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How to Perform WordPress Security Check?

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Security is an important thing you will need when you are running your website. You will need to perform the website security check to ensure that your website has proper security. We will see how to perform a WordPress security check.

We will see all the things in detail about the security checking. Make sure you follow all these steps to do a complete security check of your website. We will start with the most popular thing and then check all the common things.

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How to Perform WordPress Security Check?

Security Plugin

The first thing that you need to see is the security plugin. If you are not using any security plugin on your website, you are missing out on a lot of things. Therefore, your first goal is to use a popular and standard security plugin that can keep your website secure.

You can simply analyze your security plugin here. It must have a malware scanner or security scanner. This feature will simply scan your website for all the vulnerabilities. We even suggest you do a complete scan of your website. When you do a complete scan, you will come to know about all the title files that might harm your website. You can simply fix the files using the same scanner.

Therefore, the most important thing that you need to see here is the security plugin. If your security plugin doesn’t have the scanning feature, you can try using a different plugin that allows you to run a scan. Don’t try to install a new security plugin on top of the existing one, it may cause conflicts between two plugins. It’s extremely important to run a scan on your website. If you run the scan regularly, you can ensure that all the things are working and your website doesn’t have any infected files or vulnerabilities. If your website has any of them, you can consider fixing them.

Further, you also need to see if the plugin has the firewall feature. The firewall feature will allow you to do a lot of things. Most importantly, it will keep the attackers/bots away. This will also save the resources your website is using. Therefore, you can check out all these things to be sure about it.

All these things are included in the security plugin check. You can check all the possible things about the security plugin. If your plugin doesn’t have all of these, you should replace it.

Backups

The next thing that you need to see is the backup solutions.  Your website must have regular backups. Backups are the best way to keep your website secure. You will never know when your website might get in trouble. Keep your WordPress security in check.

What if you were installing a plugin and that particular plugin spoiled a lot of other things? If you have the backup, you can restore the backup and get the work started again. Having a backup is extremely important especially in this modern world. Therefore, you will have to ensure that you have proper backups on your website.

If you are not taking the backups, you are probably missing out a lot. Here, you can see if there are proper backups taken on your website or not. You can also see if a scheduled backup task is running every single day or not.

Some people might be taking backups weekly instead of doing them daily. You don’t need to do it daily if your website is not that big or you do not input new info daily. For example, if you run a blog that you update every week, you can surely take the backup every single week instead of taking it daily. However, if you have a website with a WooCommerce store, you might need to take daily backups.

You surely might be getting orders daily, right? If something bad happens and you don’t take backups daily, all the data of the orders will be gone. therefore, you will have to make sure that you are taking daily backups. Backup time is also an important factor over here that you need to consider. You can take the backup at a time when you won’t miss any data.

Updates

The next thing is pretty common. However, there are many people out there who will forget the updates. That’s why it’s one of the things that you need to check regularly.

Let’s be honest, when was the last time you checked if there were any updates on your website?

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If you are an active user, you might be keeping your website updated. However, if you are not, this section is especially for you – Perform WordPress Security Check.

WordPress has the following type of updates.

Do you know what’s the best part? All of these can be done in one click. All you need to do is select the things that you want to update and then hit the update button. That’s it. It will hardly take a minute. What’s wrong with updating then? Most people are not updating because of laziness. However, this might cause a big loss.

Many security issues are fixed in the website when you update it. For example, if someone found a vulnerability in the plugin, the plugin developer will release a new update that will fix the issue. In this way, you won’t have to go through that issue.

Further, you will also get many new features when you update your plugin/theme. Even WordPress comes up with many new things. You probably are missing out on some of the major changes if you don’t update your website regularly. Therefore, you should surely update your website, plugins, and themes on regular basis.

Talking about plugins and themes, there is one more thing that you need to keep in mind. This is slightly connected to the updates. Let’s learn more about it.

Outdated Plugins

This specific part can be divide into two main things.

One of them can be the outdated plugins which you are no longer using. There are many plugins that you have installed earlier. However, you don’t need that plugin now or you are just not using it. There might be multiple reasons for the same. Either you might have found a better alternative that works or your requirement might be over. It doesn’t matter what is the reason, you will have to clean them up. You can deactivate and delete them if you no longer need them.

Most people might surely know what we mean by the outdated plugin. You also need to update the plugins that are updated. There are many plugins where you will get an update by now. You can surely update your plugin if you haven’t done it yet. Having an outdated plugin is the worst these days. If you have an outdated plugin, you will have to ensure that you are using the right update. Now, you can also set the auto-update. This is how you don’t even need to update the plugins.

So, these are the two things that you need to see for WordPress Security Check. You can remove all the unwanted plugins or update the plugins wherever there is an update. The same thing applies to themes. If you have any outdated themes that you are not using, you should consider deleting them. In the same way, if you are having any updates, you can update your theme to get the latest version. This will increase the security of your website.

Scan the Website – WordPress Security Check

Now, it’s time to run the scan. You can run the complete scan of the website to determine where the problem lies. We have already checked that whether you have installed the security plugin or not. Now that, you have the security plugin, you can run the scan easily.

To run a scan, you can simply open your website and head over to the plugin menu from which you can run the scan. Running a scan is one of the easiest tasks you can do. All you have to do is open the plugin and then hit the Scan now button.

When you do so, it will start running the complete scan. It will start with the home directory and then scan all the plugins, themes, and uploads folders to find the vulnerabilities. Once the scan is completed, you can see which files are infected.

It will then ask you what you want to do with the infected files. You can simply hit the fix now button and they will fix all the files. You can also remove all the files and you are done.

If you don’t want to install any plugin, you can also use the cPanel scanner here. Did you know that cPanel has their malware scanner? It will find the infected code on your website. You can use the same thing. As it runs directly on the cPanel, you don’t need to keep the tabs open. You can surely exit the tab once the scan starts. It will automatically start and run the scan. Meanwhile, you can do the rest of your work.

Once the scan is completed, you will see the list of files infected. You can hit the quarantine button and you are done with WordPress Security Check.

Analytics and Resource Usage

You can easily know if your website is at risk or not simply by looking at the analytics. For this, you will need an analytic plugin installed on your website. If you already have that, you can surely carry on and see to the analysis.

If you see some huge spike in the number of visitors at odd intervals of time, you will have to do your research as WordPress security check. You can also see the country name, browser, etc. Once you determine all this, you can take the steps to prevent it. Generally, what people face is that they will get a huge amount of traffic from unknown websites or adult websites. In that case, you can block the traffic. As you have already cleaned the website, you won’t face more issues here.

Further, you can also check the resource usage in the cPanel. In the Cpanel or your hosting panel, you will have something called “resource usage”. You can click on it and see if there was a sudden spike in resource usage. You can also see which of the processes caused this spike.

You can surely check the resource for the last 24 hours to determine where the error is coming from.

SSL and Hosting

You can make sure that you are using the SSL certificate. This will include the extra S in HTTP. This will increase the security of your website. Further, you should always go with the reputed hosting. The servers need to be secure. If the servers are not secure, your entire website may be hacked.

Therefore, you can use the right hosting which has a good level of security. If you choose the hosting that isn’t good, your website might even be marked as a spam website.

Regular Monitoring

After all of these, there is one thing that you will have to do if you want to increase the security of your website. That is regularly monitoring. You will have to monitor your website regularly. This will include scanning your website for all the malware and security vulnerabilities. You will also have to take regular backups of your website.
If you start doing all of these, you will surely keep your website secure.

Final Words about WordPress Security Check

To conclude, these were some of the security checks that you can surely run if you are running a WordPress website. If you do all these things regularly, you will surely keep your website secure and safe. There are many more things you can do to keep your website secure along with these. However, these are enough security checks for most websites. Therefore, it won’t be an issue for most people. You can surely rely on these. Additionally, there are premium plugins that can help you with security. You can also get security services if you want.

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