WordPress is now the most popular website management software, currently powering more than 70 million websites worldwide. Software by it’s very nature is something that needs to be maintained, as new updates and patches become available. WordPress has been freely available since 2004 to create a website with, and versions remain online from 1.x to the most current (3.3.2).

From the very first version of WordPress, to the latest, there have been hundreds of updates available – some of which patch very big security holes. Over the last few years the term “malware” has been used in conjunction with WordPress websites that have been compromised (hacked) through one of these security holes. While malware is typically a term to describe a virus with a payload on a PC, the term is now more often used to describe a (WordPress) website that’s been infected with SEO spam, or malicious scripts or code.

The best prevention for malware in WordPress is simply keeping it up to date. As new releases become available, perform the upgrade as soon as possible. In addition, also be sure that your installed theme and plugins are up to date as well.

Tips for Malware Prevention

While updating WordPress is great preventative medicine there are multiple additional things that you can do to further protect your website:

Remove old plugins: Be sure to remove any plugins that you aren’t using (that are deactivated). Even unused plugins can be a security risk. Also, be sure to only leave installed plugins that have had an update within the last 12-18 months. If you’re using plugins older than that, they may not be compatible with the latest version(s) of WordPress (or your theme) – and they could have security holes as well.

Review your theme: How old is your WordPress theme? If you purchased it from a developer, check and see if there is a recent update available for you to install. If you have a custom theme (or even one you coded yourself), be sure to have it reviewed by a competent developer or security expert about once per year to ensure it doesn’t have security holes.

Security and Hardening: You should install and configure one or more popular WordPress plugins to secure and harden your website (beyond the ‘out of the box’ setup). While WordPress is a very mature and secure platform, you can easily add multiple additional layers of basic security by changing your admin username, the default WordPress table name, and security against 404 attacks and long malicious URL attempts.

Tips for Malware Removal

If you think your WordPress website has been hacked or injected with malware, malicious scripts, spam links, or code, the first thing you should do get a backup copy of your website (if you don’t already have one). Get a copy of all files in your webhosting account downloaded to your local computer, as well as a copy of your database.

Next install one of the many free malware scanner plugins in the WordPress official free plugin repository. Activate it, and see if you can find the source of the infection. If you’re a technical person, you might be able to remove the code or scripts on your own. Be sure to check all your theme files, and you might also need to reinstall WordPress.

If your WordPress core files are infected one of the best ways to remove the source of the infection is to delete the entire wp-admin and wp-includes folders (and contents) as well as all files in the root of your website. Inside the wp-content folder delete both the themes and plugins folders (keeping the uploads, which has attachments and images you’ve uploaded). Since you have a local copy of your website, you can reinstall the theme and you know what plugins were installed.

The best thing to do at this point is to download a fresh copy of WordPress and install it. Use the local copy of the wp-config.php file to connect to your existing database. Once you’ve done this, before reinstalling your theme and plugins you might want to login one time to your wp-admin dashboard and go to “Tools->export” and export and entire copy of all your content, comments, tags, categories, and authors. Now (if you want) at this point you could drop the entire database, create a new one, and import all your content so you’d have a completely fresh copy of both WordPress and a new database. Then last, reinstall your theme and fresh copies of all plugins from the official WordPress repository (don’t use the local copies you downloaded).

If these steps are too technical for you, or if it didn’t remove the source of the infection, you might need to enlist the help of a WordPress security expert.

Preventive Maintenance Moving Forward

If your website is important to you, or if you use it for business – it’s important that you protect it as if it were your physical business. Would would happen if your website were down or out of commission tomorrow? Would it hurt your business? A little preventative medicine goes a long way:

Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan: Make sure you have a working and tested backup solution in place (this is what most businesses would call a disaster recovery plan). There are many free and paid plugins and solutions to accomplish this for a WordPress website.

Install Basic Security: If you don’t have a WordPress security plugin installed, get a highly rated and recently updated one from the official free plugin repository today to protect your website. If you aren’t comfortable doing this on your own or don’t have a technical website person, then hire a WordPress consultant or security expert to do it for you.

With the advent of new web technologies, the influence of web app technologies in 2017, especially front-end technologies, has increased with a great pace. PSD to WordPress conversion is an affordable conversion process which gives the boost to your online business growth.

But still, there are some myths about PSD to WordPress conversion that might be annoying for web developers. In fact, Every digital agency should be well-informed with such facts and myths related to their projects.

PSD to WordPress conversion myths is mainly categorized as:

A. WordPress development myths

B. WordPress security/insecurity myths

C. WordPress page builders myths

However, I have listed all myths and their truths in details here.

Check out this quickly:-

1) Restricted to Low Traffic

Myth:: WordPress websites are not able to achieve high traffic. These websites go offline in case of high traffic.

Truth:: Websites actually go offline because of hosting and other technical issues. In fact, you can host your website on a secured and trusted the server to solve such issues.

2) No support

Myth:: WordPress provides no support for free templates/themes.

Truth:: WordPress makes development easier. There are a number of forums you can approach whenever you get stuck with it. They give you full support at no cost.

3) Not meant for E-Commerce websites

Myth:: Businesses can’t have a full featured e-commerce website through this. It is not beneficial for them. It’s just a blogging platform only.

Truth:: WordPress is a full fledged CMS equipped with plenty of e-commerce plugins that makes it more ideal for businesses. Various e-commerce giants such as eBay using WordPress and thus generating high revenues from it.

4) Helps only small businesses

Myth:: WordPress is only good for small businesses.

Truth:: The above fact is completely wrong. Many prominent brands like Disney, Best Buy are using this nowadays and also helping them to grow their business further.

5) Not a secure platform

Myth:: WordPress is not a secure platform to work upon.

Truth:: It would not opt by leading brands if it is not secure. Besides, WordPress codes are thoroughly checked by developers for any loose strings, bugs, and loopholes. If found it is immediately reported to WordPress officials.

See, WordPress offers impeccable security and a safe environment for their users. More levels of security can be provided to this by adding security plugins to it. Wordfence security, Sucuri Security, BulletProof Security are some of the famous security plugins for WordPress.

6) No reliable plugins

Myth:: Reliability is directly concerned with security aspects. It is a famous rumor nowadays that WordPress Plugins are not secure enough to use.

Truth:: This rumor is completely false. Plugins provide features to a website.However, choosing a plugin is done by admin only. He must look for its ratings and reviews before adding to the website.

Updating plugins regularly is another major aspect. Besides all WordPress plugins are secure and written in compliance with coding standards.

7) Prone to Hacking

Myth:: WordPress can be easily hacked content management system.

Truth:: The above fact is not true. Anyhow, if we regularly backup WordPress site, it will decrease the chances of being hacked. WordPress is user-friendly CMS and comes with many security plugins, so we should not avoid this for such rumors.

WordPress drag and drop page builders are complex plugins for creating custom websites. In fact, advanced users utilize these tools for their complex tasks to be get done easily. So, if you are creating your business website using builders then you should be aware of all myths related to this.

8) Slow loading speed

Myth:: Page builder slows down WordPress website.

Truth:: It is completely wrong to say above. In fact, Page builders are fast and capable of loading complex designs in less time. Loading time completely depends on how content is structured in the page builder.

Page level caching and Builders using shortcode are another major factors that affect page loading time.

However, if a WordPress plugin(page builders) is properly coded then this may not affect your site speed at all.

9) Bad for SEO

Myth:: It is said that page builders are not good for SEO as the markup they leave is not optimized.

Truth:: Since SEO is all about quality content. Page builders even act as a medium in producing attractive content for the website. It also provides plenty of semantic markups to choose HTML tags for your headings and keywords too.

Wrapping note:

Every business should admit this fact that WordPress is the most flexible platform in terms of maintaining a website. Business giants such as Forbes, TechCrunch and much more are using WordPress to bring more traffic in this competitive environment.

Moreover, the above-mentioned points have unveiled top 9 myths about PSD to WordPress conversion. Now you are able to take a note of its truth side too. This will help you to become clear with all aspects of WordPress and its importance in the present scenario.

Last year and a half taught us that WordPress security should not be taken lightly by any means. Between 15% and 20% of the world’s high traffic sites are powered by WordPress. The fact that it is an Open Source platform and everybody has access to its Source Code makes it a tempting prey for hackers.

Most attacks are coming from Russia, Germany, Poland and India including, but not limited to:

SQL Injections

Clickjacking

Cloaking

Blackhole Exploit Kit attacks

Password and Login brake efforts

Truth is, if a capable master of the script targets your site, there is really no way to prevent an intrusion. What you are about to read below are some precautionary actions you can take to quickly minimize the risk to an acceptable level. If your WordPress site is well protected chances are a hacker would prefer picking another, easier victim.

Starting with the more obvious ones:

1. Forget about using “admin” as your username.

Many of the attacks target the default WordPress username with bruteforce, password cracking robots. First step is to change your “admin” or “administrator” username from the WordPress Administration Panel.

– Go to mysql tool (phpmyadmin)

– Find your database

– Go to wp_users and browse for “admin”

– Under user_login column, change it to something else.

This naturally leads to the following…

2. Choose a strong password

Choose a password that includes multiple upper and lowercase letters, as well as symbols such as “!@#$%^&*()” Go to Users->Your Profile and change it through the “New password” field at the bottom. This will make it way harder to crack it down. Make sure you do the same for your ftp Cpanel hosting account password and don’t use the same one you used in WordPress.

3. Frequently backup your database

You heard this one before. Do regular backups or you will eventually regret it. You may lose all of your work if being hacked. Also, remember to backup every time you make changes. You can do that through the use of a plugin or manually.

4. Always Update your WordPress

There is absolutely no reason to stay on the older versions when there is a new one available. WordPress updates contain bug fixes, vulnerability fixes and cover security flaws discovered by the vast WordPress community. Same goes for updating themes. It is easy and efficient. Actually, it is the best and easiest way to prevent your page from malicious activities, which are most likely as result of a compromised and not fully updated application, site, exploitable php scripts, etc. All the old versions of your applications can be considered as a potential security holes. They can simply be used by the attacker, who is (most of the time) an automated spider.

5. Protect your WP-CONFIG.PHP file.

Move your wp-config.php file one directory up from the WordPress root. WordPress will look for it there if it cannot be found in the root directory. Also, nobody else will be able to read the file unless they have SSH or FTP access to your server.

There are a number of important plugins you should consider installing:

6. Login LockDown

This is very useful plugin, protecting you against brute-force password-crack attacks. It keeps track of the IP address of every failed login attempt. You can configure the plugin to disable login attempts for a range of IP addresses when a certain number of failed attempts is reached.

7. Secure WordPress

Secure WordPress is an easy to install comprehensive plugin taking care of number of things, including:

– Hides your WP version.

– Removes error information on login page.

– Removes core update, plugin update and theme update information for non-admins.

– Blocks queries potentially harmful to your WordPress website

– Adds a virtual index.php plugin directory.

– Many others…

8. Bullet Proof WordPress Security

Crash resistant, comprehensive plugin, covering many aspects of an attack – XSS, RFI, CRLF, CSRF, Base64, Code Injection and SQL Injection hacking attempts. According to the official description – “The BulletProof Security WordPress Security plugin is designed to be a fast, simple and one click security plugin to add .htaccess website security protection for your WordPress website.” This pretty much sums it. A must have!

9. Exploit Scanner

Exploit Scanner goes through the files on your website database, comment and post tables in search of anything suspicious. It also notifies you for unusual plugin names. It does not remove anything, it simply warns you for potential threats.

10. WordPress Firewall

This is another must-have security plugin.

– Investigates WordPress web requests in attempt to block obvious attacks.

– Black and whitelists pathological-looking phrases based on which field they appear within, in a page request. (unknown/numeric parameters vs. known post bodies, comment bodies, etc.).

Implementing all of the above will probably take less than an hour to complete, while making your WordPress site much more resistant to intrusions. Over 1 million WordPress sites were cracked last year, mainly due to easily preventable security gaps. Have yourself prepared and you are likely to be on the safe side.

Hope we helped. Please, share your thoughts on tour blog’s WordPress security in the comments section below.

Whether you have a WordPress website promoting your company products and services or a blog showing your writing capabilities, security of both is of prime importance. Google blacklists almost 20,000 websites for malware and 50,000 for phishing. If you are serious about keeping your WordPress site up and running then securing it online should be on top of your mind. The WP core software is completely secured as it is checked by hundreds of developers daily, even then the security risks still prevails.

With the increase in number of cybercrimes and online attacks affecting the servers of many websites daily, risk elimination is not the goal anymore but risk reduction is. Do not worry as the capable and efficient WordPress Tech Support is always present to offer the best technical guidance to its customers regarding any issue affecting their WordPress site. However, let us first understand why WP site security is so important for all WordPress operators.

Why Is WordPress Security So Important?

A hacked WordPress website can cause a serious blowback to your online reputation as well as business. Online hackers can easily steal personal information, passwords and install malicious software on your WP site thereby rendering it useless. If you want to retain your website as well as your business, then securing your online presence is the first thing to do.

How Can I Secure My WordPress Site Against All Possible Attempts Of Unauthorized Access?

The experts at the WordPress Support have come up with four tips on how you can ensure total security for your WP site. Kindly follow the guidelines mentioned below.

Continuous WordPress Site Updation:

WordPress is an open-source content sharing software that is regularly maintained and updated. By default, WordPress always installs minor updates automatically while for the major updates the user has to initiate the process. It comes with a number of themes and plugins that can be installed and on your WordPress website.

Password And User Permission:

One of the most common way to hack into your WordPress website is through the use of stolen account password. This can be avoided by ensuring that strong password is used, this is a combination of letters, alphabets and symbols making it difficult to be remembered. A strong password can be used not only for your WordPress admin area but also for FTP accounts and WordPress hosting account.

Install A WordPress Backup Solution:

The first line of defense against any hacking attempt is to have a complete backup of your WP site. These allow you to have the complete backup of your website in case your website is hacked or the server fails. There are a number of WordPress backup plugins available that you can utilize to create a backup of the whole website.

Enable Web Application Firewall:

One of the easiest way to protect your WordPress site is to use a web-based application firewall. This firewall will block all malicious traffic before it even reaches your WordPress site. The experts at the WordPress Support can be your guide in providing total security to your site.

From WordPress core, theme and plugin safety, to user name and password best practices and database backups.

Other topics to consider include:

• layered security measures like using the .htaccess file to enable or disable features
• limiting file permissions
• black listing and white listing IPs
• disable file editing
• using HTTPS

WordPress Security

If you run a large commerce site and it gets hacked, you can lose valuable customers and of course, money. Web hosts are likely to suspend accounts that are hacked taking your site offline. You don’t want to waste your time patching up a site after hacks or paying hosting when your site is down.

Why is WordPress so successful?

WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system now powering 20% of all websites. It’s success is due to its intuitive interface and the fact that its free and open source. Its features provide endless options for extending functionality through the addition of plugins and the ability to customize your site with themes and widgets. With thousands of paid and free themes and plugins available on the web, the option to create a site that is both functional and uniquely yours is virtually limitless.

Why is WordPress exposed to attack?

These same features are the most common ways that we expose our sites to attack. Because WordPress is open source, anyone can easily explore the core code or search through any of the most popular themes and plugins for hacks. These are items of WordPress that are out of your control.

Your host and WordPress hacks

Unless you pay big money to have your own server for web hosting, you also can’t control the hosting environment your website is run on.

Brute force attack

A brute force attack is also something that is out of your control. While you can’t always stop them, you can put into place measures to limit the damage and make it difficult for someone to successfully hack your site. Even tech giants like Microsoft, Apple and Amazon have had their security breached. No site, WordPress or otherwise, is completely secure. What you must do is recognize where weakness exist and create extra layers of defense to protect your content in the event your site is hacked. Use as many common solutions as possible to help manage the weakening of your site through human error.

A brute force attack can last months and involve thousands of servers world-wide. All hosting providers who offer WordPress are potential targets Hackers use compromised servers and PCs to hack websites’ administrator panels by exploiting hosts with “admin” as account name, and weak passwords which are being resolved through brute force attack methods.

4 Points of Vulnerability

1. host security breaches

2. out of data WordPress core

3. unsafe plugins and themes

4. brute force attacks

Managing your WordPress powered site well is the most valuable security tool available to you.

• speed
• options
• services
• security
• backup solutions
• control
• server type
• price point

Choosing WordPress to power your site means WordPress is the foundation of everything on your site. The fact that it is free and open source carries many benefits. But with each update, the exploits of the previous version are made available to the public making previous versions more susceptible to being hacked. Employing backs security through obscurity tactics, you can remove or hide the version number of your WordPress installation from displaying. You can even choose a more simple solution with plugins to hide the version number. This may deter a bot from attaching to your site, but this does not patch holes in older versions of WordPress. Only updating your WordPress installation as newer versions are made available will remove the published exploits.

Updating WordPress is simple (since version 3.7 was released with automatic updates)

In previous versions of WordPress a new version banner would display in your dashboard whenever there is an update available. Now WordPress installs will automatically update to new minor versions without you having to lift a finger. Minor versions are usually for security updates. You will, however, still need to update for to new major versions.

To update WordPress

1. First things first! Backup your WordPress.
2. Dashboard
3. Updates

The biggest threat to your site

The quickest way to compromise your site includes adding poorly, maliciously coded or out of date themes or plugins from untrusted developers or sites. Due to the open source nature of WordPress many themes or plugins are distributed under a GPL or GPN (General Public License) licenses. So its easy for themes and plugins to be forked and redistributed on free WordPress theme and plugin sites with the addition of hidden or malicious code. This code can be as simple as exposing a virus or as serious as exposing your visitors to identity theft.

Before downloading a free theme or plugin:

1. Research the author and only download from the authors site or the WordPress depository
2. Ask advise at WordPress.org/support
3. If you are going to use free trusted plugins or themes, check the version number compatibility listing and verify that the plugin or theme is still being supported and updated. Many themes or plugins are slow to receive updates or are simply abandoned.
4. If you don’t use it, lose it. If you are not using a theme or plugin, delete it.
5. Use paid supported themes and plugins (not free).

Experience shows that nearly all WordPress attacks could be defended against and defended by simply using safe, up to date and trusted plugins and themes.