Best security plugins for your Wordpress website

Aditya Singh
Actiwate
Published in
5 min readJul 14, 2017

WordPress is open source software you can use to create a beautiful website, blog, or app. 28% of the web uses WordPress, from hobby blogs to the biggest news sites online.

But, the bitter truth is that, WordPress is more vulnerable than your hard-coded sites and thus, it becomes an easy target for the many hackers sitting around the globe to exploit your sensitive data.

Hackers attack WordPress sites both big and small with over 90,978 attacks happening every minute. Fortunately, there are numerous ways you can protect your WordPress site.

While building a WordPress website, it is important for you to not only pay attention in the designing of the website, but also in making your WordPress website secure. Fortunately, this process is as easy as click of a button.

WordPress provides several plugins that you can install for free, that makes your WordPress website secure.

We’ve made a research on WordPress security plugins and solutions and would like to report our results and thoughts.

We’ve written this article with the following aim: to help you protect your WordPress site using security plugins, combinations of plugins and solutions (both free and paid) and help you understand why you may want to choose this or that WordPress security solution.

So, there are different aspects which you need to consider before you make your WordPress website live. They are discussed as follow:

Security : Security should be your main or primary concern. As WordPress websites are quite vulnerable, it is important that you work on making your website secure. Now, there are a lot of plugins that are available, but we have identified some if the finest and we recommend that you install these for your security measures.

  • WordFence Security (we recommend )
  • Sucuri Security
  • IThemes Security
  • All In One WP Security & Firewall
  • BulletProof Security

BackUp : Creating regular WordPress backups is the best thing you can do for your website. Backups give you peace of mind and can save you in catastrophic situations when your site gets hacked or you accidentally lock yourself out. There are several free and paid backup plugins for WordPress, and most of them are fairly easy to use.

  • UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin (we recommend )
  • Jetpack
  • Duplicator
  • BackWPup — WordPress Backup Plugin

SEO : Search engines are a major source of traffic for most websites. That’s why users often ask for SEO tips and plugins that can help improve SEO of their WordPress sites.

  • Yoast SEO (we recommend )
  • All in One SEO Pack
  • Jetpack

Protecting Your Login : Protecting your login page cannot be accomplished by any one specific technique, but there are certainly steps you can take to make any attacks far less likely to succeed.

Your site’s login page is certainly one of the more vulnerable pages on your website, here are some tips and plugins for protecting your login

  • Use a strong password
  • Login LockDown Plugin
  • Idle User Logout
  • Always keep up with the updates

Caching : A cache is an area in the computer’s memory that stores recently used information. When a site is cached, it means the site’s pages, images, files and Web objects are stored on the user’s local hard drive. This in turn means that when a user opens a frequently accessed file, the browser will have most (if not all) of its files cached.

Excessive load times can harm your website in more ways than one. There are quite a few ways to improve your site’s speed but caching has the greatest impact.

  • W3 Total Cache ( we recommend )
  • WP Super Cache

Adding Analytics to your website : Learning more about your users is vital to run a successful online business website. You need an analytics solution that helps you gather data and provide insightful reports into user activity on your site.

Analytics platform can tell you where your users are coming from, which pages they are visiting the most, how long do they stay on your website, which links do they click on the most, etc.

  • Google Analytics ( we recommend )

It is important that you pay attention to these details. There a lot of plugins that are available and makes the process easy. You just need to explore!

Some other plugins that may be required in your websites :

WP Mail SMTP : The WP Mail SMTP plugin reconfigures the WordPress delivered mail function to use SMTP. It offers a setup page that enables you to configure various email options. These options include specifying an SMTP host and SMTP port, specifying the from name and email address for outgoing mail, setting SMTP username and password, and more.

Broken Link Checker : Broken Link Checker monitors the links found in your posts, pages, comments, blogroll, and more. The plugin identifies any broken links that no longer work, missing images, or any redirects.

Once broken links are identified on your site, links can be edited directly from the plugin page to avoid manually updating each post.

Google XML Sitemaps : This must-have plugin will automatically generate an XML sitemap for your site. Having an XML sitemap is crucial in helping search engines better index your blog.

With a sitemap, web crawlers can see the structure of your site and retrieve the results more efficiently.

Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo will be notified every time you create a post about your new content.

Thank You!

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Aditya Singh
Actiwate
Editor for

Product Designer | Storyteller | Ambivert | Currently crafting digital e-commerce experiences at Ounass