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Keep Your WordPress Blog Safe and Secure

WordPress is a great platform to build a small business Web site, but you
must stay on top of security measures. As some of you know, my blog was
recently hacked by a bot looking for weakness in my WordPress and/or
plugins. Hackers left thousands of spam comments with embedded links, all
of my plugins were stripped from the site, and it wasn't working very well.
It was pretty much a nightmare and there was no easy fix. It was tough for
some of my readers to find the forms to submit to be a guest on
#SmallBizChat or to be a guest blogger. I learned a lot about WordPress in
this process that I think you all could benefit from.

Here are 6 steps to keep your WordPress blog safe and secure.

Do regular maintenance. Just like with your car needing an oil change, your
WordPress blog should have a basic tune-up regularly. Make sure you are
using the latest version of WordPress and keep your plugins up-to-date too.
It's easy for plugins to create a conflict in the backend of your WordPress
site.

Get professional help. Do not diagnose the problem yourself, hire a
professional that does website recovery work. Keep in mind, the person who
built your Web site might not be able to determine how to stop a hacker
attack.

Make sure you have the appropriate hosting option. If you have a site that
gets major traffic - over 25,000 visitors a month like this one, a shared
hosting server will not cut it. You might need to look into having a
dedicated server, which is pricey, but can provide an additional security
options to give you better peace of mind.

Keep a list of your passwords and plugins. You should have a permanent file
in Google Docs or DropBox with all of the logins to the site and your
hosting account. You also need a list of plugins that are being used on your
site.

Do regular back-ups. Make sure you have at least monthly back-ups done for
your blog. (I do them weekly.) WordPress has a great free plugin for
back-ups called myRepono. You can automate your WordPress, website and
database backups using the myRepono plugin.

Delete the Admin login to your site. You never want to make it easy for
people to gain access to your website. By using "Admin" as your login, you
are giving hackers half of the information they need to break into your
blog - then all they need to do is guess your password to gain access to
everything.

If you do these things, hopefully you will avoid the chaos that can happen
when your WordPress site is hacked.

my motto is "Keep it simple" and "don't leave anything for tomorrow that can
be done today."

Regards Gerald Crawford

Stellenbosch South Africa
Cell: +27-0720390184 (mobile)
E-mail: gerald@webcraft.ws

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