The best way to protect your WP site from server problems and hacking
You’ve done so much work, commercial or not, it is certain that you wouldn’t like to wake up one morning and realize that you’ve lost everything. It’s not an everyday matter, but it happens frequently. A server can face severe problems leading even to complete loss of data, even loss of backups, assuming they are even taken in the first place. Besides server problems, you may cause yourself in your site some damage of a great scale and of course you may fall victim to hacking attacks, lose your data or be blackmailed.
As a general rule, always update your core WordPress files, themes and plugins making sure you use the latest versions. Never use “admin” as your username, nor the name of your site, and also use strong passwords, those you cannot remember by heart but only store them in safe files and in a password manager that completes the login form automatically whenever is needed, such as LastPass.
2 plugins are necessary: you cannot avoid any of them. A security plugin, that detects attacks and defends your site, and a backup plugin that saves in the Cloud copies of your database, themes, plugins and other files. Note that you need to use a plugin that uploads backup files to the Cloud, since leaving them on the server means that you will lose them along with your site in case that your server is damaged. Having them on the Cloud makes it easy to get them also on your PC, since you can have some or all of your Cloud folders synchronized with folders on your PC.
There exist commercial and free plugins for security and for backups, but since TheFreeWindows is for free stuff, I won’t bother with commercial products. Both plugins that I suggest here are powerful and reliable, and of course they are free, although they offer also commercial versions. I feature them because their free versions are already powerful enough and they work flawlessly, without forcing you in any way to buy the commercial product. Go ahead, get them, try them, and enjoy! Here is my pick for the best WordPress security plugin, and the best WordPress backup plugin.
