So you’ve just installed WordPress and you’ve performed the necessary first steps for building your site.

But you feel like you’ve forgotten something… and you probably have…oh right, the hackers!

How are you going protect your site from hackers and sleep well at night?

After all, over 30,000 sites are hacked per day on average and if the HeartBleed attack told us anything, it’s that it’s time to revamp our security efforts.

Don’t worry, you can sleep easy, as here the best WordPress security plugins that I highly recommend to protect your site.

A quick, but very important note: 

Read the installation instructions before installing anything! Be sure to perform a complete backup of your site before using this plugin as some of these plugins can make significant changes to your database and other site files which can be problematic for your existing WordPress sites.

iThemes Security

iThemes Security combines the best WordPress security features to act jointly in covering as many security holes on your website as possible.

iThemes Security will hide and alter whole sections of your website, such as changing the URLs for your dashboard areas (such as login and admin). You can also turn your dashboard onto “away mode” so that it turns off the ability to login for the period of time that you aren’t going to be going on to the site.

The power of this plugin also lies in its ability to constantly scan your website code and immediately report/fix vulnerabilities. It also prevents brute force attacks, keeps malicious bots that crawl your website out, and blocks attacks to your file systems and database.

If your site is attacked, iThemes Security keeps multiple backups and are always on the case. The plugin will even detects hidden 404 errors such as bad links and missing images, customizes default admin URLs, and removes your current version of jQuery (the one that comes with WordPress) and replaces it with a safer version.

Wordfence

Wordfence gets the ball rolling from the very moment that you install it and checks to see if your site is already infected. Through its Two Factor Authentication, it will offer you a security feature to log in on your website by using both your password and your cell phone as a physical token.

Wordfence Security will verify the integrity of your source code and it will block any potential threat by filtering live traffic on your website.

Wordfence tracks any attacks and other issues for every website that uses the plugin, and uses that knowledge to further protect your website in its subsequent updates. You can be sure that this team is staying current, and they offer a free scan for the HeartBleed vulnerability to all users.

The plugin also includes the Falcon Engine, which is a fast caching engine that reduces your web server disk and database activity to a minimum. For those with sprawling mutlisites, this plugin also offers multisite protection.

BulletProof Security

I love the name of this next WordPress security plugin. BulletProof Security protects your website from many kinds of attacks, including cross-site scripting, remote-file-inclusion, Base 64, SQL and Code Injection, and even a whole website hijack.

This plugin uses .htaccess website security, deriving its power from your .htaccess files. How? Well, these files must be processed before any other code on your website, so BulletProof security uses them to detect and block any malicious software before it reaches the WordPress backend.

Of course, if you do not know how to edit these files, BulletProof Security will automatically do it for you. But if you insist on editing them by yourself, then you can do that using the .htaccess File Editor.

This plugin also offers login security/monitoring and auto-restore while keeping your website’s performance smooth.

Antivirus

This plugin is just what the name suggests, a WordPress Antivirus Plugin. It performs automatic daily scans of your websites code, searching for loopholes in your themes, malware and spam injections and sends results directly to your email address. You may also perform a manual scan as well.

By scanning the code, this plugin will clean it up and optimize it. This is important feature, especially after you uninstall some plugins.

Limit Login Attempts

The Limit Login Attempts plugin does exactly as it says – you can set the number of times a user can fail to enter a password correctly at your admin login page. If a user fails to enter the correct password after a certain amount of times, it locks them out.

You can adjust your settings to set the amount of login attempts someone can make and how long they will be locked out for. So feel free to fend of the bots for as long as you would like! Make sure you don’t set punishments for failed logins that are too strict if you are prone to forgetting your own login credentials. Make sure you know where you keep all of your usernames and passwords at all times.

What Do You Think Are The Best WordPress Security Plugins?

Protecting your website is of utmost importance, so choose your method of security wisely! Do you have any other suggestions for the best WordPress security plugins? Let us know in the comments.