With WordPress being such a popular option amongst website creators (they claim to ‘power’ 23% of all websites!) it can also be a popular target for hackers. And by ‘hackers’ I mean ‘vandals, trouble-makers, and people with nothing better to do than attempt to destroy all of your hard work.’
It’s hard to understand the motivation behind the act, but the good news is that they can be stopped.
Now there are a number of different things you can do with your WordPress site to help you avoid falling prey to break-in. And there are numerous articles on the web that will help you through the process of securing your website (this, for one, is very much worth reading – http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress). This post you’re reading isn’t out to re-invent the wheel of WordPress website security – but just to give you some advice on a quick and easy way to at least lock the front door.
Install Wordfence.
It’s a plugin, it’s a piece of cake to install (just search for Wordfence in your ‘Plugins > Add New’ section), and it does what it says on the box. You can pay for a premium version, sure, but like a lot of really good plugins the free version comes complete with a raft of easy-to-understand and implement functionality.
At the time of writing they were fast approaching over 5,000,000 downloads. So they must be doing something right. Right?
If you’re not quite convinced that you need some security on our WordPress website just yet, take a look at this sobering little graphic from the Wordfence site. It shows the number of hack-attacks on Wordfence-enabled sites, around the globe, happening right now.
Yes, that number on the left is 40,000. And yes, you read that right – per minute.
Once installed, without any further effort on your part, your website will be a LOT more secure. But take a few moments anyway to familiarise yourself with the nuts and bolts of it. Run the Scan (it literally saved a website install for me that had been ruined by malicious code). Set an alert email address. And tweak a few of the other settings.
When you first install Wordfence it will take you through a handy, and very easy to follow, settings tour. So install, grab a coffee, take the free tour, and feel more secure.
There’s more info here: https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/wordfence