What is WordPress Security and why is it Important?

As a company that aims to be known in the online world, you should be familiar with WordPress. WordPress is a convenient and technologically superior platform that is open source available. It has received a lot of attention from users. But sometimes for the wrong reasons.

May I introduce: Script Kiddies

According to Securi, 9 million websites were hacked in 2017. Forbes even assumes that every day 300,000 websites are hacked! Cybercrime is on the rise. Today, criminals have automated scanners scanning the Internet to find targets where they can inject their malicious code.

What are the parts of your site that give hackers unauthorized access? The most common weaknesses include bad passwords, the use of a public WLAN without a VPN, an insecure hoster, obsolete plug-ins and phishing attacks.

Safety matters: That's why!

Your website is the figurehead of your company. If your customers can not trust your site, they have no reason to trust you. Whether you are running a blog or a website, the worst thing that can happen is that your online platform is being attacked. Luckily, WordPress has solutions for it. WordPress offers plug-ins that protect the core files or ward off a bruteforce attack.

However, it can not tell if you are downloading a vulnerable plug-in. And that's the real problem. Here are a few facts that will help you understand why WordPress security is important to you:

• 50,000 WordPress sites were compromised in July 2014 by a flaw in the MailPoet newsletter. The programmers of MailPoet fixed the vulnerability within a few hours.
• In October 2017, a hacker gang stole 800,000 banking data from WordPress sites.
• A vulnerability in the plug-in Slider Revolution hacked 100,000 WordPress sites.
• Not only websites with many visitors are the destination. Even unknown websites are blamed.

Taking care of the security of your WordPress installation is a matter of survival. There are many developers who implement features that compromise the security of your website or blog.

The multiplication table of WordPress security: Protect your website from the worst attacks

Below are a few tips you should keep in mind to protect your website from ordinary or sophisticated attacks.

1. Always stay up to date

One great thing about WordPress is that new versions of plug-ins are quickly available. These especially fix errors and improve security. To keep hackers out and provide security for your website. Although some security updates are done automatically, most of them have to be done manually.

To update your WordPress in a single install, go to Dashboard> Updates . For a multi-installation, go to Network Admin Dashboard> Updates> Available Updates s.

2. Choose the right hosting provider

When it comes to your security, it makes sense to start with the most basic thing: the web host. If you host your site with a vendor that does not care much about security, then your site runs the risk of being attacked if the vendor's servers are hacked.

Therefore, you should look for a hosting provider who has an experienced team and is also familiar with security issues surrounding WordPress. In addition, individual account options may be useful.

The good news is that this does not have to be expensive. When you sign up with us for an annual contract, you will receive a free WordPress hosting option.

3. Do not forget backups

In order to keep your business running, it is important that you make regular backups of WordPress. So in the unlikely event that the page is attacked, you have the ability to restore the previous state. Your host server should provide such backup capabilities. Ask about the backup and recovery time.

4. Change your admin username

Most people know that "admin" is the most commonly used administrator name. And hackers take advantage of this. The login page of WordPress ends at wp-config.php. Therefore, hackers use automatic bots and scripts to search for the right combination of username and password. Make it hard for them. Use a unique username. You should also use a strong password. Here are the features of a strong password:

• More than 12 characters
• The password should consist of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters

5. Check the access to your directory

The access rules to your directory ensure that only selected, authorized persons can see or modify files that are necessary for WordPress. This will prevent website visitors from gaining access to these directories because they are not part of the site.

You can also set access via the htaccess file - especially for the admin page. Now if a hacker tries to enter this page, he will be redirected to a page with the message "403 Access denied".

6. Download plug-ins from trusted sources

There are over 40,000 plugins for WordPress. These are undoubtedly an important thing to make your website functional. But not all of the plug-ins are suitable for you. As discussed earlier, some plug-ins are vulnerable.

Before you download a plug-in, be aware of the following points:

• Read the user reviews
• Which support is offered? Do you have to pay for it?
• Does the plug-in owner answer questions?

Monitor your WordPress website

It's hard to keep track of the performance and security of your site around the clock, all week long. However, it is important that they do everything possible to ensure that your website is never hacked. Even in the unlikely event that this should happen, you should be able to respond immediately and take the right actions.

There are many companies that not only control the site, but also provide additional support. This can improve the performance of your site. One of such providers of web services is our company ECS Professionals. We have more than 10 years of experience in hosting, security, maintenance and support.

How to optimize your website and make it attractive to Google

SEO is the most important thing in online marketing these days. If you run a website or blog in a specific niche, SEO is the biggest source of traffic. When you start a new website or blog, you need to make sure your site is SEO friendly.

Otherwise, you will not receive traffic and your site will not be as successful as you wish.

The good thing about WordPress Optimization is that you can easily make your website easier to find. To do this, you need to understand how SEO works and how you can use it to your advantage. There are many aspects of SEO (for example, social media are now given a much higher weighting than before). Optimizing your website is a fundamental step.

With a little help from WordPress, your website will be much more visible on the WWW in a short time.

Use the correct page structure

If you're using the default WordPress page structure setting, you're probably losing important traffic. Most WordPress sites work great out of the box. But you should change the page structure to make it easier to index. Google sends its bots over all websites and creates an index with all information on it.

The bots create a cache of your website on the Google server and it will appear in the search results. A website that is more easily understood by the search bot will appear more frequently in the search results. If you give your pages the right name, the bots understand them better. However, with the default naming conventions, the pages have names like p = 155. That's not helpful at all. The Bot learns nothing about the content and the index gets worse.

Make sure the pages are named correctly. A page with a url ending in "p = 231" is bad, but an ending like "google-should-like-your-side" is good.

Create a sitemap

Do you want Google bots to work better on your site? Then give them a card. A sitemap is a great way to tell search engines where to find something on your site. Thanks to various plug-ins, this is not difficult. Install a plug-in like Google XML Sitemap and you're done. This is one of the top rated plug-ins and important for optimizing WordPress. The best part is that it is very easy to use and generates complete sitemaps. These will help you on all major search engines like Google and Bing.

Avoid Black Hat SEO Tricks

We can not stress this point enough. There are some tricks that Google does not like. If you use these tricks, you will be severely punished. There is a risk that they will rank so badly that nobody will find you. The fastest way to get blocked is to use backlinks. If you create unnecessary backlinks just to get traffic, then the visibility of your website crashes in the search results. It does not matter how big or popular your site is. Google enforces its rules very strictly.

Bring your website forward in search results by providing up-to-date content. Once you have good content and apply the allowed SEO techniques, you will see an improvement in your traffic.

Create good captions and file names for your images

Images are also a big factor in search results, but are often overlooked in WordPress optimization. If you do not give the correct caption or file name, then Google can not understand what's in the picture. Instead of providing your pictures with numbers, you should give a meaningful name. The old day is also very important and is often ignored. However, search engine bots pay attention to the old tags and the right day will give you an edge.

Use the right theme and the right plug-ins

Themes and plug-ins are our most popular WordPress service. You can use them to complete your WordPress optimization and get your page in the first hits.

There are many themes optimized for SEO. These themes do this by focusing on SEO right from the start. This ensures that every component of the website is optimized for Google's liking. Also make sure that your website is fast. If your theme takes too long to load, it will negatively impact search site space.

There are also many plug-ins that help you with SEO. We already mentioned Google XML sitemaps, but there are many more. Google Analytics is always an important tool when it comes to SEO, and the Google Analytics dashboard for WordPress makes it easy to see and understand the statistics.

If you want to automate something more, then you are well served with All in One SEO Pack. The aptly named plug-in will help you with almost anything that has to do with optimizing WordPress. You will find many tools (including Sitemaps and Google Analytics) and in-depth features in it. For example, you can edit the meta tags, and the plug-in even creates appropriate meta tags based on your content. Even the titles are automatically adjusted to make them SEO friendly.

After you've done all of the above, you can focus on what you're content with. Remember that content is king. If you create good content, then your site will jump up in the search results. With bad content, it goes in the other direction. Social media is also important and a healthy combination of SEO, content and social media will make your website a real visitor magnet.