WordPress Security: 26-Step Guide for Elite-Level Protection

Higher rankings mean more visibility, and more visibility means more visitors. Luckily, one of the ways to boost the odds Google likes your site is to make it secure. Find and follow step-by-step guides for every WordPress.com question. Upgrade and unlock features, tools, and expert help with a paid plan. We operate a bug bounty program via HackerOne to reward people who find bugs and help us improve the security of our services. For more details on all of this, you can see our ultimate WordPress security guide.

Step 4: Secure Your WordPress Hosting

This way you can better prevent hackers and or a middle man from gaining access to your website. In fact, websites break mostly because of bugs in older WordPress versions. Core modifications are never recommended by the WordPress team and expert developers who understand the risks involved. And WordPress updates mostly include must-have security patches along with the added functionality required to run the latest plugins. Another very important way to harden your WordPress security is to always keep it up to date.

We run firewalls and have processes to alert us about unauthorized attempts to access WordPress.com accounts. Our web application firewall (WAF) examines incoming traffic to your website and decides to allow or block it based on various rules. This adds an important layer of protection to your site, particularly when attackers actively exploit unpatched vulnerabilities.

What is a Web Application Firewall?

Search engines like Google don’t want to send their organic traffic to a compromised website. Instead, they prioritize websites that focus on user experience and security. Therefore, implementing proper WordPress security best practices will deter fraudsters from stealing user data.

If your site includes comment sections, bad actors may try to use them to disseminate links to malware, malicious websites, or your competitors. PHP is one of the key components necessary for WordPress websites to run on a server. Running old versions is not recommended because they may include security vulnerabilities and are not as well optimized as newer releases.

Structured Query Language (SQL) is a programming language used to communicate with databases. With BlogVault, you can safely update your site without worrying about a new version messing anything up. The plugin enables you to test a plugin on a staging site before using it on your live site. Depending on how much your website has been affected, you may need to delete the corrupted file or restore a previous site version from a backup.

Two great ways to do this is first by changing your default wp-admin login URL and also limiting login attempts. Another easy thing you can do to boost your WordPress security is to lock down your login credentials. This can be done in several ways, including using a plugin to change the login URL from /wp-admin to something of your choosing. You can also add two-factor authentication (2FA) to your login and limit login attempts, which will help repel bots.

As a website owner, there’s a lot that you can do to improve your WordPress security, even if you are not tech-savvy. Whether you are a beginner, small business owner, or professional web developer, Astra provides all the tools you need to easily build your beautiful WordPress website. Lindsay started her freelance career in 2009 and writes about business tech, tools, and advice for small brands and solopreneurs. She loves productivity hacks, minimalist workflows, and every horror movie that comes out.

WordPress site backup services usually have a low monthly fee and store your backups for you in the cloud. We only support SFTP connections at Kinsta to ensure your data remains safe and encrypted. We take this a step further here at Kinsta and every site has a Security for WordPress randomized port which can be found in your MyKinsta dashboard.