Thousands of websites are hacked every day, with a new cyberattack happening every 39 seconds.
A poorly secured website is at risk of losing important data, content, and information, not to mention financial and credibility losses.
Luckily, there are several ways to secure your website. First, use the right web hosting plan. Make sure the plan includes security features like an SSL certificate and DNS protector as the first layer of site security.
Second, use the right security plugin to further protect your site from hacks, breaches, and other attacks.
In this article, we’ll go over seven security plugins to help you ensure a safe and secure WordPress site. This way, you can focus on growing your business and reach success without any worry.
Let’s start.
1. Sucuri
Sucuri offers a free plugin for WordPress that comes with security activity auditing to monitor all security-related activities within your WordPress site. This is an essential feature to help you check who is logging in and what changes were made to your site.
Additionally, all activities are stored in the Sucuri cloud for safe-keeping so attackers can’t wipe your data. Sucuri also constantly compares your site’s current state with “the known good”.
If your site doesn’t meet the standard, Sucuri will indicate that as a problem to help you prevent malicious attacks before they happen.
2. iThemes Security
iThemes Security is a freemium security plugin. The free plan.” includes robust security features for protection, prevention, and detection.
For instance, it bans bad bots and users and blocks specific IP addresses from accessing your site. It also protects from local and network brute force attacks, which accounted for 377.5 million attacks in the first quarter of 2021 alone.
iThemes security offers database backups, strong password enforcement, security logs, and site scanner to further prevent malicious attacks.
Security logs help track potentially harmful activities such as file change, file alteration, plugin installation, and user creation.
Site scanner, on the other hand, will check for plugins, themes, and WordPress software vulnerabilities on your site. It can also check your Google’s blocklist status and alert you if malware is found.
Users can also enable automatic vulnerability patching to automate software updates when a new patch is available.
3. Wordfence
Wordfence is a firewall and malware scanner for WordPress. This security plugin constantly updates its firewall rules and malware signatures to ensure site safety.
Wordfence’s WordPress firewall security identifies and blocks malicious traffic from harming your site. It also has an integrated malware scanner that blocks requests containing malicious code and content.
This security plugin also protects your site from brute force attacks by limiting login attempts and including CAPTCHA to stop bots from logging in. WordFence also includes two-factor authentication (2FA) to further secure access to the site.
Furthermore, Wordfence checks for malware by scanning through core files, themes, and plugins on your site. It also goes through bad URLs, backdoors, spam comments, and malicious redirects to keep your site clean from potential attacks.
Additionally, this plugin has security tools such as Live Traffic to monitor visits and hack attempts in real-time, providing information about their IP addresses, origin, time of the day, and time spent on the site.
4. All In One WP Security
All In One WP Security is a lightweight WordPress plugin that won’t slow down your site’s performance. It has three security categories, starting with basic, intermediate, and then advanced.
This way, users can choose one that fits their needs best without adding unnecessary features – which may slow down their sites.
Some of the basic features in AIO include a password strength tool to ensure users create secure login credentials.
In line with that, AIO also offers user login security, including protection against brute force login attacks using the login lockdown feature.
This plugin also lets the admin view failed login attempts by presenting information such as the user’s IP address, username, and date and time of the failed login attempt.
Users can also secure their database by scheduling automatic backups. Additionally, secure important files such as .htaccess and wp-config.php by creating backups and easily restoring them.
Last but not least, AIO also has security features for spam comments, malware scanners, and firewall protection.
5. Jetpack
Jetpack is a freemium WordPress security plugin. It features security measures such as backups, malware scanning, spam protection, and activity log for free.
JetPack comes with real-time backups to save changes as you go, also featuring a one-click backup restore.
The activity log helps users understand which action or person made changes and possibly harmed your site.
JetPack’s malware scan also features a one-click fix. When the plugin notices a problem, you’ll receive an email alert to fix it right away. Moreover, you can review security scan results in a centralized location.
This plugin also automates spam clearing for comments and forms. Therefore, you don’t need CAPTCHAs to filter bots. In turn, visitors can engage without any distraction and submit more forms or comments.
Additionally, JetPack also has a downtime monitoring feature that will inform you right away when the site goes down. This way, you can ensure the best customer experience each time they visit your site.
6. WPScan
WPScan is a light security plugin with robust benefits.
This plugin has its own vulnerabilities database to help check and scan your site from threats. All vulnerabilities are manually entered into the database by WordPress security professionals and users.
They are sourced from around the web or sent directly to WPScan by security researchers and constantly updated.
This plugin then uses this database to scan for WordPress, plugin, and theme vulnerabilities. It also offers an option to schedule automated daily scans, send email notifications and alerts, and report downloads for a thorough analysis of your site.
WPScan also shows an icon on the admin toolbar with the number of security vulnerabilities found to keep you aware of potential threats.
7. BulletProof Security
This security plugin is intuitive and easy to use. Users can conveniently set up the plugin using a one-click setup wizard.
BulletProof Security, or BPS for short, is a .htaccess site security. Meaning, it distributes server configuration files that are processed by your server before any other code on your site. Therefore, hackers are stopped by this file before the scripts even have a chance to reach other code in your WordPress site.
.htaccess security also filters malicious attack patterns. It uses a matching method and IP blocking to protect your site’s performance and server resources from threats.
This plugin also has a feature to scan hidden plugins folders – a plugin that exists in your plugins folder, but is not displayed on the WordPress plugins page.
Hackers can use this as a backdoor to access your site’s dashboard, hosting account or create a user account.
To avoid that, BPS will automate cron checks and send an email alert if it finds hidden, non-standard, or altered files in the plugins folder.
Conclusion
If you’re a website owner, it’s critical to secure your website with the right tools to prevent hacks and avoid security breaches.
One way to ensure site security is by using the right plugins. Let’s recap the security plugins we’ve mentioned in this article:
- Sucuri
- iThemes Security
- Wordfence
- All in One WP Security
- JetPack WPScan
- WPScan
- BulletProof Security
There you have it, seven excellent security plugins to protect your WordPress site from cyberattacks and malicious threats. If you’re unsure which one to choose, feel free to go through this article once again or further research some of these options.
Best of luck.