Even the highest quality and most technically sound website requires some routine maintenance to help ensure it is performing at its best and is as safe as possible from Internet malfunctions and hackers.

Programming languages like WordPress are built to sustain changes made by their designers, and therefore are easily updated and must be maintained to save new content.

Here are four ways to maintain your WordPress site:

New Password Standards

Since we were old enough to type, we’ve been taught to create passwords that are complex in characters. While we are trying to remember what weird symbols and numbers are mixed into our password, hackers and bots are cracking our one-word codes.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology advises users to rework obscure, one-word passwords into an easy-to-remember sentence of four to five words. Machines can crack a one-word code (~28 bits of entropy) in three days at 1,000 guesses per second. If your password is comprised of four random, common words (~44 bits of entropy), it would take a machine 550 years at the same rate of guessing to try all possible combinations and crack your password. Mathematically, the length of a password is increasingly more important than the complexity of the password character set.

Backups

Increased engagements on a webpage leads to increased social shares, which ultimately means more data and content creation for the website manager. In order to ensure your site is safe under increased traffic, you are going to want to keep a backup of everything on your WordPress from comments to content to databases. Whether your site goes under a security breach or you accidently delete content, keeping backups will ensure your site’s safety.

Bulletproof Security Plugin

WordPress is built on a platform that allows users to install plugins to their site. BSP is a plugin that protects websites against hundreds of thousands of different hacking attempts and attacks. BSP not only keeps your site safe from attackers but is also capable of full database backups (scheduled and manual) and enters front and backend maintenance mode when your site is being worked on.

Download the plugin here.

Software Updates

Keeping software up to date is like doing your laundry. If you leave your clothes on the floor and allow them to pile up, they are just going to get in the way and cause unnecessary trouble. Software updates are released to fix bugs within the website code and issues caused by hackers and bots. WordPress makes it extremely easy to keep your site’s software up to date, so don’t ignore the banner when it pops up on your dashboard when you log in! The update is there for a reason.

Key Takeaways:

• Change your obscure password (that you are always forgetting anyway) to something simpler, but substantially longer in length—about four to five random words.
• Make backing up the data on your website and updating the software for your site a weekly routine.
• Utilize WordPress’s platform and install necessary plugins to keep your site secure and running optimal.

For more information on how to keep your website secure, contact the interactive team at evok advertising for a no cost, no obligation website security evaluation.