Beverly Agius
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10min
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Website security can be a complex (or even confusing) topic in an ever-evolving landscape. This guide is meant to provide a clear framework for website owners seeking to mitigate risk and apply security principles to their web properties.
It’s important to keep in mind that security is never a set-it-and-forge-it solution. Instead, it's encouraged you to think of it as a continuous process that requires constant assessment to reduce the overall risk.
In this post, I will discuss various security plugins available for WordPress. These security plugins offer a wide range of features to make your WordPress blog secure from known threats. These plugins keep their services updated with security from the latest exploits and threats. If you are really serious about your online business running on WordPress, you must use any of these plugins to make it secure. These are the 8 best security plugins available for WordPress.
What is Website Security?
Website security is the measures taken to secure a website from cyberattacks. In this sense, website security is an ongoing process and an essential part of managing a website.
Why is Website Security Important?
Website security is important because nobody wants to have a hacked website. Having a secure website is as vital to someone’s online presence as having a website host. If a website is hacked and blacklisted, for example, it loses up to 98% of its traffic. Not having a secure website can be as bad as not having a website at all or even worse. For example, client data breach can result in lawsuits, heavy fines, and ruined reputation.
Why Websites Get Hacked
With over 1.94 billion websites online in 2019, hackers get an extensive playground to work in.
There is often a misconception about why websites get hacked. Owners and administrators often believe they won’t get hacked because their sites are smaller, and therefore make less attractive targets. Hackers may choose bigger sites if they want to steal information or sabotage. For their other goals (which are more common), any small site is valuable enough.
There are various goals when hacking websites, but the main ones are:
- Exploiting site visitors.
- Stealing information stored on the server.
- Tricking bots and crawlers (black-hat SEO).
- Abusing server resources.
- Pure hooliganism (defacement).
To prevent your Wordpress website to get hacked, it's important to keep your site's maintenance
The 8 Plugins
1. WordFence
WordFence is one of the most popular WordPress security plugins. It keeps on checking your website for malware infection. If scans all the files of your WordPress core, theme and plugins. If it finds any kind of infection, it will notify you. It claims to make your WordPress website 50 times faster and secure. For making your website faster, it uses Falcom caching engine. This plugin is free, but a few advanced features are available for premium users. If you can afford it, do it.
This plugin blocks bruteforce attack and can add two factor authentication via SMS. You can also block traffic from a specific country. It also includes a firewall to block fake traffic, botnet and scanners. It also scans your hosting for known backdoors including C99, R57 and others. If it finds anything, you will instantly get email notification.
It also scans your posts and comments for malicious code. It also supports multi-site. You can also check the traffic on your WordPress website in real time and see if there is any security threat attacking your website.
2. BulletProof Security
BulletProof Security is another popular WordPress security plugin that takes care of various things. It adds firewall security, database security, login security and more. It comes with four-click setup interface. Just activate this plugin and then relax. It will take care of your website.
It limits failed login attempts and blocks security scanners, fake traffic, IP blocking and code scanners. It keeps on checking the code of WordPress core files, themes and plugins. In case of any known infection, it notifies admin. It also optimizes the performance of your website by adding caching. It comes with built-in file manager for htaccess. It protects WordPress websites against various vulnerabilities including XSS, RFI, CRLF, CSRF, Base64, Code Injection, SQL Injection and many other. This plugin keeps itself updated with new vulnerabilities to keep your website protected. It keeps on updating it according to new exploits and vulnerabilities.
It also has a pro version which offers some advanced features to improve the security of your website. But the free version is popular enough to make your website secure.
3. Sucuri Security
Sucuri Security is the security plugin for WordPress. This plugin is from the popular website security and auditing company Sucuri. This plugin offers various security features like security activity auditing, file integrity monitoring, malware scanning, blacklist monitoring, and website firewall. It incorporates various blacklist engines including Google Safe Browsing, Sucuri Labs, Norton, McAfee Site Advisor and more to check your website. If there is anything wrong, it will notify you via email.
It protects your website from DOS attack, Zero Day Disclosure Patches, bruteforce attacks and other scanner attacks. It also keeps log of all activities and keep these logs safe in the Sucuri cloud. So, if an attacker is able to bypass the security controls, your security logs will be safe within Sucuri’s security operations center.
If you are willing to pay, you can go for the Sucuri premium service. They are a well known web application security company with a team of experts. So, you can get better service and advice.
4. iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security)
iThemes Security is also a nice WordPress security plugin which claims to offer 30+ ways to secure and protect your WordPress website. With one click installation, you can stop automated attacks and protect your website. it also fixes various common security holes in your website.
It tracks registered users’ activity and adds two-factor authentication, import/export settings, password expiration, malware scanning, and various other things.
It scans the entire website and tries to find if there is any potential vulnerability in your website. It also prevents bruteforce attacks and ban IP addresses which try to bruteforce. It also forces users to use secure passwords and also forces SSL for admin area in server support. Unlike other plugins, the GeoIP banning feature is not available. But the company has promised to bring this feature soon. We cannot say exactly when, but it says the feature is coming soon. It also integrates Google reCAPTCHA to prevent comment spam on your website.
5. Acunetix WP SecurityScan
Acunetix WP Security Scan offers a security scanning tool to find vulnerabilities in web applications. This plugin helps you to secure your WordPress website and suggests measures to improve the security. It offers file permission security, version hiding, admin protection, removing WP generator tag from source, and database security.
It removes various information from the source code of the page which can be used in the information gathering process before attack. This includes theme update information, plugin update information, really simple discover meta tag, WordPress version, Windows live write meta tag, error information from login page, versions from scripts, versions from stylesheets, database and php error reporting.
It also offers a database backup tool to take a backup of your website. With its live traffic monitor tool, you can check traffic in real time. It also scans your website to notify known web application vulnerabilities.
Download Acunetix WP SecurityScan
6. All In One WP Security & Firewall
All In One WP Security & Firewall is a popular WordPress security plugin to check vulnerabilities in your WordPress website.
It protect against bruteforce login attack and lockdown if someone tries to bruteforce. It also sends you an email notification if somebody gets locked out due to failed login attempts. It detects if a user tries to save a weak password and forces him/her to use a strong password. It also monitors the account activity of all users and keeps track of username, IP and login date time.
It allows you to schedule automatic backup and receive email notification. It also protects PHP code by disabling admin area editing. It adds a web application firewall in your website and enables 5G Blacklist to prevent various attacks. It denies bad query strings, prevent XSS, CSRF, SQL injection, malicious bots and other security threats.
It has a security scanner which keeps track of files and notifies you about each changes in your WordPress system. It can also detect malicious code in your WordPress website. It blocks and protects your blog from comment spam. It also works with most plugins without any problem.
Download All In One WP Security & Firewall
7. 6Scan Security
6Scan Security is a popular auto-fix protection for your WordPress site. It can protect your website from hackers. It offers rule-based protection for your website and tries to keep the security of your website up to date.
It has a security scanner which scans and protect your website against SQL injection, Cross Site Scripting, CSRF, Directory traversal, Remote file including, DOS attack and other OWASP top ten security vulnerabilities.
A notable feature of the plugin is its automatic vulnerability fix. When it finds any vulnerable code, it applies auto-fix by using its auto-fix server-side agent solution. It also has an automatic malware fix for malware related issues on your website. Like other plugins, it also sends email notifications if there is anything serious in your website.
8. Defender
As well as all the usual features (checking your website for security hacks while scanning core files for issues and vulnerabilities) probably the most exciting thing about Defender is that it also comes with a whole pile of featuresz that you usually have to pay for that keep you sites especially secure.
Obviously, being a WPMU DEV plugin it also works great with Multisite and there’s a premium version available with their free trial that will give you some extra frequency and in-depth scans as well as expert WP support to help you fix up any specific problems or run with any super advanced security setup you’d like to implement.
