How To Protect Your Blog Files Against Hackers – Part I

WordPress is the most popular blogging platform in the world and it’s used by most folks as their primary website creation package. Folks just don’t use WordPress to create blogs, but they also use it to create serious corporate or other types of sites. Popularity has a price, however. Hackers are always out there to target the most popular software packages and sites that are using these packages. The attacks on WordPress blogs have been nothing short of intensive.

One way folks can figure out how to attack your site is by figuring out what plug-in you are using or hacking your WordPress account. While there is no foolproof way to avoid getting hacked, there are ways to protect it. Here is how:

You should Prevent others from uncovering your plug-ins: many hackers use plug-ins that you have installed against you. Many of these plug-ins are not up-to-date or come with security holes that can compromise your blog. Folks just type in your plug-ins URL to get a list of plug-ins that you have in place. I personally use Redirection plug-in to redirect all invalid requests to home-page. You can also put an empty index file in your plug-ins and themes folders.

You should disable user registration: a lot of folks like to give their readers the ability to register accounts on their blogs. That is simply not a good idea as it makes protecting your blog more complicated that in needs to be. Disable registration to give yourself some peace of mind.

You should Hide Your WordPress Info: you should try to hide your WordPress version from public eyes. Many of us don’t apply the latest patches instantly, which means our blogs could be targeted by hackers. You should take out all the references to your blog presence from the public eye.

At the end of the day, you should try everything in your power to make life hard for hackers. You are never going to be able to protect your blog against hackers, but the above techniques give you a start.

In the 2nd part of this post, I’ll talk about other ways that you can protect your blog against hackers. So stay tuned.