If you have ever had one of your websites hacked then you might be familiar with the feeling of panic that comes with it, and the knowledge that all of your hard work may have been compromised. Information security is an important part of operating a WordPress blog, because the possibility exists of somebody gaining unauthorized access to the administration panel of your blog and compromising your hard work. This article will give you some good advice about what to do if this happens to you, and most importantly how to make sure that you never put yourself in this sort of situation.
You might ask yourself why anybody would ever take the time to try and hack into somebody’s WordPress blog in the first place. The answer is that if you have a blog that receives a large amount of website traffic, somebody could redirect that traffic to a different location to try to make money from it (which is obviously unethical). If you ever actually have one of your blogs hacked, start by trying to use the password recovery feature based on your email address, otherwise you may need to log in to the control center in your hosting account and temporarily redirect the website until you can re-establish it securely on the back-end.
It is important that you always keep your WordPress software updated, and this is easy to do in the main administration panel in your dashboard. Even though WordPress is free to use, its massive popularity has resulted in a software that is extremely secure, but the possibility of having one of your blogs hacked still exists. Once you have devoted time and energy to creating your own content for your blog, it is important that you regularly use the “export” feature in the tools tab so that you can create a backup file with all your content. It is a good idea to get on a regular schedule with this, such as twice a month or every 20 posts.
Your password is also a big security risk if it is easy to guess or if it is the same password that you use for other accounts. Make sure that you are using a unique password to log in, and it should be impossible to guess by making sure that it includes upper case and lower case letters, special characters and numbers. Making it too easy to log in to your account is the biggest reason why a WordPress blog gets compromised. If you have followed the tips in this article such as making regular data backups, you can effectively “hack-proof” your blog so that it is easy to set up again even if it gets compromised.
If you enjoyed this article by Ricky Weber then you should also enjoy an article he wrote called “The Internet Marketing War” where he discusses how to win more sales by competing with other websites, and a weapon that you can use to win the battle called Search Engine Submitter.
January 20, 2012
Web Development