subject: Three tips that will secure your Wordpress installation [print this page] Three tips that will secure your Wordpress installation
The most widely used CMS platform is a piece of software known as Wordpress. For the people in the audience that do not know, CMS stands for content management system. A content management system is a piece of software that allows you to easily post text and other kinds of data to the web without the user having to go into the code. A CMS can be small and simple or it can large and complex.
Wordpress is known to be the latter.
Even though it is not the biggest piece of software around, it is still pretty big and pretty complicated as well. With so much complication in the source code, there is a good chance that a person is going to run into bugs along the way. Bugs in software can easily turn into security holes. A few of these security holes have plagued Wordpress every once in a while. So to counter this, people have come up with methods that will help them secure their wordpress installations. If you follow these rules, you will be on the first step to making your Wordpress installation a safe platform.
Follow the news
If you are a person that makes a living off of wordpress then you should make sure that you keep up to date with the news about the software. You should subscribe to a couple of blogs that give you wordpress news. Even if you are not the coder of your web site, as the owner, you should know when something is wrong and it might affect you. If you follow the daily news reports then you will know when the latest security updates are coming, a bug has been found, or anything else that could harm your installation. Knowing what is wrong with your system will help you stay out of trouble and allow you to know when you are going to need to call for help.
Keep plugins up to date
The one thing that people like about Wordpress is the fact that you are able to use their plugin architecture very easily. This is especially true now that they have added an interface that allows you to just point and click to a plugin that you want and it installs it all in just two steps. But even though the plugins are easy to install and manage does not mean that you do not have to keep an eye on them. If there is a bug in the plugin code then that means that your system is at risk. Plugins are executable code as well and just like the core part of Wordpress can leave you unsafe. This is why you should make sure that you update your plugins whenever they need it. It only takes 5 minutes and it will really help you in the long run.
Look for security plugins
Not only should you keep your plugins up to date, you should look for security plugins as well. There are several plugins that are used for security purposes in Wordpress. You should look into installing those plugins for your blog. In this case it always pays to be safe than sorry.
If you follow these three tips then you know that your Wordpress installation will be relatively secured.