WordPress Security-I

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WordPress Security

Understanding the security and its importance.. Your website represents who you are and your purpose of being online. Your customers do not know you directly and if they do not know you, it will be hard for them to trust you, so it is your website that builds this trust for you and if your website is not trustworthy, your customer will not gain confidence or faith you for what you sale or offer.. This trust is build with security. The more secure is your website, the more trust the customers gain and the chain grows on.. When it comes to websites, the most common CMS, i.e., Content Management System, is WordPress that is available around for free.

Importance of Security

Your website stores the data of the user, so if you have a non-secure website, not only you but your clients will be at risk of having their information leaked or misused. A hacker may enter in, check it, gather the information, not necessarily he will do something, but he can collecte the information for later use. Imagine if someone with bad intention gets the full access of something, what will happen? Of course, he is going to misuse it for his advantage. What they can do is a separate topic to be discussed, but for example they may inject a malicious code in your website making your website to be point of spreading the infection to your users causing further security issues. Web is secure, so they keep a track of what is there on your website, and if it is found to be a source of infection, it start giving the user the warning when the website is browsed stating that malicious contents on the website and most Anti-virus software would even block the website from being viewed..

Be Careful with what you install

Well ! there is no issue in securing a website, as there are number of plugins available for it to be secured, but the main problem is that if you installed a plugin that has vulnerabilities, then you just opened up your website unknowingly for the attackers to attack.. Most of people who uses the WordPress are not experts in it, to track it before it is too late.. The main problem is that the plugins you used to secure will fight against attacks and prevent access to the files, but they just cannot inform you that the plugins you are installing is a vulnerable one or not. Some of the developer just want to make the website look good, and end up installing things that are vulnerable without getting much information. Your website may be your living, so take a step towards it, check the things, and be careful..

Setting up security policies

Consider two scenarios: Scenario 1) An administrative user does not follow security practice and use a simple passwords just for a sake of making it easy to memorize and the attacker tries to crack it and gains access in few guesses or with the help of some software to do this..

Scenario 2) An administrative user does follow security practice and use a strong password or authentication mechanism and the hacker is unable to crack it, he will still try to attack, but not be do anything except sitting idle and wasting time and falling back.

You can decide on which scenario you stand and which you want to be in..

Keeping things updated and patched

WordPress, being an OpenSource software and most common one for the attackers to target. The updates are regularly circulated by the developers. These updates are very important for the application in terms of stability and security, so has to be marked as very important..

As a hosting provider, it is very much important to take some countermeasures to protect the servers from common threats, especially, on a shared hosting server, where there are hundreds of websites hosted, there is a risk of having it contaminating other sites on it those are sharing resources with each other. Web Hoster will do their job of isolating the user, but if you are a WordPress owner, your responsibility is more towards what you host that it is for hosting provider.

You check the article on WordPress Security-II for more preventive measures..


I hope this has been informative to you and I would like to thank you for reading this article..