4 Hosting Tips To Keep Your WordPress Website Secure

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WordPress accounts for nearly 60 percent of all content management systems used by businesses today. One reason for this popularity is the flexibility that the software provides that allows businesses to tweak the source code for their custom needs.

The popularity and the open source nature of WordPress is also the reason why the software is a lot more vulnerable to hacking than alternate closed systems. One study found that there are nearly 40,000 websites built on WordPress among the top one million Alexa sites and among these, nearly 70 percent are vulnerable to hacker attacks.

In this article, we will take a look at some WordPress hosting tips that can help you keep your website safe and secure from hackers.

Version Updates

In recent times, WordPress has enabled automatic version update on their software which ensures that your CMS is always up to date. This is important to ensure that hackers do not exploit known vulnerabilities in older versions of WordPress in order to hack or compromise your system. Despite this, only about 45% of all WordPress websites use the latest version 4.6 of the software. Surprisingly, over 10 percent of all websites still use versions 3.x or below which essentially means that a significant chunk of WordPress websites are sitting ducks for hackers to break into. Besides updating your WordPress version, it is also important to frequently update your plugins and themes to the latest versions. Also, if you do not need a plugin, make it a point to delete them from your account. Outdated plugins are one of the easiest ways to compromise your system.

Preventing Cross-Site Contamination

Shared hosting services are popular among businesses to host their WordPress blogs. Unfortunately, such shared services open the possibility of cross-site contamination. This is essentially a strategy that hackers use to attack a website by gaining access to another website in your shared server. One way to prevent such attacks from happening is by using a managed hosting company that can keep WordPress secure through advanced security configurations, automatic backups and automated version updates.

Cache Your Content

No matter how secure your WordPress website is, it is still extremely easy to break. Modern hackers extensively use DDoS techniques to hit websites with thousands of requests every second which can bring down the website. As a general precaution, it is a good idea to install plugins like WP Super Cache that caches the content in your server. This way, the database remains relatively unaffected by incoming traffic. Beyond this, it is also a good idea to deploy a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that manages traffic spikes as well as can protect your website from potential hackers and handle traffic load much better.

Backup System

No matter how secure your system is, there are always vulnerabilities that a potential hacker may hack into. It is as important to plan an post-hack recovery process as it is to prevent one. Setting up an automated system to backup all your important files and databases is critical to ensure that you can quickly bring your system back up in case of an attack. Most of the popular web hosting services come with add-on features to automate the backup process. This is something every business with a WordPress website must sign up for.

Article source: http://www.hostreview.com/blog/161214-4-hosting-tips-to-keep-your-wordpress-website-secure

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