5 Best Free Plugins for WordPress Security
Did you know that by 2023, the United States will account for 50 percent of all breached data, roughly equating to 16.5 billion records? In fact, the US remains the number one target of cyber attacks in the world.
If you’ve recently invested in an e-commerce website, small business site, or blog, these figures will hit alarmingly close to home. After all, starting up a website requires paying for hosting, plugins, themes, website development, and more.
It’s a major investment of time, energy, and money. So, how do you safeguard your digital collateral from hackers and cybercriminals?
Read on to learn about the five best free plugins to secure your digital assets.
1. iThemes Security
With iTheme Security’s plugin, you add an extra layer of protection to your website login. How? By relying on Google reCAPTCHA to authenticate each login. That way, you can stop bots before they start causing trouble.
It also offers a file change detector. As a result, you can catch “messed up” files before they, in turn, mess up your website.
The plugin allows you to compare your WordPress core files against their latest versions. This function lets you quickly establish whether or not your files have been comprised by any malware.
It also includes brute force protection, strong password enforcement, 404 detections, and an “away mode” function. “Away mode” locks your WordPress dashboard when you’re not able to stay current on the latest updates.
2. Wordfence Security
One of the most popular WordPress security plugins out there, Wordfence Security is a must-have tool. It pairs security incident recovery tools with robust login features.
It also provides you with insight into hacking attempts and traffic changes over time. It even monitors live traffic keeping you apprised of Google crawl activity as well as the presence of bots, human visitors, and login and logout attempts.
Boasting the best firewall, it can fight spam, malware, and other cyber threats in real-time. Wordfence Security also contains its own comment spam filter as well as unique tools that allow you to sign into your website from your cell phone.
While the premium version starts at $99 per year, the free version proves powerful enough for smaller websites.
3. Sucuri Security
Like Wordfence security, Sucuri Security comes in both free and paid versions. Fortunately, the free plugin can handle most of your website needs providing bulletproof security.
The free features for this plugin include security activity auditing. This allows you to monitor just how well the plugin is actually protecting your site.
There’s also blacklist monitoring, file integrity monitoring, and security notifications and hardening. Best of all, you can count on instant notifications should a problem with your website arise.
4. WP fail2plan
WP fail2plan represents the one-hit wonder of the plugin world. That said, its “one hit” proves pretty darn important. You see, WP fail2plan protects against brute force attacks.
It does this through a unique approach that’s more effective than most security suite plugins alone. How does it work?
Quite simply, WP fail2plan keeps a record of all login attempts. It stores these records to the syslog using LOG_AUTH. Based on this information, you can choose to soft or hard ban a user.
5. Jetpack
Made by the people who brought us WordPress, Jetpack comes with a ton of features. These range from modules to speed up your site to spam protection and tools to strengthen your social media presence.
It also contains important security tools such as the “protect” module. Protect blocks suspicious activity as well as brute force attacks. It also supports whitelisting and has a useful downtime monitor.
These features make it a great all-around tool that removes the necessity for many other plugins. As a result, it remains the best WordPress security plugin out there.
Ready to learn more about how to keep your website safe? Find out more about cybersecurity training.
The Best Free Plugins to Protect Your Website
From the narrowly focused WP fail2plan’s total defense against brute force attacks to the varied functions of Jetpack, you’ve got many great options when it comes to the best free plugins to secure your site.
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