It’s time to spend some attention to the security of this website. From years of reading ICT technology news, I was painfully aware that WordPress websites are a prime target for hackers. And from my initial week of having the website online, I had already discovered a couple of visits from malicious IP addresses in my access log.

The book “WordPress Visual Step by Step for Beginners 2018” recommends installing the Wordfence Security plugin. This is an Endpoint protection solution. Another solution that I had read about was Cloudflare. I was interested in the differences and found this article on the Wordfence website. Biased? Certainly. But I do agree with some of the arguments and decided to install the Wordfence plugin as a basic security measure. I can always add Cloudflare on top of that.

Then I looked for articles on hardening a WordPress website and found these (1, 2) two articles. I really appreciate the blog of WP Engine. A good find was the “WPS Hide Login” plugin, which made it very easy to implement measure #13. The blog by Bjørn Johansen was very helpful in implementing measure #14.

I have disabled Comments on my website. The main goal of my website is to inform and not to interact. Contact Form 7 and Flamingo are plugins that work together to enable the contact form and to store the messages on the WordPress server. This provide readers with a basic way to interact. The nice thing (from a security standpoint) is that I am able to add a “reCAPTCHA” button on the bottom of my contact form. Which should reduce the amount of spam.

Published on: 4 April 2018