How to Perform a WordPress Security Audit (Complete Checklist)
by Admin
Posted on 08-11-2022 09:34 AM
The checklist allows you to review the most important aspects in the case of a security audit. On the other hand, it should be mentioned that this process is not that complete, which means that your
website
may still be vulnerable. One of the cases is when it becomes difficult to keep track of all user activity, suspicious code and much more. In this case, you need to perform automatic security audits and keep a record of all the activities that are done on your website. This process can be automated using some security plugins for wordpress.
When it comes to website security, less is more. Remove unused third-party components and keep things tidy to reduce vulnerabilities. You can think about your wordpress installation as your house: the more things you have, the more difficult it is to notice when something is out of place , or when an item goes missing. To audit your website, use this quick checklist from our how to perform a website audit article, along with the assessment points we just went over.
Your website can be breached for many reasons, therefore you can not leave any stone unturned while performing a security audit. While doing the security audit, always maintain a routine checklist to ensure all the potential loopholes are being covered. For your convenience, i’ve made a list of things that you must check while performing a security audit. You can perform the operation both manually or using a wordpress audit plugin. I’ll show you the manual way first, and later on, i’ll talk about some of the plugins that you can use alternative to perform security audits automatically. If you don’t want to use a plugin, as many of them seem to decrease your page speed, you can perform manual security audits on your wordpress website.
What is a WordPress Security Audit?
Your wordpress login page is the first line of defense against attacks, so it’s essential that you make sure it’s secure against brute force attempts.
There are several ways you can do that, including:
this can involve quite a bit of
work
. However, you only need to implement each of those security measures once, and then you can forget about them until your next security audit.
Our website audits can help you find and resolve issues with your website’s technical aspects, construction, and content. Some potential problem a wordpress website audit can identify are: security issues with your website’s protocol broken links and images problems with your meta titles and descriptions search indexing issues with your sitemaps thin content and duplication issues. And more.
Securing your wordpress site isn’t a one-and-done deal. No matter how much you trust your security plugin or how thorough you were with website hardening, a safe website today does not make for a safe website tomorrow. To keep hackers at bay, you have to regularly conduct wordpress security audits and fill in the safety holes you find. Website hacking tactics are always progressing, and with them so are preventative measures to keep your site safe. Think of it as a cycle. The safer a website is, the more creative hackers have to be to get into it, which means your website has to get even safer, and so on.
We’ve all seen the reports and the panic that ensues with high-profile data breaches affecting large companies such as target, yahoo, and others raising questions of data safety. Hackers worldwide are using web applications such as login pages, shopping carts, and contact forms to access the databases of many organizations. Poor programming and the lack of a security audit can be blamed for security breaches. There are many third-party malware and security scanning tools that will help with the wordpress website audit such as sucuri sitecheck , quttera , web inspector , and isitwp wordpress website security scanner. But before going into the weeds with your security audit software, perform the simpler steps to ensure you are doing the basics first.
When to Perform a WordPress Security Audit?
July 19, 2019 performance is not just about “my site loads under x seconds”. There are several other factors you need to look into. Here is a list of tools and services i use to audit or test the performance of a wordpress site. Not just wordpress, these can be used for any site.