5 Steps For Non-Techie To Secure WordPress Blog
Monday, December 29, 2014, 6:00 AM | Leave Comment
If you have a blog especially one based on WordPress platform, there are ways you can secure it. Of course, no matter how much you are careful, someone with determination and time on their hands can easily break into your online site.
Your posts and data can be easily compromised. No question about that. 100% security is possible.
You have to diligently but with no pain follow some procedures that can be easily performed on your part.
Simple steps for the non-techie…
This post is written for those folks who are not very technical savvy. These are steps anyone working on WordPress platform can take.
Most people who install WordPress don’t give security much importance.
Many are under the impression that since they don’t bother with sensitive financial and user information, their blog is not a target for attack.
But time and again, that has been proven to be false and has turned out to be a mistake.
It’s important to produce content and promote it on a regular basis. Murphy’s law has been proven true time and again: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”
Believe it if your blog is not secure, you could lose everything in one instance.
You can’t imagine how hackers are knowledgeable about technology that can break and destroy anything you have online.
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Back up your blog everyday…
Backing up ought to be at the top of the list of how to secure your blog. This is the easiest, the simplest and the quickest way to secure your blog, not to mention the cheapest.
I do it manually everyday using phpMyAdmin after I have posted for the day. Depending on the size of your database, it shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes.
When you do back ups, the file is stored on your hard disk. What you can do something extra is to buy a USB Flash Drive and transfer the backed up file to the external drive. So you have it in two different places in case your hard drive crashes.
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Use strong username and change it periodically…
The hackers can use many methods at their disposal to try to break in your WordPress blog. Once they find out the “username” of your blog, they can set up an algorithm to determine the password.
If they have the time – and believe that they do, their software can go through millions of iterations to find out your password.
So the first step for you is to change your “username” from an obvious one to a more complex one. One way to do this is to follow How to Change Username in WordPress.
Before you delete the old username, if you have posts published with it, WordPress will ask you if you want to move those posts under the new user.
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Use strong password and change it periodically…
While this may seem like an obvious step, it was recently found that out of the 32 million+ passwords exposed in an attack against a leading developer of social games and advertising solutions for social media (RockYou social network), 123456, 12345, and 123456789 were the most popular.
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Update plug-ins…
Plug-ins enhance your blogging experience with WordPress. Keep them updated with newer versions.
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Update WordPress…
WordPress is an open source software. Its source code is public. Anyone can have access to it. This means that hackers can scrutinize the code looking for security holes.
But the WordPress world community releases an updated version protected against the new threats.
If you always run the latest WordPress version, you will be minimizing the chances of having security problems.
In a Nutshell
Follow these simple steps and you will minimize the chances of hackers’ attack on your WordPress blog.
