Site security is so important.
It's crazy how many people will actually try to hack your Web site.
Once you start to grow your traffic and if it wasn't for some security plug ins like word fence security
I'm sure that my web site would be down and hacked all the time.
So here are two free options that both have premium options as well but they're easy to get started
with for free.
One is security.
This is a security web security web site.
That's their specialty and they have a free plug in that you can get started with.
The other is word fence security and this is the one that I'm going to walk you through right now the
one that I use and the one that I recommend.
Of course if you want to do your own due diligence and do some research yourself you can decide between
the two.
But to get started let's install word fence.
You can see that it has over a million active installs and thousands of good reviews.
Once word fence is installed it's pretty plug and play.
There's a pop up where you can actually just go ahead and start the tour.
And it kind of walks you through all the things that you need to know about or advance.
So this is what I would recommend doing when you install this plug in for the first time.
What it does is basically walk you through all of the different things that word fence does such as
scanning your site for any malware files or any things that are an issue with your web site including
plug ins that are out of date.
Creating a firewall against hackers who try to maliciously add a file or do something to your Web site.
It also automatically blocks IP addresses of people who have tried to log in to your Web site and have
been permanently blocked for doing so.
So you can go through with that tour I suggest doing it.
But really quickly if you go to the dashboard you'll see how it basically works and you'll see what
enables what's not enabled.
You can see that the fire wall log and security different things are enabled other things are premium.
You can see here the total number of attacks that word fence has blocked in the past day.
Now this isn't on your site but this is just across all of the sites that it protects.
And then once you start getting people attacking your Web site which I hope you don't you'll start seeing
it here you'll see the IP addresses that are blocked you'll see if anyone is logging in or attempting
to log into your web site.
You'll see countries that are attacking here.
But the main thing is that you have to configure this plug in furs.
So at the top you'll see this banner that says that you have to configure word fence so click that configure
button right there.
It's going to run an entire scan of your web site to make sure that everything's up to speed everything's
good to go.
And then it's going to actually be active.
You have different choices.
And with this plug in I just recommend using what they recommend.
So this Apache plus SU ph pee test.
So just do that and click continue and it will run.
It'll ask you to download a backup copy of a certain file is H.T. access file.
Go ahead and click download and just save it.
Click Continue once you've downloaded it.
If successful it will give you the success message and let you know that your site is being protected
to the fullest extent.
The one thing I want you to check out is go down to your options and this is where you can change some
of the things.
Everything is set up pretty much automatically for you.
But there are some options that I would just check out and look at.
And one is under log in security options.
So this is where if someone does get to your logon page and tries to log in but doesn't have the right
password they'll be blocked after a certain number of attempts.
So I suggest lowering this number because it's after 20 attempts that seems pretty high.
So I'm going to limit it to five.
And same with password.
I'll limit it to five.
It counts these failures over a period of five minutes.
Seems pretty fine.
So make sure though you do remember your passwords so you don't get automatically locked out because
you could be blocked where defense will also send you a weekly summary of any sort of blocked attempts
to log on or anything that is wrong with your web site it will automatically send you alerts if you
have plug ins that are out of date or if there are files or any attempted attacks on your Web site as
you can see there are a lot of options and a lot of things going on with word fence and there could
be an entire course on how to use word fence for your Wordpress Web site.
But like I said this is a pretty plug and play plug in so now that you haven't installed you can kind
of rest assured that your web site is pretty darn safe.
Thanks for watching and that's how you protect your wordpress site.