What comes to your mind when you hear “free, flexible and efficient content management system”? Yes, WordPress is the first thing to pop up in your mind. No wonder WordPress is so popular currently. However, this overwhelming attention is both a boon and a bane. Since the number of users of WordPress is increasing, hackers’ attention has turned towards WordPress websites.

While WordPress is a very secure CMS, some security mistakes users make tend to create various vulnerabilities in the website. But how do we protect our websites from hackers? The easiest and fastest solution is to use WordPress security plugins like the Hide My WP security plugin. Further in this article, you learn about the Hide My WP security plugin setup and installation. 

What Are WordPress Security Plugins?

WordPress security plugin is software that is added to WordPress to target specific security issues and improve the security of the WordPress website.

There are various WordPress security plugins available, but using too many plugins can be troublesome too. To minimalize the usage of plugins, we can use a plugin that focuses on multiple security vulnerabilities. One such security plugin is “Hide My WP.”

What Are WordPress Vulnerabilities?

The loopholes and flaws in a WordPress website that prove to be advantageous for an attacker to hack a website are WordPress vulnerabilities.

If I have to list out the possible WordPress vulnerabilities, this article might get never-ending or at least be the length of Rapunzel’s hair. Instead, I’ll list out the most commonly used and dangerous attacks that we need to know.

Brute-Force Attack

Hackers use this attack to force entry into a website by trying out various usernames and passwords. They use bots to perform a trial and error process of login by using a sequence of characters. If they get lucky with the attempt, they get access to your website.

SQL Injection Attack

SQL injection attack is an attack that hackers use to steal confidential data and information from your database using SQL payloads. They execute this attack by entering malicious code into user query/entry fields.

CRLF Injection Attack

A hacker uses a CRLF injection attack to steal valuable data from your website by entering appropriate CRLF characters into entry fields that assist him in accessing the data he wants.

Zero-Day Attacks

It’s possible to protect your website from known vulnerabilities, but what about the attacks that are unknown to us? It’s no easy task. This attack is all about that. Zero-day is an attack that a hacker uses to exploit vulnerabilities that the website owner does not know of yet.

Distributed Denial-Of-Service Attack

A hacker uses Distributed denial-of-service( DDoS) attack to take down the website and its servers’ functioning. He executes overwhelming the website with fake traffic.

Man In The Middle Attack

Hackers use a man-in-the-middle attack to steal valuable information from both users and websites or send malicious data to them without being noticed by intercepting the conversation between the user and the website. 

URL Phishing Attack

Hackers use a URL phishing attack by sending spam mail containing links to trick users into clicking on the URL that allows them to gather confidential information like usernames, passwords, and bank account details.

How To Install And Setup The Hide My WP Security plugin?

Installing and setting up the security plugin is quick and easy.

Plugin installation

1. Select the plugins option that is on the left side of your WordPress.

2. Under the plugins section, select the “Add new” option. 

3. Select the “search plugins” option that is on the right side of the page.

4. Search for ” Hide My WP” and install it. All done.

Plugin Setup

1. Once you activate the Hide My WP plugin, select the Hide My WP settings option.

2. Here, you see the start section of the settings. The section includes the import options. You can choose from light to high privacy options based on your preference and this step allows you to choose pre-made settings schemes. The three settings are:

Light Privacy

This type of privacy setting will provide basic anti-detection, cleanup, and help you wp-login.php and themes. It is also included with anti-spam. This setting is suitable for simple sites and makes minimal changes to the site.

Medium Privacy

The medium privacy will deep anti-detection, intrusion detection, and trust network. It allows you to rename plugins. This type of setting is best suited for medium complexity sites. It is the most recommended setting for many sites.

High Privacy

This option will completely hide your WordPress and disable direct access to files. It hides the admin bar, popular plugins, and hides your websites from detectors. This setting will hide everything, includes intrusion detection, and provide you with high-end protection.

Choose the privacy setting that is best suited for your website.

3. The hide section of the settings will help you hide the login page, hide admin, notify you if someone visits 404 pages, hide your WordPress from online detectors, and disable direct access to directory listings. You can use this option to hide the admin bar to prevent unauthorized people from accessing it. There are additional options like disabling direct access to PHP files and giving users a trusted role.

4. You can also customize the permalinks to your liking from the permalink section. It allows you to create a new theme path, a new style name, a style Expiry Header, etc.

5. The protection section will allow you to choose various options regarding the IDS firewall, track admin, enable trust network, monitor cookies, block IPs, etc. 

6. The cleanup section will provide additional options like minifying HTML, replacing the default tagline, etc. 

7. The last section is the replace section which will help you replace URLs and replace anything in HTML. Remember to save the settings after you choose your options.

Conclusion:

Hide My WP is the best security solution for protecting WordPress websites efficiently. It has many trusted users that enjoy the feeling of knowing that their websites are very safe. It has multiple features that help the users increase their website security.