordPress offers a very extensive catalog of solutions we propose you a couple of them that are very easy to install and manage. This is a plugin to hide the path to the administrator and another to backup the entire site.
1) WP Login Hide. This plugin allows you to change the default WordPress access address for a custom one. In this way, instead of using the URL "misite.com/wp-admin" to access the management panel we can change it for example by "misite.com/entering" and so hackers find a first obstacle that may make them give up attacking our site.
This plugin is very easy to manage. Just go to Settings >> Hide Login and choose the term that replaces wp-admin. We must use this address to access our administration panel.
2) All in One WP Migration. This plugin is initially intended to migrate your website from one hosting to another but it offers a very simple way to have a complete backup of your website, including all the plugins and themes that have been installed.
Once installed the operation to be performed is summarized in two steps.
- First create a backup. To do this you just need to choose the "Export" option and select "File".
- Once the process of creating the copy is finished, you have to download it to our computer from the list of Backup Copies.
This download is very important to keep it on our computer as it will be the one that will allow us to restore the entire website in any WordPress installation where we install the AIO WP Migration plugin. Another important aspect to remember is that each copy is stored on the hosting itself and is available in the list of Backups, but each copy occupies an important space of the hosting with which we can fill it quickly if we do not have the precaution to go deleting old copies.
Following these basic tips we can keep our WordPress website safe with minimal guarantees.
We hope you find these tips practical and remember that, as always, it is better to prevent....
