How secure is your WordPress website? There are many things that can be done in order to help make your website more hacker proof than you get when you do a simple install.
First of all, it is important to know that just about everything on your website – the pages, the blog posts, the comments, the users – just about everything gets saved in a database. A database is just like a very big file that is organized in an efficient manner. To make it efficient,聽 the database is organized into sections called tables. Think of it as many tables make up a database. There could be one table called PAGES for the Pages. There could be one table called USER for the User Information. There could be one table called POSTS for the Blog posts. Make sense? (These names are just as examples; some are called that, others have different names. No need to worry about what they really are at this point).
By default, WordPress has a ‘prefix’ before each name. So using the table names from my example, the ‘real’ names are wp_PAGES, wp_USER, wp_POSTS, etc. Now, hackers certainly know all the table names (and you will too shortly!). They also know that the default prefix is ‘wp_’. If your database uses the default prefix, a hacker knows exactly what all your table names are! This is not very safe!
If you never changed these, you need to as soon as possible!!
Before I write up detailed instructions on how to do this, please leave a comment and let me know if:
- You already did this and you are safe
- You heard about this before, but don’t know how to do it
- You never knew it, and never did it!
- You would like to know how to do it!
Thanks.
“You already did this and you are safe ” . . . heck Paul, you tought me how to do it
You are safe, Lar! The Coaching Program has many benefits! Glad you learned it, are practicing it, and are being safe!
I would like to learn how to do this! It’s getting scary I’m hearing more and more about people getting hacked.
Shawn – I will write a post on how to do this! Nothing to be scare of when you take the proper precautions! Give me a day or so, and I will get the info up here.
Oh I’m all done! Am I safe? Well safer than the majority of WP sites out there 馃檪
Excellent! Yes, you are safer than most people just by doing that! Well Done!
I think it’s a great piece of information. The most important thing to mention is that this is easily done when you are installing WordPress for the very first time (using whatever server provided installer) and it should be standard practice to do so.
Rob – You are correct! The earlier you do the, the better… But it can be performed on your database after 2 years, if you have never done it before! By the way, this is the one of the first steps that get covered in the 28-Day eCourse!