Most Popular WordPress Plugins for Security

Cyber attacks, whether by viruses, malware or some other type of IT security breache are on the rise and as we mentioned in our previous post on cyber security, small businesses should take the potential threat of breach very seriously. Many hackers view small businesses as “soft targets” due to the fact that the majority of SMB's don't take cyber security seriously or view it as a large business problem, leaving their valuable data unguarded. 

One area of vulnerablity for many SMB's is their website, especially those that use WordPress, a popular content management system/blogging platform. Due to its ease of use and customization, it's estimated that up to 70% of small businesses have built their websites off of WordPress. However, this popularity and ease of use comes at a price as hackers have become attracted to the platform en masse, with WordPress hacks increasing from 81,000 successful hacks in 2009 to over 170,000 successful hacks in 2012. 

The good news is that there are steps you can take to secure your WordPress site. The infographic below represents some of the most popular security plugins that you can install to help enhance security. 

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image source (www.wptemplate.com)

While these plugins are a good start for making your website more secure, there are other precautions that you can take to make your site less vulnerable. Take a look at our post on some easy to follow steps to make your WordPress site more secure.

WordPress Security

A few of the more obvious steps that you can do to make your WordPress site more secure includes the following:

• Make sure that you have the most up to date WordPress installation as well as having all your plugins updated.
• Delete the admin username. By keeping the admin username, you're making it that much easier for hackers to gain access to your website as you're saving giving them half of the information needed to gain access to your blog, saving them time on hacking your site as now all they'll need to do is figure out the password. 
• Choose a password that's difficult to crack The password that you choose should be at least each characters and comprised of upper and lowercase letters as well as numbers and specials characters. 
• Protect your WordPress using .htaccess which is a configuration file allowing you to override your server's global settings for the directory that it's installed in. Here's a great article with a few suggestions on snippets of code that you can add to your .htacess file.

Take a look at the infographic below from WordPress Templates, that shows statistics of how many WordPress sites have been hacked over the past few years as well as some steps you can take (in addition to what was mentioned above) about protecting your site. Additionally, you should make sure to regularly backup your database, that way you have peace of mind in case anything does ever happen to your website.