15 Awesome Security Plugins to Help Secure Your WordPress Site from Hackers
About 30 000 websites get hacked each day (!). That’s an average of 20 websites each minute. The sad truth is that your WordPress site could be next if you do not take the necessary steps to secure it.
WordPress sites can be an easy target because of Theme and Plugin vulnerabilities, weak passwords, or obsolete software. And a hacker might only need a few seconds to destroy many years worth of your hard work.
Fortunately, many awesome plugins exist that you can use to secure your WordPress site from hackers and malicious intruders.
In this article, you’re going to find some nifty WordPress security plugins which can help you block malicious code injections and other hacking attempts on your site.
Also read: 15 Best WordPress Anti-Spam Plugins to Keep Your Website Safe & Secure
Use these plugins to avoid hack or phishing attempts, malicious attacks, injections, corrupting scripts, and many other security threats.
15 Awesome Security Plugins to Help Secure Your WordPress Site from Hackers
1. Wordfence Security
This is currently one of the most comprehensive WordPress security plugins out there. It has many features that can help you secure WordPress, and also improve the performance and speed of your WordPress site by up to 50 times.
When you install Wordfence, it will first check to see if your site is already infected before doing a deep server-side scan of your source code and securing your WordPress install.
Key Features Include:
• WordPress caching using Falcon Engine. Improves your site speed.
• Real-time blocking of Known attackers
• Two-factor authentication to improve login security
• Ability to enforce strong passwords among your administrators, publishers and users
• Firewall to block security threats
• WordPress Multi-site compatibility
2. iThemes Security
Another comprehensive security plugin which offers more than 30 ways to secure WordPress. It can help you stop automated attacks, fix common loopholes, strengthen user credentials, among other things.
Key Features and Benefits Include:
• Malware Scanning
• Network Brute Force Protection. Bans users who have tried to break into other websites from breaking into yours.
• Prevents attackers from learning too much about your site
• Blocks bad users and increases the security of passwords and other key information.
• Monitors your site and reports changes to your file system and database.
• Regular backups of your WordPress database
• Multi-site compatibility
3. BulletProof Security
This is a top-notch WordPress plugin that offers among others protection against different hacking attacks, login security monitoring, and database backups of your WordPress.
Key Features Include:
• htaccess security and firewall
• Login security and monitoring
• Database backups. You can schedule or do manual backups
• Website performance optimized. Does not slow your site
• Suports FrontEnd/BackEnd maintenance mode
4. All In One WP Security & Firewall
All In One WP Security & Firewall is a comprehensive plugin that helps secure WordPress by checking for vulnerabilities and implementing the latest WordPress security best practices and techniques.
Key Features Include:
• User accounts security
• User Login Security
• Database security and backups
• File system protection
• htaccess and wp-config.php File Backup and Restore
• Block Ip addresses
• Firewall protection
• Whois look up
• Security scanner
• Comment spam prevention
• Front-end text copy prevention
Download All In One WP Security & Firewall
You might also like: 10 Essential Free WordPress Plugins You Should be Using
5. Centrora Security
Centrora is a powerful security plugin that helps protect your WordPress Sites from attacks and hacking, and is available for multiple sites.
It uses a built-in Malware and Security Scanner to help you identify any security risks, malicious codes, spam, virus, and other security vulnerabilities.
Main Features Include:
• Firewall Protection
• IP management (allow, block and track IPs)
• Antivirus
• Database security checks
• Ability to report security to owners or security analysts.
6. WP Security Audit Log
WP Security Audit Log is a WordPress plugin that helps you identify security issues on your site before they can become serious threats.
This monitoring and auditing tool works by keeping a security audit log of what is happening under the hood of your WordPress site. This way, you can easily track suspicious user activities that would later harm your website.
Among other things, the plugin generates alerts when:
• A new user is created
• A user changes the role, password or other profile settings of another user
• A user creates a new post, page, category or a custom post type
• Failed login attempts
• When WordPress users log in or out
• And much more…
This plugin also contains wWordPressand php error monitoring tools and is available for multi-site installations.
Download WP Security Audit Log
7. 6Scan Security
This is a plugin that provides a comprehensive solution to secure WordPress by finding and automatically fixing security vulnerabilities.
Features Include:
• Frequent site scans
• Firewall protection
• Automatic back ups
• Automatic vulnerability fix
• Automatic malware removal
• Protection against brute force attacks
• Email or SMS notifications
• Blacklist Monitoring
8. SmartFilter Security
This plugin is designed to help keep your wordpress site safe from malicious code injections in your comments and posts.
It employs modern algorithms which can understand how content behaves so it can detect code injections and filter out the threats immediately. This way you can focus on enhancing your blog without worrying about such security threats.
SmartFilter helps protect against threats that can:
• Hack your comments
• Hack your posts
• Break themes or templates
9. WangGuard
WangGuard is a WordPress security plugin that helps keep your WordPress site safe from spammers and sploggers -fake blogs created solely to promote affiliate programs.
Once you install WangGuard you need to obtain your API key from wangguard.com which you’ll use to activate the plugin.
WangGuard will then check user registrations against a centralized database to find out if they’re spammers or sploggers. You can also flag spam users directly from your admin panel.
Key Features Include:
• Centralized database of sploggers/spammers
• Clean your installation from unwanted users and spammers
• Block users by domains
• Configure security questions for users
• Support for multi-sites, buddypress, bbpress, and woocommerce
10. NinjaFirewall
NinjaFirewall is a stand-alone web application firewall that can be installed like a WordPress plugin and shield your site from attacks by hackers. It can scan and reject any Http/Https requests before they reach your pHp scripts or plugins thus keeping your WordPress install safe.
Some Key Features Include:
• Firewall protection
• Multi-site support
• Protects against code injections, SQL injections, brute-force scanners, etc
• Real-time detection
• Activity log and statistics
• Debugging mode
• Brute-force attack protection
• Email Alerts and event notifications
11. Login LockDown
This nifty plugin will help secure your WordPress by limiting the number of login attempts from a given IP range.
It records the IP address and timestamp for each failed login attempt. It will then block the IP address if a certain number of attempts are detected within a time period you set. This helps prevent brute force attacks.
The plugin also allows you the option to unblock IP ranges manually.
12. UpdraftPlus Backup and Restoration for WordPress
This plugin is a personal favorite of mine. I use it along with Wordfence Security. It can be a lifesaver if one day you get hacked (God forbid).
It makes it easy for you to perform a complete backup and restoration of your WordPress site whenever need arises.
Moreover, you can perform the backups manually or schedule them to email or popular cloud services like Dropbox, Google drive, Amazon S3, and many more.
Key Features Include:
• Quick Restore
• Backup to the cloud
• Manual or Scheduled Backups
• Back up both files and databases
• Large sites can be split into multiple archives
• Select the components to backup and restore
Download Updraftplus Backup and Restoration for WordPress.
13. Antivirus
Antivirus is a useful WordPress security plugin that can help protect your site against exploits, malware and other malicious injections. The plugin automatically scans your theme templates on a daily basis to ensure it is safe.
Features Include:
• Virus alerts
• Cleaning up after plugin removals
• Daily scans with email notifications
• Database notifications
• Manual check of template files
14. Ultimate Security Checker
Ultimate Security Checker is a wordpress security plugin that helps you identify security problems within your installation.
This plugin scans your site against hundreds of known threats, and then gives you a ‘grade’ based on how well-protected your site is.
However, this plugin only identifies but does not automatically fix the problems. You can fix the problems yourself or login to the official plugin site to have them fix the issues for you.
Main Features:
• One click installation and activation
• Automatic security scans
• Grading based on how well-protected your site is
Download Ultimate Security Checker
15. Rename wp-login.php
Rename wp-login.php is a simple security plugin that allows you to easily and safely customize your login page and prevent brute force attacks that are targeted specifically to wp-login.php.
Important! When using this plugin, remember to bookmark or take note of your new login url since wp-login.php page will become inaccessible. Nevertheless, you can easily undo this by deactivating the plugin.
This plugin is also compatible with multi-site installations.
Conclusion – the best security plugins
While all these plugins are great for securing your website, you still need to have other WordPress security best practices in place to ensure you’re completely safe.
Small things like avoiding use of admin as your user name, changing the default database prefix, updating wordpress, checking your themes, and keeping your plugins updated will go a long way in keeping the bad guys off your site. You can also use online tool offered by top VPN providers to strengthen the security of your WordPress site.
Also, there is this good resource on wordpress.org that highlights some common vulnerabilities and the things you can do to harden your WordPress installation.
Finally, we’d love to hear your thoughts. Which plugins do you use to secure your WordPress? Any other that you think we should have included in this list?
