WordPress is one most popular and famous content management system in the world. That popularity makes it a top choice for hackers. It is incredibly secure at its core and known for its bullet proof security. The extensive ecosystem of WordPress plugins and themes makes it vulnerable to security issues. A user must use WordPress Security Plugins to protect your WordPress website against these security risks.
In this article, we will learn six best WordPress Security Plugins. Each of them will have features list for the better decision.
Table of Contents
How do WordPress Security Plugin work?
Well, setting security plugins on the WordPress site has three standard steps. First, a user needs to find a WordPress security plugin according to his needs. Install the Plugin on your WordPress site and finally activate the Plugin on your WordPress site’s dashboard.
Note: You cannot use WordPress security plugins on the WordPress.com site. The user can use WordPress security plugins only on self-hosted sites like WordPress.org. According to current policy, WordPress.com Business plan users can install third-party plugins to their sites. Still, average WordPress users cannot install their plugins.
What are the Best WordPress Plugins for Security?
1. Sucuri
Sucuri is an industry leader in the WordPress security world and one of the best WordPress security plugins in the market. It offers an essential free Sucuri Security plugin that helps users harden WordPress security and scan the WordPress website for common threats. The original value is in the paid plans that come with the best WordPress firewall protection. A firewall helps users block brute force and malicious attacks from accessing WordPress. The Plugin Sucuri firewall filters out horrible traffic even before it reaches your server. It also serves static content from their CDN servers. Apart from security, its DNS level firewall with CDN gives you a tremendous performance boost and speeds up the website.
Most importantly, it offers to clean up your WordPress site if it is affected by malware at no additional cost. Users can even take a website already affected by malware, and it will clean it up for users. Users use Sucuri on all their websites.
Sucuri Security plugin has 800,000+ active installations currently. The average rating of Sucuri Plugin is 4.3 out of 5 stars with 345 reviews.
Features of Sucuri Security Plugin:
- Security Activity Auditing
- File Integrity Monitoring
- Remote Malware Scanning
- Blocklist Monitoring
- Effective Security Hardening
- Post-Hack Security Actions
- Security Notifications
- Website Firewall [in Premium version]
2. Wordfence
Wordfence is a popular WordPress security plugin. It offers a free version of its Plugin, which comes complete with a powerful malware scanner, exploit detection, and threat assessment features. This security plugin will automatically scan the website for common threats, but users can also launch a full scan at any time. Users will alert if any signs detect a security breach with the instructions to fix the seen signs. Wordfence comes with a built-in WordPress firewall. However, this firewall runs on the server just before loading the WordPress site. The process makes it a little less effective than a DNS-level firewall like Sucuri.
Wordfence Security plugin has 800,000+ active installations currently. The average rating of Wordfence Plugin is 4.3 out of 5 stars with 345 reviews.
Features of Wordfence Security Plugin:
- Web Application Firewall
- Integrated Malware Scanner
- Login Security
- Two Factors Authentication
- Security Tools
- Real-time Firewall and Malware Signatures [in Premium version]
- IP Blocklist [in Premium version]
3. iThemes
iThemes Security is another WordPress security plugin from the folks behind the famous BackupBuddy Plugin. Like all their products, iThemes Security offers a friendly, clean user interface with many options. This Plugin comes with sub-directory integrity checks, security hardening, limited login attempts, vigorous password enforcement, 404 detections, brute force protection, and many more. iThemes Security does not include any website firewall. It also does not have its malware scanner and uses Sucuri’s Site check malware scanner.
iThemes Security plugin has 1+ million active installations currently. The average rating of iThemes Plugin is 4.7 out of 5 stars with 3,842 reviews.
Features of iThemes Security Plugin:
- Two Factor Authentication
- WordPress Salts and Security Keys
- Malware Scan Scheduling
- Password Security
- Google reCAPTCHA
- User Action Login
- Dashboard Widget
- Online File Comparison
- Temporary Privilege Escalation
- wp-CLI Integration
4. All in One WP Security
All in One Security plugin is a robust WordPress security auditing, monitoring, and firewall plugin. It enables a user to apply basic WordPress security best practices on the website easily. This Plugin has features like login lockdown to avoid brute force attacks, IP filtering, file integrity monitoring, account monitoring, also scan for suspicious patterns of database injections, and much more. It also contains a basic website-level firewall that can detect some common patterns and block them for the user. However, it isn’t very efficient, and often a user will be required to blacklist suspicious IPs manually.
All in One Security plugin has 900,000+ active installations currently. The average rating of All in One Plugin is 4.8 out of 5 stars with 1,061 reviews.
Features of All in One Security Plugin:
- Scanning
- IP filtering
- Login lockdowns
- Password strength tool
- Account monitoring
- A website-level firewall
- Manually blacklist suspicious IP addresses
5. Anti-Malware
Anti-Malware Security is a helpful WordPress anti-malware and security plugin. This Plugin has actively maintained definitions that help it find the most common threats. Its malware scanner allows a user to quickly scan all directories and sub-directories on the WordPress website for malicious code, backdoors, malware, and other known patterns of malicious attacks. It requires a user to create a free account on the Plugin’s website to access the latest reports and get some premium features like brute force prevention. The Plugin also makes a call to the developers’ website to look for the updated words. While the Plugin runs through tests, it often shows a large number of not true positives. Matching each one out of them with the source file is quite a lot of work.
Anti-Malware Security plugin has 200,000+ active installations currently. The average rating of Anti-Malware Plugin is 4.9 out of 5 stars with 681 reviews.
Features of Anti-Malware Security Plugin:
- Download Definition Updates
- Complete Scan
- Firewall Block SoakSoak
- Upgrade vulnerable versions
- Integrating checking [in Premium version]
- Automatically updates checking [in Premium version]
6. WPScan
WPScan is a different or unique WordPress security plugin because it uses its own manually curated WordPress vulnerability database updated daily by dedicated WordPress security specialists and community members. It scans user’s websites for over 21,000 known security vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins, themes, and core software. A user can schedule automated daily scans and get email notifications of the results. This Plugin has a free security API suitable for most websites, but a user can upgrade to the paid plan if the user has a more binding site and uses many plugins.
WPScan Security plugin has 6,000+ active installations currently. The average rating of WPScan Plugin is 4.1 out of 5 stars with 19 reviews.
Features of WPScan Security Plugin:
- Check for debug.log files
- wp-config.php backup files
- XML-RPC is enabled or not
- Code repository files checking
- Default secret keys are used or not
- Exported database files
- Weak passwords
- HTTPS enabled
Conclusion
In conclusion, we discussed WordPress Security plugins. Many Security plugins options are available, but we saw six of them with advanced features. Users can use the WordPress Security Plugins to protect their websites from hackers or attackers.
