How to make your WordPress site secure

When you run a small site with only a few visitors, the loss of data—although painful—will not necessarily cost you your income or many customers. If your site or WooCommerce store is the core of your company, however, you must make sure that even in the worst‑case scenario you can react quickly and restore a working version of the site.

But, as the old saying goes, “prevention is better than cure.” Let’s focus on what you can do to minimize the risk of attacks or errors on your site.

The single most important thing you should care about is SEO, and it just so happens that Google loves secure sites. Trust me: it is genuinely easy to check whether you’re running plugins that haven’t been updated in ages. If someone with zero experience can find that out, Google certainly can.

Is WordPress a secure platform?

Some people in IT still claim that WordPress is useless and insecure—nonsense when given without context.

• More than 40 % of all websites are built on WordPress. Because it is so widespread, there are tens of thousands of password‑guessing and hacking attempts every single day.
• WordPress is open source, and you can find thousands of plugins and themes for it, which means the odds that one of them is poorly written are high—and that, in turn, can make a site more vulnerable to attack.

That is why it is critical to use only tried‑and‑tested themes and plugins. Otherwise, you expose yourself to countless problems.

WordPress and WooCommerce Themes

If you are just starting to build a new site or store, you have two options. Each has its pros and cons, and even enormous projects can be tackled with either. Do not let anyone convince you that using a premade theme is “unprofessional.” Today there are many excellent themes written by extraordinarily talented developers.

1. Build a custom WordPress or WooCommerce theme from scratch with a development team.
   This is the best route if you have a larger budget, know exactly what you want, and—most important—are working with a team that knows exactly what it is doing.
2. Choose a premium theme that usually comes with tools allowing you to build virtually any site or store.

Risks of the second option

• Poor code quality: a theme written by people with little experience who ignore best practices.
• Lack of active support and updates: some themes, even good ones, may eventually be abandoned, causing major headaches.
• Feature bloat: some themes include so many functions that they constantly break. Because they must remain backward‑compatible, they are hard to improve over time.

Custom themes that have been built correctly and according to best practices do not require frequent updates. Well‑thought‑out themes already contain everything you need and, with proper testing, can serve you smoothly for a long time—remember that in IT “a long time” does not mean years; two years is an eternity. Premium themes, by contrast, are updated almost constantly, partly because their enormous feature sets are used by thousands of people, which means plenty of scenarios in which bugs appear or new features are requested.

Security problems arise when your custom theme contains extra functionality written badly, making the site vulnerable. With basic features, the risk is minimal—provided a qualified developer built the site and you regularly update WordPress itself. For premium themes, the main reason vulnerabilities arise is that, despite available updates, no one installs them. Throw in out‑of‑date plugins, and you have the perfect recipe for disaster.

Updating WordPress Plugins

Two points to remember about plugins:

1. You do not always need a plugin to implement a feature.
2. You should not treat WordPress or WooCommerce as a Swiss Army knife that does absolutely everything.

Before installing a plugin, check whether it might be faster and cleaner to pay a developer. Simple tasks can often be done in two hours, giving you exactly what you need. A generic plugin may ship with extra functions you will never use, yet you install it just to get the one feature you care about.

There is another category of plugins I personally dislike: those that turn WordPress into a CRM or add dozens of AI functions to autocomplete everything. Such plugins cause endless difficulties and drastically slow down the WordPress dashboard. They are always problematic and make it extremely hard to maintain full control of your site.

If you run a WooCommerce store, your site should only include plugins that extend e‑commerce features, not ones that graft on a lead‑management system or an email marketing platform. Mailing systems and CRMs, in my opinion, belong outside WordPress and should only be integrated with it; doing so will spare you many problems.

Running a dozen—or even several dozen—plugins always increases the chance that one of them is vulnerable. It is hard to maintain so many, so use only what you truly need.

Choosing the Right WordPress Hosting

This is a vast topic that deserves its own post, but here are the key points. There are so many hosting companies on the market that choosing one is hard. If you run WordPress sites or WooCommerce stores, consider hosting platforms dedicated to WordPress. They are more expensive, but in the long run you will actually save money: instead of manually cleaning an infected site or wrestling with backups, you can fix things in seconds yourself or ask support for help.

At Less Code we use Kinsta and are delighted with them—we have never had a support problem and have even gotten more help than the contract required. Another excellent provider is WP Engine, which offers similarly strong solutions.

WordPress‑specific hosts are ideal because every service they provide is designed for this CMS. From their dashboard you can manage plugins and themes, access SSH, and integrate Git. You get alerts about plugins or themes with known vulnerabilities so you can update them quickly. They also have their own security layers that block many bots before those bots can even attempt to break in.

WordPress Account Management

This sounds trivial, but remember these points and you will avoid disaster:

• Regularly check how many administrators there are in Users › All Users. If you stop working with someone, make sure that person’s account is removed.
• Sometimes a vulnerable plugin can create an administrator account without your knowledge. Check the list now and then.
• Use a password manager and take it seriously; if several people manage the site, each should use one.
• Never share one login among several employees. Every person should have a personal account—it costs nothing.
• Enable two‑factor authentication for WordPress logins; it protects you from many attacks.
  

The Most Popular Ways to Improve WordPress Security

Besides the topics covered above, here is an absolute must‑have checklist to secure your site:

• Keep WordPress core, themes, and plugins up to date.
• Run the latest supported version of PHP (good hosts do this automatically).
• Always use SSL certificates (obvious, but often neglected).
• Change the default login address from /wp-admin to a custom URL to avoid brute‑force attacks.
• Hide the WordPress version number.
• Change the default database table prefix.
• Use tools to monitor your site’s status—popular hosts like Kinsta include built‑in scanners that alert you to unusual activity or file changes.
• Add CAPTCHA on the login screen.
• Limit the number of failed login attempts.
• Disable file editing from within the WordPress admin panel.

Conclusion

Keeping a basic WordPress or WooCommerce site secure may look simple, but it stops being simple when you have to control a large, feature‑rich site with thousands of user accounts—especially when those accounts store sensitive data. Whenever you have doubts, hand the job to a company with real WordPress and WooCommerce experience. Reacting in time and setting things up properly is always cheaper than cleaning up after a mess. Prevention always costs less than rescue.