WordPress is one of the most trusted and preferred Content Management Systems and certainly the best blogging platform. There is no second thought about the credibility of WordPress development and millions of websites use this CMS and blogging platform extensively. WordPress is an opensource Content Management System so it is free to download and extremely simple to use for everyone. It is flexible in nature and allows you to publish, add, delete and edit content and images on your website without any hassles. If you are an ardent blogger then nothing suits better than WordPress for your blog site, it is a haven for bloggers. Once you have installed WordPress on your system, you need not have to worry about maintaining and building of your website or blog. It is taken care by WordPress and you can concentrate on your content. WordPress Development has acquired huge popularity and appreciation in a short time, and it has one of the largest numbers of users across the world. WordPress is being used widely in a variety of websites like- corporate, social networking, personal blogs, government and educational websites, community web portals just to name a few.
However, like everything else, WordPress development also has a flip-side. It is an open source CMS, which makes it vulnerable to hacking. Hack attacks have become very predominant on the web today and there are many high profile hackers looking forward to prey on several WordPress powered websites. It is very crucial for online owners to protect their WordPress websites and blogs and give a serious thought to WordPress security issues.
Given below are some useful technical guidelines, which can play a great role in securing your WordPress websites and blogs-
1 When WordPress is installed manually there is a chance for you to create your own database along with custom prefix for various tables. It is very important that you change the prefix because WordPress by default adds wp_ as the prefix to all WordPress tables. If you skip or overlook to change this prefix then you simply making work easier for hackers. You are thus advised to use a custom prefix for table names, and you can do this by using plugins or editing wp-config.php at the time of manual WordPress installation.
2 Besides changing the prefix, you should consider to change your user password. The password should be strong and unique, which is difficult to guess and hack. A common or simple password is not very reliable and is easier to crack. It is advised to avoid common phrases and include numbers, special characters and upper and lower cases to form a strong password. Also, keep changing your password regularly.
3 This is very crucial that you add a secret key to WP-Config file because the file is storage of database information that WordPress needs to connect its circuit. Moreover, the file has the names, address and password of MYSQL database that keeps the record of all users’ info, blog-posts and other very crucial content. By adding a secret key to WP-Config file, you give a hard time to hackers to obtain access of your account.
4 With the help of .htaccess file, you can tie limits to a specific IP address. This means people limited to that location only can access your information.
5 Many WordPress themes have the WordPress version info in the meta tag. You should remove WordPress version info because hackers can easily get to this information and cause damage by targeting the security vulnerability for that version.
6 If your server has outdated or unused software then you should remove them instantly because hackers can use them to gain access of your website.
7 A very essential guideline to make your WordPress website hacker proof is to backup your WordPress database. It does not matter how secure is your website backups are always very useful. You can install WP-database-backup plugin to backup your database daily.
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