Flu season is nearly upon us, and with that come the ubiquitous GET YOUR FLU SHOTS HERE TODAY! signs at your local grocery store and pharmacy. And let’s not forget the age-old “wash your hands” advice, or the more recent suggestion to sneeze into your elbow or down your shirt, to prevent getting your hands all germy and spewing any phlegm-borne disease you might be carrying into the air.

Now that you’re completely grossed out, let’s take this analogy and apply it to your site.

No one wants their Web site to be all germy, disgusting and mucous-y. Yet an amazing number of sites take no precautions with their security; they leave their site out there in the cold with the equivalent of no immune system. As your mother warned you, this is just asking for trouble!

Fortunately there’s some vitamin C we can apply to the situation.

Updates

We’ve touched on this before, so we won’t belabor the point; but, keeping your version of WordPress and your plugins all up to date is essential.

Plugins

A number of plugins exist to augment the security of your site. For the purposes of this post, we’re talking about WordPress sites.

Wordfence

Wordfence is a great little plugin that offers 90% of its features for free, along with an optional paid service that enables a few premium options.

The free version is quite comprehensive by itself, including:

• checks core, theme, and plugin files for new versions
• checks your entire site against its list of known malware URLs and files
• checks for any suspicious-looking code
• checks for weak passwords among your user accounts; any one of these can be exploited by hackers

If any problems are found, it sends an email alert; and, it automatically runs once a day.

Top marks for this plugin.

Block Bad Queries

This plugin automatically protects your site against malicious URL requests (don’t worry if you don’t know what that means!).

WP-Activity

This plugin will allow you to track activity of all registered users. Useful for monitoring who’s doing what in your site, and for making sure that no one is misbehaving.

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There is a wealth of other plugins, but these three are an excellent place to start. After installing these plugins for a client, we were able to put a stop to a recurring attack that had been happening again and again, despite their efforts to remove the virus code from their site.

How’s the health of your site? If it’s time for a checkup, don’t hesitate to contact us!

Photo by juhansonin