Protecting Your Website Using the Sucuri WordPress Security Plugin

Sucuri – WordPress Plugin Review

Raise your hand if your website has ever been hacked. I’ve experienced it, how about you? According to Sucuri’s hacked website report, about 30,000 websites get hacked each day. Hackers are not picky and will go after any site they can find. It doesn’t matter how big or small your site is or how much or how little traffic you get. If it can be compromised, a hacker will find it sooner or later. WordPress security is a must for any website owner.

Securing Your Site

If you use WordPress to run your website, you have some options to help prevent any hacking that may occur. Of course, no one or no software can 100% guarantee your site will never get hacked or compromised, but it helps to limit the ways hackers can gain access.

One of the most popular WordPress security plugins available is Sucuri. As with many plugins, Sucuri has a free and premium version available. The free version is solid and has most of the features you’ll need for your site.

Notable features include:

Security notifications
File Integrity Monitoring
Remote Malware Scanning
Blacklist Monitoring
Effective Security Hardening
Security Activity Log

To help prevent hacking of your website, Sucuri has many options to guard your site. Some of these tasks include not allowing PHP files in your “uploads” directory, which is where you’ll find any files you upload through the media library.

It also makes the WordPress version you are currently running hidden so that hackers can’t easily find it. Protecting your WordPress version is important because hackers can use the version number to figure out known bugs and use those bugs to compromise your site.

File integrity monitoring is important because it will alert you when files are edited. Unless you’re directly revising or updating a theme or plugin, there’s no reason for a file to be modified or changed. Most hackers inject malicious code into PHP files, and when that code is run, it causes havoc. With file integrity monitoring, if any malicious code somehow gets added, you can stop it in its track.

The Security Activity Log is a great tool, especially if more than one person is working on your website. This tool logs every move a person makes in the administration area. If someone edits a theme file, it’s recorded. If someone installs or deactivates a plugin, it’s logged. It’s a great way to see what people are doing on your website.

Notifications

Now, what good is all this monitoring if you don’t know the results?

You’ll be happy to know what Sucuri has security notifications that’ll alert you if something suspicious is going on, so you can take appropriate action.

Sucuri also has a web security blog that I recommend you read. The blog will help keep you up-to-date on the current security trends and the best ways to prevent hacks.

Premium Features

The premium version of Sucuri comes with firewall protection. A firewall helps you block brute force and malicious attacks from accessing WordPress. The firewall filters out bad traffic even before it reaches your server.

Apart from security, Sucuri’s DNS-level firewall with CDN gives you a considerable boost in performance and speeds up your website.

Here’s the best part: You can use Sucuri to clean up your WordPress site if it gets affected by malware. You can even have Sucuri take a website already affected by malware, and they’ll fix it for you.

A lot of this may sound confusing initially, but the plugin does most of the work for you; just follow the prompts or use this step-by-step guide.

You rely on your website to produce income for your business; don’t let it become compromised.

Ready to protect your site? Check out more about Sucuri right here.

Click here to contact me if you’d like some help with your WordPress backend maintenance or content management.