Being the most popular platform for creating websites, WordPress is a very lucrative target for hackers. It is estimated that more than 30,000 WordPress sites are hacked every day. If you fail to take proper security measures, your website could be one of these too.
There are lots of dedicated plugins for helping you to improve your website security. In today’s post, I will introduce you to iThemes Security, one of the most popular among them.
Setting the Ground
First of all, install and activate iThemes Security in your website. At this point, you will be provided with some notices like the following –
Close the first notice, we will discuss about this issue later. Click on the ‘Secure Your Site Now’ button. This will open a pop-up like the following –
These are some important first steps that are strongly recommended by iThemes Security. We will perform them one-by-one.
Initial Security Steps
Click ‘Make a backup’. This will create the backup and send the backup to your email or save the backup in the ‘uploads’ folder of your WordPress site.
Then, click ‘Allow File Updates’ to allow the plugin to edit necessary files including .htaccess and wp-config.php pages.
Next, click the ‘One-Click Secure’ button to enable all the recommended options. iThemes Security guarantees that none of these options will conflict with any of your existing themes or plugins.
The last one is optional. Enabling this one will allow iThemes Security to collect anonymous information about your use of the plugin.
The plugin will also create two new menu items titled ‘Security’ in your dashboard menu and the top menu. Go to Security > Dashboard. Skip the first few sections and find out the ‘Security Status’ section.
In this page, the plugin will show you a list of all the potential issues it has found in your website. According to their status, the issues will be divided into categories like High Priority, Medium Priority, Low Priority and Completed.
You will find a ‘Fix it’ button after each of the issues. Clicking a button will take you to the respective section where you can take care of that issue. Once you resolve an issue, it will be moved into the Completed category.
Below, you will find a few other sections containing technical information about WordPress configuration. PHP, server, database, file systems, etc.
Configuring the Settings
Go to the Security > Settings page to configure various options of the plugin. The page is divided into various sections. Besides scrolling the page, you can jump to any section by using the ‘Go to’ drop-down list.
In the ‘Global Settings’ section, you can customize the lockout messages, lockout period, manage blacklist and whitelist, etc.
The ‘404 Detection’ section allows you to find out potential abusers and lock them. You can choose the lockout duration, ignore specific file types.
By using the ‘Away Mode’ section, you can temporarily disable access to your website dashboard.
‘Banned Users’ section lets you ban specific users. You can also use the ready-made list of banned users prepared by Hackrepair.com.
In order to prevent brute force attack, there is a separate ‘Brute Force Protection’ section in the settings page. You will need to get an API key from iThemes to use this feature.
In the ‘Database Backups’ section, you will find all the relevant options for properly backing up your database. ‘File Changes Detection’ lets you keep track of any changes in the files of your website.
You can also make use of other useful features like Hide Login Area, Malware Scanning, Strong Passwords, etc.
Other Options
If you want to change the content directory, database prefix or the admin user of your website, you will find the relevant options in the Security > Advanced page.
The ‘Backups’ page lets you create a complete backup of your database. In the ‘Logs’ page, you will find detailed information about all the actions taken by this plugin. Before making any of these changes, it is strongly recommended to make a complete backup of your database.
Final Words
As you can see, iThemes Security is a very powerful security plugin with lots of useful features. In this post, I tried to show you an overview of the features, but it is up to you to find out which options are required for your website.
Let me know which options you found most useful. And if you think I have missed an important feature here, let me know that too. I will be glad to include that in the post.