Being hacked, or even just thinking about getting hacked, can make all of your plans for expanding or improving your business crumble. It can completely shatter your peace of mind. WordPress sites are targeted hackers simply because around 43.2% websites on the internet are website. Because WordPress sites are particularly susceptible to hacking attacks, we at Try Solutions would like to increase awareness among our clients and website owners regarding how they can best protect themselves against this threat.
Thinking about WordPress site susceptibility the first that comes to anyone’s mind is that is WordPress secure enough, so that you can create your website with WordPress?
Is WordPress secure enough?
The answer to that question is “Yes”. WordPress is secure enough
The modularity of the platform and the fact literally anyone can run code on WordPress the security can become vulnerable. But whenever the WordPress core itself has any security issues the WordPress team immediately releases a update in very timely manner compared to any other CMS.
In case of security issues with plugins and themes, again ptach gets released in very timely manner and in-order to prevent mass infiltration of ugly bugs WordPress team has taken charge many times and forced updates out to everyone automatically several times.That being said its clear that WordPress is quiet serious about their security issues. The very reason why WordPress has colored as insecure because of its large market share. As 43.2% of all the websites on the internet are WordPress website makes it bigger target for hackers.
How The Hack Can Impact
The impact of a hack on your website depends on method used to hack your website. Your can potentially suffer the following
- The site’s loading speed may drastically decrease
- It could completely get disfigured
- It could face a “White Screen Death”
- You valuable customer or any other type data may get lost
- It could malfunction and crash
Here are 15 Reason That Can Potentially Make Your WordPress Website Security Vunerable
Insecure Server
Most people overlook this fact. A server where you host your website and having server with security vulnerability is first reason that your site may get hacked. Most people don’t think about this fact and goes for the cheapest server that they can possibly get. This is where they messup, so you must have to make sure that the server company that you’re choosing is trusted and secure enough. Its affordable to host your server on a shared hosting plan but what most people don’t realize is that on shared hosting plan the server resources is shared with many other website like yours and that one of the vulnerability that you shouldn’t overlook because if one of the site in the shered server gets hacked it can potentially consume the whole server bandwidth and affect other websites in that server.
The way you can fix this issue is go for reliable host and a virtual or a dedicated server.
Password
One of the main reason your website can become a victim of brute force attack is your password. If you use a password very weak that is very weak you’re seting yourself up to fail.
Its probably not you maybe that friend of yours that uses same password in the 29 other websites. That’s how someone makes their websites vulnerable to attacks and in-case of WordPress you can set password rule for the entire userbase and finally probably not you but that HR guy at your office will not able to create passwords like “poWer33”. Nowadays using unique passwords for all your websites is not-negotiable, consider it compulsory going forward.
User Names
Just like password user names can be easily guessable if you use a very common user name like admin1, admin365 and what not, you get drill. Hackers can easily break into the admin accounts and take control of the backend of your website. So make sure the user names are also unique along side the password.
Not Using WP-Salts
We’re not talking about the seasoning here. WP Salts, an inbuilt cryptography feature, that can help you encrypt your passwords. It also helps your websites sign cookies for security. Without getting too technical, an important and frequently overlooked piece of the security feature is WordPress salt keys. To keep your website safe salt keys are convenient to use and run quietly in the background.
Using Nulled Themes and Plugins
Another very silly reason how you set yourself to be attacked is using nulled themes and plugins. There are many websites where nulled pirated copies of popular paid themes and plugins are being sold in cheap price. But don’t fall for that trap because most often these cheap copies filled with malware and can potentially compromise your websites overall security and hackers can exploit your website easily.
Other than that you won’t be getting any updates on your pirated themes and plugins from as its not the real thing. Now how to fix all that? If you’re super genius and have all the technical abilities than you know how to fix all that and update those themes and plugins as you please, and if you have that capability you wouldn’t even need to buy pirated copies in the first place. The simple solution is get the theme and plugins from trusted and legit provider from website market place and if you don’t wish pay for them using the free versions with limited features is more safe than using the pirated copies.
Not Using SSL/TLS Certification
You can seamlessly migrate your website HTTP to HTTPS simply by installing an SSL/TLS certificate. It is a safe way to encrypt any data transit between the client browser and your web server. Without this encryption, data can be intercepted and stolen by hackers. Additionally, a non-secure website may have a number of detrimental effects on your company, such as a decline in incoming traffic, a drop in SEO ranking, or a loss of client trust.
The fact that more hosting companies are steering their customers to websites with SSL capability is encouraging. You can fix this problem buy simply geting SSL or TLS certification from your hosting companies or SSL/TLS certificate providers
Lacking Firwall Defense
Another frequent means by which hackers can get past website security and access the backend resources is the absence of firewall protection. Firewalls act as your home’s security alarm and are your final line of defense against hackers. Web requests arriving from different IP addresses, especially the questionable, are monitored by firewalls.
They can recognize and reject requests that have previously been known to be malicious, denying hackers quick access to the domain of your website. Various assaults such force SQL injections, XSS, and.attacks can be prevented by web application firewalls.
Not Hardening WordPress
Usually hackers look vaunarabilty or weaknesses to illegally access your website and hardening WordPress means minimizing those weaknesses. Some of the key components of hardening WordPress includes
- Using Secure File Permission
- Disabling file editor from dashboard
- Changing Security Keys
Click the link to learn more on Ways to harden your WordPress.
Not Updating the WP-Core
This is very overlooked aspect, because like most people we are afraid of the updates that WordPress bring, we don’t deal with the changes or perhaps we wanna fix the issue sometimes later on and as we are very busy people we turn off the automatic WP-core update to avoid all these technical mess and move on with our lives and the websites goes months and years without any security patches being applied and booml we’re in really bad shape and then we take double the hassle to fix everything back to normal.
How to avoid this problem? Update the WordPress Core regularly.
Not Updating Theme and Plugins
Coming back the importance looking after your themes and plugins. Most of website owners do not update their website’s installed themes and plugins. Hackers takes advantage of these unused, or outdated themes and plugins to exploit websites.
So with the WP-core update the theme and plugin and remove all the unsed one and replace the ones that doesn’t go with the updated version WP-core.