WordPress is one of the best platforms to use for a website or blog whether it be for personal or business. It allows you to create and maintain a professional site with little to no knowledge of html code. But just like any other platform on the Internet, WordPress is not exempt from being hacked into. If or when it does happen, the damage can be devastating. Hackers are creating a cyberspace war-zone between them and us.
There are different ways that a site can be hacked and different degrees of damage that it can cause. Sometimes you may not even notice it until your hosting company contacts you to let you know that suspicious code has been installed on your server. And there are other times when a hacker, that really wants to create a cyberspace war, will completely take over your site and change your log-in information and add script codes and bad links. Depending on the damage that’s caused, the hacking war can be brutal.
There are a number of ways to protect yourself and your website from being hacked, but they won’t do you a bit of good if you don’t follow them. It’s important to remember that it doesn’t matter what type of site you have or what your content is, your privacy needs to be protected.
Here are 5 Ways to Protect Your Website or Blog from Hackers
- Username & Password Protection – In order to protect your website in general from being vulnerable, you need to be very careful with the username and password that you choose. Hackers are smart and they have their ways of cracking out log-in info. The username for WordPress, should never be “admin”. Another one they’ll try is your name, so if your name is listed on your site, don’t use that one either. Come up with something unique. Your password is next and it needs to be a strong password. The more letters, characters, and numbers you have, the better you’ll be. Use capital and lower case letters and characters and numbers mixed in together. This will make it nearly impossible for them to guess what it is. And be sure to change your password every 30 to 60 days.
- Anti-Virus Software – The next thing you need to do is protect your computer with virus software. Hackers can use spy-ware and malware to gain access to your computer and then this happens they have the ability to steal your usernames and passwords. Most people save there log in information for each site, so it’s easy to use the files within the computer to find this information. When this happens not only will they have access to your passwords, but they’ll also have access to your images and videos and they’ll have the ability to post them all over the net and say what they want when they do.
- Staying Up to Date – One of the #1 ways that hackers get into a website is through vulnerable files. WordPress sites are known for being hacked because people are not updating their plug-ins or even WordPress for that matter. When updates come through, they need to be taken care of right away. Many updates provide security fixes which protect your files from being vulnerable against attacks.
- Security Scans – It’s also important to run a scan on your site using http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/scanner. This will help you identify if your site is clean or not and what files have been compromised. Once that is done, you will need to remove all of the corrupt files.
- Site Backups – Backing up your website files and database is another important step in staying safe. If ever your site does get hacked you will have a copy of the CLEAN files so they can replace the corrupted files. Your hosting company does do daily backups, but they can also become corrupt, so you will want to have a backup saved elsewhere.
It’s important to protect your website, personal information, images, videos, and documents. To protect your website and your privacy, you need to be prepared. There is never a way to completely prevent hacking to your site, but when you take the appropriate precautions you’ll make it a lot harder for the hackers to get in and make your site the target of a cyberspace war-zone.
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