WordPress – 4 Ways to Protect Your Site From Hackers

Building a website takes time and effort. You install the site, configure and write content to give your readers a rewarding experience. Unfortunately there are people out there who want to inflict maximum damage to your work and bring your site to a grinding halt. It could be a jealous rival or someone who has nothing better to do with their life.

It has been known for sites to become infected with Malware. Hackers will make changes to your website files by changing some of the code in files. For example they may enter a line which links to a malicious site.

So what can you do about this?

You need to have a recovery plan for when things go wrong. It will not happen to everyone, but these days it is an increasing occurrence. Generally hackers target the file, but you should aim to protect all your files and data. Better safe than sorry.

1) Keep original copies of your content

When creating content use some kind of text editor. This could be notepad or your favourite Word processing package. Many people use Microsoft Word to type their content. Ensure you save each document with a good title so you can refer to it easily. If your website is hacked or damaged you still have backups of your content and can post it back onto the site. The same goes for any images you loaded up to the site. Ensure you have all images stored somewhere.

2) Backup your content

If you have all your content stored on your computer make a backup of it and store it on disc or on another backup drive.

3) Backup your site files.

If your WordPress installation has cpanel hosting then this is how to backup your site files.

First go to your cpanel.

Now click on File Manager

In the dropdown box select your domain

Click on the option “Select All” files

Now choose ‘Compress’

Now check zip for file format and give your file a name

Finally click go

And that’s all there is to it. You will now find that your files are backed up.

To restore your files simply

Go back into file manager

Now click on the zip file you created

Choose the ‘Extract’ option.

It will now overwrite all the files there and they are restored to their normal state.

4) Backup Your WordPress Database

Chances are your site will have a database, most WordPress sites do. The database is of extreme importance to WordPress and you will need to back this up also.

To back up the database do the following:

First go to your cpanel.

Now click on phpMyAdmin

Select the database you wish to back up

Now click on ‘Export’

Finally click go

Make sure you save it to a folder for your site on your computer’s hard disc

That’s all there is to it.

The security of your website should be taken seriously, especially in this age of hacking. Take all possible steps to protect yourself so that your visitors can continue to benefit from your site content.