Building and managing websites using WordPress is an efficient way for organizations to establish a robust digital presence. However, to attain long-term success, maintaining the security of WordPress-built websites is crucial. Millions of websites backed by WordPress have become a primary target for cyberattacks. The consequences of a compromised WordPress website can be severe, starting from loss of confidential user data to damaging brand reputation. Hence, conducting an extensive WordPress web security audit is essential for protecting sites against potential vulnerabilities.
Through meticulous evaluation of a WordPress website’s security posture, identifying vulnerabilities, implementing adequate measures, and mitigating risks become easier. Maintaining a secure WordPress site eventually helps businesses promote trust among their visitors, clients, and customers. Businesses should consider delegating the responsibility of web security audit and maintenance to dedicated WordPress experts. With their expertise, organizations using WordPress sites can fend off any cyber threat.
Hiring WordPress Specialists for Strategic Security Evaluation
By hiring security specialists from a reputable WordPress development services provider, businesses can perform a full-cycle security audit on their websites. The audit involves assessing the site’s configuration, plugins, server environment, codebase, and themes to detect security risks and susceptibilities. Consequently, experts can implement appropriate measures to secure sensitive data, offset risks, and improve the integrity of WordPress sites.
There are some crucial reasons why businesses should conduct a security audit with skilled WordPress professionals:
- Data Protection - By incorporating encryption and updating existing security plugins, WordPress experts can make the sites effectual in data protection. This way, organizations can secure sensitive data like customer personal information, transaction details, and business-related documents, and overcome data breaches.
- Eliminating Downtime - WordPress specialists integrate firewalls and intrusion detection systems with the functional sites. This helps in optimizing server performance and reducing downtime scenarios.
- Improving SEO - Through the up-gradation of site themes, layouts, and core files, WordPress experts can improve loading speed and performance. This helps in lowering bounce rates and improving the website’s search ranking.
Steps Taken by WordPress Experts Before Performing Security Audit
1. Files & Database Backup
Before running a security audit, WordPress experts backup the files and database in a live WordPress website. This enables experts to easily restore the site to its original state when the audit process inadvertently disrupts the content or configurations. Moreover, backing up ensures that the site remains functional even when performing security evaluations and updates.
‘AutoBackup’ is a robust module that WordPress specialists use for automated backup of web files/databases in a preferred staging environment. Using the automated backup modules also helps in reducing human intervention and eliminating errors.
2. Choosing the Right Staging Environment
For storing the backed-up web files and database, WordPress experts use staging environments like Dropbox, S3, or Localhost. Apart from storage, these environments also enable WordPress experts to replicate a live website’s configuration, including its plugins, content, and themes. This replication helps in performing preliminary security testing and experimentation before the actual audit process.
This preliminary testing enables experts from a reputable custom WordPress development company to devise personalized strategies for auditing. The choice of a staging environment varies depending on the complexity and size of websites. However, WordPress experts consider key functionalities before choosing a staging environment like scalable storage capacity, live testing simulation modules, and real-time analytics support.
3. Integrating Audit Log Tools
Integrating WordPress-built websites with audit log tools is a key step that WordPress experts focus on before performing the security audit. This log tool helps in capturing and documenting all the maintenance and security installation events performed by the experts. The documentation of audit logs and trails helps web administrators take appropriate remediation processes after security audits.
Also Read: Best Practices to Make WordPress Website UX User Friendly
Crucial Areas Focused by WordPress Experts During Security Audit
1. User Authentication and Access Control
Assessing a website’s user authentication and access controls is a key security audit aspect that WordPress experts focus on. This assessment is essential for ensuring the integrity and privacy of sensitive data stored on a website. By evaluating authentication mechanisms like password policies and two-factor authentication, experts can identify vulnerabilities that could lead to unauthorized data access and brute-force attacks. Consequently, to mitigate the vulnerabilities, WordPress experts implement access control techniques within the websites.
The process of access control implementation includes role-based encryption, backend, and REST API lockdown. WordPress experts use an intuitive plugin, called ‘Members’ for role-based encryption. This plugin is helpful in creating, editing, and regulating user permissions within a website. Similarly, by using the plugin ‘Access Manager’, experts can restrict unauthorized access to a site’s backend and REST API endpoints.
2. Updating Existing Plugins and Themes
Running an extensive security check on plugins and themes used in a WordPress site is essential to improve reliability. It’s because the themes and plugins might become infallible when they are not updated over a long time. Also, the presence of outdated themes and plugins can impact the site’s functionality and user experience.
By evaluating the core codebase, themes, and plugins, dedicated WordPress specialists can identify potential security loopholes. To overcome some basic loopholes, WordPress specialists perform a simple plugin/theme update, bug fixes, and patch installation. However, for complex vulnerabilities like SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks, WordPress developers configure and integrate security plugins like ‘Sucuri’ and ‘Wordfence’. These plugins offer an extra firewall for WordPress websites and make themes and functionalities resistant to attacks.
3. Malware Discovery and Removal
The rise in cyber threats poses major risks to WordPress websites. Particularly, malware attacks that compromise the functionality of websites and enable hackers to steal data and credentials. Experts from a reputable WordPress website development services provider perform malware auditing and ensure the stability of a website’s codebase.
By using scanning tools like ‘MalCare’, WordPress experts can simplify the detection of malware programs within a website’s plugins and themes. Accordingly, experts can re-write the plugin codebase and re-install it. This is an effective way of removing malware from WordPress plugins. However, when the database of a WordPress website is impacted by malware, experts prefer a manual approach for detection and removal. Though manually assessing and removing malware in WordPress databases is time-intensive, experts can reduce the errors and protect site resources via backup.
4. Secure Server Configurations
Protecting a WordPress website’s server configurations against DDoS attacks is crucial. Mitigating DDoS attacks manually is a tedious task for WordPress specialists. The hackers send multiple server requests using automated bots and blocking them using manual approaches is ineffective. Hence, to detect malicious server requests and protect sites from DDoS attacks, WordPress experts integrate rate response limiters and firewalls.
By integrating firewalls, experts set up a barrier between a WordPress site and the incoming traffic. Also, it helps in automatically analyzing and filtering out malicious server requests. Similarly, rate response limiter tools help in automatically blocking suspicious IP addresses and protecting sites from DDoS attacks.
Wrapping Up
Improving the security posture of WordPress websites is an ongoing endeavor that requires attention to detail and applying the right measures. Hence, hiring dedicated WordPress security experts is an optimal choice for organizations. By discovering vulnerabilities and malicious activities through security audits, WordPress experts can make the websites failsafe in the long term.
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