Great WordPress Security Plugins

As we all know by now, it is of the utmost importance that steps are taken to maximise security of your WordPress website.  After all, you’ve invested time and effort into growing your web content and achieving great Google exposure and we don’t want to lose that!

With this in mind, we thought we’d write a little about some great steps you can take to maximise the security of your website.

1. Rename your WordPress login address.  Changing your log in address from mydomain.com/wp-admin to something less obvious is a great first step in minimising brute force hacking systems from gaining entry to the back end of your WordPress installation.  There’s a great plugin which will allow you to do this quickly and easily called Rename WP Login
2. Limit Login attempts.  You can block hackers via their I.P. address by installing a simple plugin called Limit Login Attempts.  As it might say on the tin, this Worpress plugin allows a limited number of login attempts before logging in is disabled to that particular I.P. address.  You can find out more about this plugin here.
3. Make a regular backup.  Possibly the most effective way to safeguard your website is to back the whole thing up regularly.  This means backing up all of the files on the server, as well as taking a backup of your MySQL database.  Done manually this can be quite a tedious task.  A great solution though is to open an account with Dropbox (making sure your subscription will allow enough storage space for your entire website backup) and use a great WordPress plugin called WordPress Backup to Dropbox, which allows you to schedule repeated backups either daily, weekly, 4 weekly and so on, and will automatically backup your entire website installation to your Dropbox account as requested.  This plugin works very well and we highly recommend it.