wordpress
WordPress is the most popular content management platforms. Unfortunately, it’s not only popular with bloggers and businesses, but also for malicious actors: hackers, spammers, nefarious governments, and more. Even worse, their techniques for getting into your site are becoming more developed.
For that reason, it’s more important than ever to ensure your WordPress website is as secure as possible. In today’s article, we’re going to be doing just that by helping you first find a secure WordPress theme, and then showing you how to make sure your entire WordPress site is secure.
What is a secure WordPress theme?
There are lots of small factors that contribute to overall WordPress security, but in general, secure WordPress themes meet the following two criteria:
- They’re well-coded according to WordPress standards. A theme’s code should be airtight with no flaws that make it vulnerable to attacks.
- They’re regularly updated to keep them compatible with your WordPress version and your site’s plugins. Outdated themes won’t be protected against newer hacks, and incompatibility between versions could cause vulnerability glitches.
Four steps to choosing a secure WordPress theme
Thankfully, choosing a secure theme doesn’t have to be difficult. As long as you’re cautious and do your research, you should have no problem finding a theme that looks great, functions well, and keeps you safe from hackers.
Let’s take a look at the four best tips for picking a secure WordPress theme.
Use a reputable website
When choosing, buying, and downloading a theme, make sure you only browse themes from reputable websites that regularly check their themes for possible exploits.
A great place to start is the official WordPress Theme Directory. It’s filled with thousands of themes, both free and paid, and everything is thoroughly vetted for security issues before being listed.
Another popular site is ThemeForest by Envato. The Envato screening process isn’t as thorough as the WordPress Theme Directory, but it’s well-trusted by thousands of website owners. If you’re making an e-commerce website using WooCommerce, you can also try WooThemes.
There are many other directories out there filled with secure themes. Just make sure you do your research on each one before making a decision to use it. Google search “review,” “hack,” “problems” and other related terms along with the theme’s or store’s name to find any reported security issues.
Be wary of free themes
While both free and paid themes can be unsecure, free themes are the riskiest. Often, they’re harmless. Many developers use them to draw in customers for their paid themes, or simply to give something back to the community.
However, there are also many hackers who use the attractive offer of a free theme to con website creators into downloading maliciously coded themes. These themes have malware, ads, redirects, bots and more written right into their code.
Pirated themes are an even bigger risk. If you find a website offering paid themes for free, remember that it’s rare to get something for nothing. Many pirates take safe paid themes and inject malicious code into them for their own profit or gain.
Check what others think
Another great, easy tip for choosing a safe and secure theme is to follow the lead: look at what other buyers have said about the theme you like.
It’s best to steer clear of newly uploaded themes with no downloads or reviews unless you want to be a guinea pig. Instead, try filtering your search to find the most popular themes. Then, look at the reviews and comments on those themes – particularly the negative comments.
Scan them to see if you can find any mentions of security flaws, lack of updates, and other issues. If a theme has hundreds or thousands of downloads and no one has reported any security problems, you’re most likely in the clear.
Stick with active developers
It’s important that you choose a theme created by an active developer who puts time and effort into improvements. Outdated and incompatible themes are very vulnerable to hacking, so you’ll want to be sure your theme’s developer will keep the theme up to date.
When you’re on a theme’s sales page, look for the Changelog. This shows you all the past updates for a theme, allowing you to see how often it’s been improved and fixed. If you see multiple updates over the last year, you know the developer is on top of keeping the theme secure.
You should also check the theme’s comments to see that the developer takes note of customer bug reports instead of leaving them to become big vulnerabilities.
But beyond risky areas of your WordPress theme, it’s also important for you to keep your entire WordPress website free from vulnerabilities.
Is your WordPress vulnerable?
According to Wordfence report, every minute more than 90,000 WordPress sites are targeted by hackers. But what should you do to find out if your website is vulnerable, and how can you secure it for good?
According to a report published by The Hacker News, WordPress gets hacked mostly due to the existing vulnerabilities in themes (29%), Plugins (22%), Weak Password (8%) and Hosting (41%). Other sources have also suggested that WordPress is more prone to attacks when it is not updated and running old software, such as versions older than 4.1.
The best ways to fix WordPress vulnerability issues
In order to fix your vulnerability issues, you’ll first need to know that you have them. Generally, however, the most common vulnerabilities that hackers exploit can be fixed in a simple manner.
Below, we’re listing the four most important WordPress security issues you should be looking at.
Fix your location vulnerability
Another vulnerability which is very important originates from the PC’s tracked IP that is fixed to one region. This makes the work of hackers easy when they flood the networks with bots to identify such websites. Removing this vulnerability can be easily done through a reliable VPN service.
Most of the VPN services available for free on the internet have certain security issues, or they sell your data (which is why they’re free). In our recent survey, we tested more than 100 VPN services and concluded that the best VPN service for Macbook is ExpressVPN – free from all glitches, with strong features, such as the kill switch and split tunnelling. You can check the full review here: https://vpnpro.com/vpn-reviews/expressvpn-review/.
Login page URL vulnerabilities
Another basic vulnerability that stems from the login page URL can be avoided by simply changing the login page from yoursite.com/wp-admin/ or /wp-login.php to another URL of your choosing. This simple method can save you from lots of troubles and it can prevent any brute force attacks targeted towards your website.
Furthermore, to be safe from attacks based on weak passwords, keep changing your password within a certain period of time and use upper case, lower case letters, special characters and numbers. Even better, use a password manager to generate a secure password.
Hosting vulnerabilities
Hosting vulnerabilities are very common, creating room for hackers to exploit the data related to certain websites. The basic step one can take to ensure safety is to protect the wp-config.php file that holds critical information related to your WordPress installation. This is considered as the most important file on your website.
By protecting this file, you can ensure the security of the core of your website. The purpose should be to keep this file inaccessible for hackers and this can be done by moving your wp-config.php file higher than the root directory or downloading plusings, such as Sucuri Security, to lock it down and make it inaccessible by anyone but you.
Themes and plugins vulnerability
Last but not least is keeping your themes and plugins secure from attacks and free of all vulnerabilities. These are the most essential and visible aspects of any WordPress website. At the same time, these are most vulnerable to hackers’ attacks.
To be on the safer side, the software updates are meant to fix bugs, security lapses, etc. So keeping your software updated, including its themes, plugins and WordPress itself, will make your website safer than ever before.
Furthermore, the visibility of your WordPress version on your website means greater vulnerability and opportunity for hackers. The knowledge of your version number makes an attack easier since hackers can exploit known issues based on the version you’re using. Therefore, to keep your website secure, remove the version number highlighted in your site’s source view.
Conclusion
While it may take a little extra time and consideration to find a secure WordPress theme, it’s well worth the effort. A secure theme will keep your site much safer and greatly reduce your risk of damaging problems in the future.
As a bonus tip, if you’re still not sure whether you can trust your theme, download the Theme Check plugin and install it on your website. This software will run a pass/fail scan to determine whether your website’s theme is safe and secure, giving you extra peace of mind.
In general, if you’re careful about the security of your WordPress site and apply these safety measures and unique tricks, you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble and money.
–EOF (The Ultimate Computing & Technology Blog) —
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