Keeping your website safe and secure
There is probably no need to explain how awesome WordPress is. It's flexible, mature, robust yet user-friendly and user-centered content management system with all sorts of bells and whistles you can ever imagine. But even the best content management systems may have their fair share of issues that may happen over time, especially when the website starts to grow and gains popularity. This is why it's important to keep your WordPress site safe and secure. It'll just help you sleep better at night.
Backup, backup, backup... always backup
Think of a backup as an insurance policy for your site. No matter how careful you are, sometimes things just happen - servers crash, hackers strike, or even yourself might go ding-dong and accidentally delete an important piece of content. If you don't have a backup, you could lose all of your hard work and valuable data. But with a backup, you can easily restore your site to a previous backup point and get back to business as usual with a few simple clicks.
So, how do you go about backing up your WordPress site? One option is to use a plugin. There are several great options out there, including
All these plugins allow you to schedule regular backups of your site and store them in a safe location, such as a remote server or in the cloud and allow you to restore your backups with a few simple clicks easily. If, however, you are an administrator of multiple websites all of which you want to have regular backups and to be able to manage these backups all from one place, we strongly recommend you checking out ManageWP.
Think of a backup as an insurance policy for your site.
Not only will it make it possible for you to store automatic backups off-site but will also help you keeping track about backups of all of your websites and use these backups to migrate website content if needed easily. On top of that, ManageWP has a multitude of options that makes your life as website administrator much, much easier.
Protect Your Site with Security Plugins
In addition to regularly backing up your WordPress site, it's also important to ensure that it is secure. Many potential security threats, such as malware, hackers, and vulnerabilities in your website's code, can compromise your site. To protect your site, you can use plugins such as
These plugins offer a variety of security features, such as malware scanning, firewall protection, and user activity logging.
One tip we always recommend to WordPress users is to use a strong, unique password for your site. This may seem like a no-brainer, but you'd be surprised at how many people use weak, easily guessable passwords (like "password123" or "qwerty"). So, take the time to create a strong, unique password for your site, and consider using a password manager to keep track of all of your login credentials.
In addition to using security plugins and strong passwords, it's also a good idea to keep your WordPress site and all of its associated plugins and themes up-to-date. Developers regularly release updates to fix vulnerabilities and improve the performance of their products, so it's important to make sure that you're using the latest versions of all plugins installed on your website.
Don't Forget About SSL!
In addition to regularly backing up your WordPress site and using security plugins, it is also important to use an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate to ensure that the data transmitted between your site and its visitors is secure. An SSL certificate encrypts the data that is transmitted between your site and its visitors, making it difficult for anyone to intercept and read this information.
Using an SSL certificate is particularly important if you collect sensitive information from your visitors, such as login credentials or credit card numbers on your website. Many web hosts offer SSL certificates as part of their hosting packages, or you can purchase one from a third-party provider. Alternatively, you can use a free SSL certificate provided by Let's Encrypt which is easy to deploy and maintain so there are really no excuses to not have SSL certificate on your website.
Conclusion
Building and maintaining website content can be a painstaking and lengthy process that sometimes requires lots of sweat and tears and is quite a rewarding feeling when it finally takes its final shape and starts serving its intended purpose. So, would you risk it all and take chances to lose everything overnight or with one single act of negligence? Yeah, we guess not. There are no reasons to take unnecessary risks and not start backing up your website right from the get-go. Pick the plugin you feel most comfortable with and start backing up and protecting your work right from the start. With a little luck, you won't know any of this even exists. But if disaster strikes, you'll be happy to have this ace up your sleeve.