9 Tips To Protect Your WordPress Blog Like The Great Wall of China

Have you ever thought of your site getting hacked?

I know how it feels like, especially if your site is making money. You can’t put the blame on anybody if it happens. It is only because of you, your site gets hacked.

You can take a few precautions to keep your site solid as a rock that avoids sneakers. In this article, I am going to tell you nine tips to keep your site safe.

So, are you ready to dive into the core of the article? Here you go!

Also Read: The Complete Guide To Start a WordPress Blog

Tips that Protects Your WordPress Blog like the Great Wall of China

Do you know why the Great Wall of China was made? It is to protect China and Chinese people from external attacks.

The same purpose is what the tips given below are going to do to your site.

#1. Set Strong Usernames and Passwords

First things first!

The easiest way to hack a WordPress site is to know the username and password. The username is what you set during the WordPress installation. By default, it is “admin“. You have to change it to something complicated.

If you are a non-English speaker, you can take a difficult word from your language and make it your username. You can do the same for passwords as well.

Passwords Generator is an online tool that helps you generate complicated passwords within no time. You shouldn’t forget the generated password, though.

#2. Protect Your Content

Yeah, you have to tighten the security of your website. At the same time, you have to protect the content as well.

As a blogger, you need to use texts and images. There are many people who shamelessly copy your content along with your images and post the same on their site to earn money.

None of us want that to happen. So, you can follow a few things given below.

• Add a copyright notice to those who has the intention to copy your content. You can use a plugin called Footer Putter for this purpose.
• Add watermarks to your images. You can either do it manually by editing or automatically with the help of a plugin like Visual Watermark.
• Disable hotlinking (the process of displaying your images by linking to it). It steals your bandwidth.
• As a solid step, you can disable right-click and CTRL key on your site.

#3. Setup Site Lockdowns

Once your website becomes popular, tons of sneakers try to access your site by brute force attack. Normally, anyone can try logging into your site without any constraints. Even if your password is strong, each brute force attempt makes the attacker closer to the real credentials.

To prevent this from happening, you can setup site lockdowns using plugins like iThemes Security or Wordfence. When a person fails to login consecutively for a given number of times, the plugin will ban him/her from accessing your site at all (even the login page).

As a result, your site remains to be the safest forever.

#4. Rename WP Login URLs

For the majority of sites, the following are their common URLs.

• Login– /wp-login.php
• Admin panel– /wp-admin
• Register– /wp-login.php?action=register

Once you change these, hackers don’t even get a gateway to access your site. Nothing, nada!

So, how can you change the login URLs of a WordPress site? There are a lot of plugins to install for this purpose. I already told you about iThemes Security. If you decide to go with it, you shouldn’t look for another plugin for renaming WP login URLs. One another plugin I always recommend everyone for WP protection is Wordfence, but this option is not yet available in that plugin.

#5. Use 2-Factor Authentication

Have you heard of 2-factor authentication?

Simply put, it is a way of adding a second one-time password to your site. Even after entering your correct password, you have to enter an OTP.

Unlike in banking transactions, you will not get it as messages. Here, you will get the pin from an app called Google Authenticator on your smartphone.

You must install WP Google Authenticator plugin on your site and scan the QR code.

#6. Monitor Your Files

Most of the attackers access your site and alter the WP files to keep on giving you troubles.

You can track the changes occur to your files to take cure it instantly. There are a lot of security plugins available for this purpose. You can use iThemes Security here as well.

#7. Take Regular Backups

No one can predict what is going to happen the next moment. So, you have to take regular backups of your site. In case anything happens, you can revert to the normal state making use of the backup files.

I recommend you use UpdraftPlus for taking backups. It helps you connect to your Google Drive account and save files there without even bothering you.

#8. Change WP Database Table Prefix

Have you ever installed WordPress? Then you know the default table prefix of WordPress database is WP. Most of us keep it the same way.

If you change it to something random, you can increase your safety. WP-DBManager does this job effortlessly. Guess what? You can use iThemes Security here as well.

#9. Update WordPress Regularly

Why WordPress gets its updates so often?

Each update brings patches to security flaws. So, you have to install it as soon as it comes out. Or else, you will get exploited by hackers via the loopholes.

Some hosting providers provide automatic updates. If yours doesn’t, you can do it manually by following Dashboard>> Updates.

Wrapping Up

So, what did you decide?

Do you want to secure your site or you don’t mind keeping it on the bay of vulnerabilities?

If you choose to keep your site safe, just follow all the nine tips I have given you. I am here to help you just in case you have any doubts. Don’t forget to drop a comment below.

I appreciate if you share this article with your blogger friends. And, they will thank you for doing so as well.