You may not think your site has anything worth being hacked, but wordpress websites are compromised all the time. This is especially worrysome for eCommerce Websites such as Easy Digital Downloads or WooCommerce stores. Hacking is regularly performed by automated scripts written to scour the internet in an attempt to exploit known website security issues in software. You’ve worked hard on your wordpress website (and your brand) – so it’s important to take the time to protect it with this wordpress website security checklist.

Here are the Best Security for WordPress websites:

1) Install security plugins such as WordFence

If you’re operating an open-source CMS website, you can enhance your website security with wordpress security plugins that actively prevent website hacking attempts. Each of the main CMS options has security plugins available, many of them for free. The Wordfence Security plugin is the most popular wordpress security plugin with over 2 million active installs and that is really impressive considering how many great security plugins exist.

2) Backup your website

The reason you want a backup of your website is that if you experience a hack or things go wrong during a software update, you’ll have easy access to a clean version of your website. Although it may sound overly technical to do, it’s actually quite easy. Many hosts provide simple ways to create backups within their customer control panels and even if they don’t, there are several backup plugins made specifically for WordPress that are easy to use.

3) Always update software to their latest version

It is incredibly important to update your site as soon as a new plugin or CMS version is available. Those updates might just contain security enhancements or patch a vulnerability. Most website attacks are automated. Bots are constantly scanning every site they can for any exploitation opportunities. It is no longer good enough to update once a month or even once a week because bots are very likely to find a vulnerability before you patch it.

4) Create sophisticated passwords

It’s tempting to go with a password you know will always be easy for you to remember, but we have to do better than that – a lot better than that to prevent login attempts from hackers and other outsiders. Make the effort to figure out a truly secure password. Make it long. Use a mix of special characters, numbers, and letters. And steer clear of potentially easy-to-guess keywords like your birthday or kid’s name. If a hacker somehow gains access to other information about you, they’ll know to guess those first.

5) Use reCaptcha

This is a good tool for fighting spam in WordPress. It can prevent spammers from posting unwanted comments on your WordPress blog. It is difficult for bots to read the image, and therefore prevents automated spam bots from posting on your blog. As spammers become more sophisticated, they can launch massive spam attacks with little effort. Instead of turning off the comments, you can add CAPTCHA to the comment form to practically eliminate spam.

6) Use HTTPS and SSL Certificates

HTTPS is a protocol used to provide security over the Internet. HTTPS guarantees  that users are talking to the server they expect, and that nobody else can intercept or change the content they’re seeing in transit. An SSL certificate is important because it secures the transfer of information – such as credit cards, personal data, and contact information – between your website and the server. While an SSL certificate has always been essential for ecommerce websites, having one has recently become important for all websites.

7) Regularly do a Security Audit

Run a security scan or audit of your website. Check your website for known malware, blacklisting status, website errors and out-of-date software. Using a service that does all that daily monitoring for you will minimize any potential downtime. After you have completed a thorough website security audit once, you still need to check up some items regularly. We recommend doing an ongoing audit as part of maintaining a good website security posture. Unique pieces of malware were up 36% last year, so you need to schedule monthly or even weekly scans.

Conclusion: Improve your EDD WordPress website security

Securing your Easy Digital Downloads WordPress website and learning how to protect against hackers is a big part of keeping your site healthy and safe in the long run! Don’t procrastinate taking these important steps. We only listed a few of the basic wordpress website security strategies you can implement on your EDD WordPress webstores. I’m sure there are lots of other things we can do out there to enhance the security of our web stores.

Please comment below and share with us other tools and strategies you can recommend to consider to strengthen the security of your EDD stores.