#Hacked – Six Things You Can Do To Make Your WordPress Blog Safer.

This post is written by Mark Twain who works for a conversion rate optimization company Invesp and blogs mainly about landing page templates, conversion rate optimization, SEO and affiliate marketing.

WordPress is the most popular blogging platform on web mainly due to its easy and user-friendlyplatform, which has made the blogging so easy, that even a person with no technical knowledge can learn in it ten minutes.  The huge popularity of WordPress has also made it the primary target of Hackers. In this article we’ll cover six thing which you should do to make your WordPress blog safer.

Some posts ago we covered some stories about WordPress being hacked and I also told you about some of my friends who got hacked many times and also I shared a fact that “Hackers Compete“.

Remove The Footprints – This is the easiest way a hacker can use to find your blog. Almost all WordPress themes come with a footer credit – something like “theme by XYZ”. So, In case a hacker finds an exploit in any such theme, he can easily find you by doing a Google Search for that Footprint and can easily compile the list of blogs using that theme.

To delete the Footprint, go to Theme Editor Option in your Dashboard, Find the file named “Footer.php” and remove the links. In this way, your website will not appear in such search queries.

Remove The Meta Generator Tag – By default, almost all WordPress themes use a meta generator tag something like this –

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.7" />

This tag, tells the WordPress version you are using. In case a hacker finds an exploit in any WordPress version, All he has to do is to see your page code and check if you are using the same version or not.

To remove meta-generator Tag, Go again to the Theme Editor in your WordPress Dashboard, find a file named header.php, and delete the following code.

<meta content="WordPress <?php bloginfo('version'); ?>" /> <!-- leave this for stats -->

Remove Footprints Of Plugins – Many WordPress Plugins leave a footprint on the blogs, mostly linking back to developer’s site. You can easily remove such footprints by editing the Plugins file. In case you want to give recognition to those developers, it’s better to write a post and link to them, rather than linking from footprints.

Disable Directory Indexing – Directory indexing means when anyone can navigate to the directories on your server. Make sure that you’ve already disabled directory indexing. To check- type the following code after your domain name -  “/wp-content/plugins/”

Like this,

http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/

Now if you can see WordPress plugins for your website like this site,

http://www.yvideoblog.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/

Then please disable it ASAP. To disable directory indexing, just copy the following code in .htaccess file and upload it on your server.

Options –Indexes

Now, a 404 page will appear, when anyone tries to check the Plugins installed on your blog.

Hide Admin Directory – Okay. this tip is only for bloggers with some programming knowledge. By default the admin directory of wordpress blog is located at /wp-admin folder. You can change the name to any random name, So that hacker can’t find your admin directory easily. Here is a detailed tutorial about this – http://www.michiknows.com/2007/02/12/who-else-wants-to-hide-their-wordpress-admin-folder/

Avoid Shared Hosting- We’ll know that shared hosting is more vulnerable to Hacking. Most of these cheap hosting servers host 500-600 domains at one time and lack security infrastructures. So If possible go for a reputed hosting company with a good hosting plan.

Download Plugins From Official WordPress Site – This is not a rocket science tip. Just make sure that you download all your WordPress plugins from the WordPress site only and not from any other site.

These were the six things which you can do to make your WordPress blog safer. Do you know of any more tips? Then feel free to share them in the comments below.

Remember this post is written by Mark Twain. Don’t forget to thank him by commenting here!