Security for your website is a big deal. It’s not all that different than the security you probably want for your own home. You likely aren’t interested in random people coming into your house and messing things up and taking your personal items. You should feel the same about your website. While people are welcome to stop by for legitimate visits they aren’t welcome to visit and get into your files and add and or delete files and mess things up for you.
There are general security practices that apply to virtually any website but when working with WordPress you also have some additional items to consider in securing your site.
The Only Way to Have a 100% Secure Website
Now before we go any further let’s get one thing clear. The only way to have a 100% secure website is to not have a website! Did you get that? No website or WordPress site is going to be 100% secure. Now that we have that fact out of the way, what you want to do is minimize your risk.
There are various ways to minimize your WordPress powered websites security risks. We will be discussing a number of these in a series of articles on WordPress Security so you can better understand what can be done to make your website more secure.
While running a WordPress site has lots of advantages, like everything in life it has some areas that need some attention such as security. WordPress currently powers about 25% of all websites in the world. That is a large number of sites and thus, it makes it a platform that hackers target. This isn’t a problem with WordPress but it does mean you need to realize the issues and address them.
First Step To Keeping Your Site Secure
First off keeping your site updated is an absolute necessity and first step in keeping your WordPress site secure. This includes keeping both WordPress, your theme, and all your plugins updated. Beyond keeping your site updated you will need to consider a balance between Security and Usability. The balance is that you can make a site so secure it’s difficult for people to use and yet if you make it super easy to use it likely won’t be secure enough.
Another thing to be aware of is that the more sophisticated hackers get the more security measures website owners will need to use. It’s an unfortunate cycle; improve security, hackers learn how to defeat it, new and better security and so goes the cycle.
All of your security needs are relatively easy to manage so you can have a more secure site and reduce your security risks. In this series, we will look at security in more detail as we go. Up next you’ll discover 4 types of security that your site needs.