Are you using WordPress for your website or blog? Here are four simple things you can do to keep your WordPress site secure. ⋆ Profection Security

WordPress is the most popular platform for websites and blogs in the world. From enterprises and small businesses to bloggers, WordPress meets a variety of needs – chances are that many of your favorite websites and blogs are running WordPress. It’s popularity can be attributed to the fact that it’s really easy to get a professional looking site up and running with no coding required. You can be up and running in minutes with a WordPress.com site or easily run it on your hosting provider of choice, such as HostGator, or even run it on AWS.

Just because it’s easy to use, however, doesn’t mean it’s “set it and forget it.” Between WordPress itself, plugins, and themes, your WordPress site requires care and feeding to keep it secure. Here are four essential steps to securely maintaining your WordPress website or blog.

Apply updates. Security updates for WordPress, plugins, and themes are constantly being released so it’s important to keep your WP installation up to date. Login to your WP admin site, go to Dashboard > updates and apply all updates. Bonus points for removing plugins and themes that you are no longer using.

Update your entire WP site in just a few clicks.

Use HTTPS to secure your site. A valid SSL certificate ensures that interactions with your site are transmitted over a secure connection. Hopefully your hosting provider manages this for you, but if they don’t, you can easily set it up using a WordPress plugin called Really Simple SSL.

SSL can be tricky so work with your hosting provider or use a plugin like Really Simple SSL to ensure it’s setup properly.

Install a web application firewall service that can monitor your site for malicious activity, block the bad guys, and protect your site from hacking. Wordfence is a great option. It’s a free plugin, but you might consider the paid version to access additional features, especially if your site contains sensitive information or e-commerce capabilities.

Wordfence keeps an eye on the overall security of your WordPress installation.

Enable 2FA. As a WordPress site owner, you need to protect access to the admin side of your site. Adding two-factor authentication to your admin users is essential.

There are several ways to achieve this in WordPress, but the best way I’ve found so far is to use the 2FA feature in Wordfence. It’s part of the free version and really easy to setup.