WordPress sites are a godsend in the website-world, as they allow potential entrepreneurs to create and manage a web page through an easy-to-understand medium. Breaking down the imposing and prohibitively steep learning curve of programming and coding a website from scratch, or the reasonably high cost of paying a programmer to make you one, WordPress sites are a great jumping off point in general.

With that said, making sure to keep your WordPress site safe and secure is hugely important as, if it has a standardised security system, it can easily be hacked or infiltrated. Updating your WordPress security can be a good move when it comes to protecting your company and your content, but there are other ways to ensure you don’t get hacked. This article will explore a variety of ways to protect your site.

Avoid Public Access Points

Public access points can be very useful for those that don’t have regular access to private wifi or a secure internet connection at all times. However, these points aren’t always secure. It can’t be overstated how important it is to not access your WordPress admin site from a public access point, as these can be recorded or watched by the people who own them, granting them access to your website as soon as you input your password to do some work. If you have limited access to your webpage at home, it’s entirely worth a trip to a friend’s house or another secure, password protected internet connection to do your work.

Change Passwords Regularly

Changing passwords can be a pain in the leg, but so can losing all of your hard work and website functionality. Every six months you should change all passwords related to your WordPress site, including the passwords used for the email addresses you used to sign up for the web service. Changing these passwords ensures that anyone who gets your password with the intent to use it later on to break into your website will come up short as the password will change soon afterwards. 

Check Security on Everything

As opposed to changing your passwords regularly, you should check the passwords on all of your devices to ensure that your hardware is safe from hacking as well. A shocking number of people neglect to change the password on their internet router or home computer, leaving the factory standard passwords in place. There are entire websites that run unprotected webcams in a bid to show the viewers how important hardware protection is, so don’t risk your hard-earned website and work for the sake of a password on a router. 

Set Up Backups

Make copies of your website every few months and save them on external hard drives, and make backups of those hard drives on other hard drives which are stored separately. Anyone who works with digital media as the main source of their income knows to back up everything up to three times in case of failure somewhere along the line, and you never know when a catastrophic failure or a hacking incident will take down your entire WordPress website. Having a backup ready to go for when that happens means that you have minimised your downtime and protected your WordPress site more effectively.

Perform Updates Regularly

Most software tells us at some point or another to update, and this regular update is usually glossed over or postponed indefinitely by many, many people. It’s much easier to click “remind me later” than it is to restart your computer to install the updates, but when it comes to a business or a computer that runs your WordPress website, being updated is key to keeping your machine’s security up to date. Don’t delay on your general updates, and you’ll have heightened security on your key computer.

Store Physical Passwords In Safe Places

Storing your passwords in general tends to be a bad idea, but if you’re prone to forgetting, or if your changing every six months is confusing for you, consider storing your passwords in a physical capacity in a safe space. Storing passwords digitally is a very bad idea, as all one has to do is hack through one password to get all of your other passwords all at once, and from there taking down your website would be easy.

Storing a physical reminder of your password can be much more subtle, and more secure if you store it somewhere like a safe in your house. For instance, if your password is Apple12, having an apple shaped sticky note holder on your desk with “12” on the top note can be an effective reminder without blatantly saving the exact password somewhere.

These tips will make your WordPress site more secure, which is key when dealing with important sites for businesses and companies. Don’t delay, implement your changes today.