10 WordPress Plugins to Harden Website’s Security
You created a website on WordPress, selected a reliable hosting for it, and added a beautiful theme. However, like all other aspects, security of your website is also of utmost importance. Even though WordPress has some security features built-in, but the type of threats a website is vulnurable to, you need some special plugins.
This post will list some of the best plugins to harden the security on your website and keep it safe from malacious attacks. Let’s take a look.
Login
Login Lockdown can help to mitigate your site from a brute force attack. The plugin will record the IP address and timestamp on every failed login attempt. If it detects multiple failed attempts on a certain period of time from the same IP address, it will disable all the requests from that address for an hour. You can set the length of the lockdown from the Settings page of the plugin.
WP-DB Manager
Part of a security measure is having a backup, especially a database backup which contains all the data (e.g. content, users, and options) on your website. WP-DB-Manager is a handy plugin that allows you to do just that easily. It can backup the database, restore it as well set an automatic scheduled backup.
Antivirus
The Antivirus plugin works similar to an antivirus installed on your computer. It’ll scan exploits, malware, and spam injections within the files as well as the database on your site. The scan can be initiated manually to select files or run daily. The plugin will notify you when it finds any malicious codes to your email address.
Bear in mind though, that the plugin may cause a performance degradation depending on the number of files it has to scan and the specification of the server on which the site runs.
Bad Behavior
Bad Behavior is the plugin which helps you fight with those annoying spammers. The plugin will not only help you prevent spam messages on your blog, but also will try to limit access to your blog, so they won’t be able even to read it.
User Spam Remover
User Spam Remover can automatically remove spam, old, or never-used accounts. It also creates a backup of all the user account that it deletes so that you can easily restore it if needed. It is a handy tool if your site manages multiple users with open registration.
Block Bad Queries
This plugin attempts to block away all malicious queries attempted on your server and WordPress blog.
It works in the background, checking for excessively long request strings (i.e., greater than 255 chars), as well as the presence of either "eval(" or "base64" in the request URI.
iThemes Security
iThemes Security makes it easy to implement general security patches to your WordPress site installation.
With the plugin, you can change the table prefix, enable 2FA with Google Authenticator, Google ReCaptcha, User Action Logging, and a lot more. It’s an all-in-one WordPress security plugin.
Defender
Defender also comes with several security features that you can enable on your site such as Hide error reporting, Disabling file editor, and changing the table prefix. It also provides some low-level security recommendations of your server.
Jetpack
Jetpack does many things including some security features such as Monitoring which allows you to monitor whether your site is up or down, Single Sign-on which is powered by WordPress.com to allow users using their WordPress.com account, and Brute-force protection.
Security Headers
Adding some Headers Response will add extra layers of security to your site. The Headers will direct on how should the browsers to behave when they render your website.
A few of the Headers we are seeing here include the Strict-Transport-Security header will enforce the browsers to load your site through HTTPS, X-Frame-Options, and X-XSS-Protection. This plugin makes it easier to add these headers on your site without the need to have access to your server.
