Wordpress Security Tips | Help Desk | Yakezie Forums

Hi all,

I recently learned that an unprotected Wordpress blog is frustrating. It's meant a month of trying to a virus my website got, so I couldn't blog. The virus was called the Pharma Virus and it puts pharmacy drugs in your website but only the search engines can see it. The search engines know it's there and punish your website. My Alexa rank went from 300,000 (almost beat the challenge) to 850,000. 

However, let's turn it into something positive – I learned a few cool tricks to protect your Wordpress blog!

1. Security Secret Keys: In your WP-config.php file on your server there is security keys. You can make these more secure. If you visit this page: https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt/ , copy the information and update the information on your WP-config.php it's more secure.

2. Protect Your Admin folder: You can restrict who is able to access your admin folder. For instance, domain.com/wp-admin/ will get you to any Wordpress website admin area. If you know the username then it's just a case of the password. So, restrict which computers can access this section. It's an htaccess file and specific info needs to be added and uploaded to your wp-admin folder. 

If you have a dynamic IP address this can be a problem.

3. Updates: I hadn't updated my plugins or Wordpress in a while so it made it vulnerable to hackers. I won't make that mistake again!

If this has been posted before, apologies, just thought it could help others avoid my mistake. Does anybody else have good tips for Wordpress security?

Thanks for the tips John.

Eric – I notice Wordpress Firewall 2 hasn't been updated in over 2 years. Does that make it more vulnerable? What other firewalls do folk use and/or recommend. I use Wordfence, together with the security benefits of cloudlfare, but I think I may still need a firewall too?

What do you think?

I just started using Wordfence.  So far seems to be working alright.  I've had to disable it while doing some heavy admin as it tended to bump into some mySQL limitations that my host has in place. 

Wordpress Firewall 2 does a lot of good stuff. I regularly block hack attempts from China/Russia with it. On my Israel blog, I have blocked hack attempts from all over the Middle East. Does good stuff for me.