Protect Your WordPress Site

As one of your major marketing tools and in many cases, the only thing your prospect sees of your business before deciding to call you, your web site and/or blog is a valuable property that needs to be protected. Having had a client that built security software to help companies prevent malicious attacks on their systems and networks, I am sensitive to these issues. So the two posts from Anita Campbell at Small Business Trends caught my attention.

The first post called Hacked: It Could Never Happen to My Site (Famous Last Words), tells the tale of what exactly happened. The second post, How to Protect Your WordPress Site has some useful tips to work into your operations.

I love WordPress and recommend that all my clients use it for their web property due to its ease of use. But like all things web, it is subject to hacker’s antics just like other types of web sites. Here are two more tips that you can do to have a contingency plan if your site is attacked.

• First, always keep an updated clean copy of the WordPress theme code on your local system. Since most themes are modified to your unique needs, once you have the site or blog design updated, copy it from the hosting platform to an area on your hard drive. That way if you do need to reinstall WordPress and recreate your blog or site, you have a non-compromised version saved. Remember, any time you rmodify the theme code to update your local copy.
• Second, use the WordPress export capability (found under Manage) to export your posts, comments and pages to an XML file locally. Again, if you need to recreate the blog or site quickly, you can upload the content really quickly. There are definitely ways to backup the database itself, but in the event you have to start over, you can reload the content into a clean database. Depending on how frequently you post, you need to make the export a regular activity.

Security is an ongoing process. Don’t think it can’t happen to you. Keep backups of both the code and the content and you can recover quickly if you are one of the unfortunate few.