Website.
Security is so important.
It's crazy how many people will actually try to hack your website once you start to grow your traffic.
And if it wasn't for some security plugins like Word Fence Security, I'm sure that my website 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 website 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 word fence.
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 website, including
plug ins that are out of date, creating a firewall against hackers who try to maliciously add files
or do something to your website.
It also automatically blocks IP addresses of people who have tried to log in to your website 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's enables, what's not enabled.
You can see that the firewall 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 website, 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's logging in or attempting to log in to your website.
You'll see countries that are attacking here.
But the main thing is that you have to configure this plugin first.
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 website 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 php 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.
This 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 and security options.
So this is where if someone does get to your login 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 5 minutes.
It seems pretty fine.
So make sure, though, that you do remember your password so you don't get automatically locked out
because you could be blocked.
Word fence will also send you a weekly summary of any sort of blocked attempts to log on or anything
that is wrong with your website.
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 website.
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 website.
But like I said, this is a pretty plug and play plug in.
So now that you have an installed, you can kind of rest assured that your website is pretty darn safe.
Thanks for watching and that's how you protect your WordPress site.