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There’s a particular kind of panic that comes with discovering your business website has been hacked.
Maybe customers are suddenly being redirected to a suspicious online pharmacy. Perhaps your website has disappeared altogether. Or worse, someone’s gotten into your database, and you’re now wondering how much customer information they managed to take with them.
None of these situations makes for a particularly enjoyable Monday morning.
The frustrating part is that many website security problems are preventable. Not all of them, of course. Cybercriminals are resourceful, and even well-maintained systems can be compromised. But an alarming number of businesses still treat website security as something to worry about after something goes wrong.
And by then, the damage may already be done.
For businesses relying on WordPress, protecting your website means looking beyond hackers and suspicious login attempts. Server failures happen. People accidentally delete things. Software updates occasionally go sideways. A perfectly innocent mistake can be just as destructive as a deliberate attack.
So how do you protect your website, your customer information, and potentially years of accumulated business data?
Here are nine areas worth paying attention to.
1. Daily Website Backups: Your Last Line of Defence
Let’s start with the one that can save your business a tremendous amount of grief.
Back up your website. Every day. Without exception.
Your website contains more than a collection of pages and photographs. Depending on your business, it may also hold customer records, orders, account information, form submissions, and content that took years to develop.
Losing that information can be expensive. Recreating it might be impossible.
An automated backup system should capture both your website files and database. Ideally, those backups should be stored somewhere other than the server hosting your website.
Why? Because if your server suffers a catastrophic failure, having your only backup sitting on that same server isn’t going to help much.
There’s another detail people frequently overlook: backup restoration testing.
A backup is only valuable if you can successfully restore it. Regularly testing that process is considerably more reassuring than discovering your backup files are corrupted while your website is offline.
For busy e-commerce websites or membership platforms, daily backups might not be enough to ensure no data loss in the case of a security incident where you had to revert to the day before. If you’re processing tens or hundreds of orders throughout the day, losing 24 hours of transactions could create a serious problem.
Your backup frequency should reflect how much data your business can realistically afford to lose.
2. Keep WordPress, Themes, and Plugins Updated
WordPress powers a substantial portion of the internet, which makes it both an excellent website platform and an attractive target for cybercriminals.
Fortunately, WordPress itself is actively maintained. The bigger concern is often what people install alongside it.
That plugin someone added three years ago to display a fancy image gallery? If the developer abandoned it, there may be security vulnerabilities that haven’t been addressed.
Hackers don’t need to personally discover every vulnerable website. Automated tools can scan thousands of websites looking for known weaknesses in outdated software.
Keeping WordPress, themes, and plugins updated closes many of those doors.
A few sensible habits to regularly adhere to can make a big difference for site security:
- Apply security updates promptly.
- Remove plugins and themes you’re no longer using.
- Choose software from established, reputable developers.
- Check compatibility and test significant updates before applying them to your live website.
Automatic updates can be useful, particularly for security fixes. But websites with custom functionality or complex integrations deserve a little more attention.
A successful site update shouldn’t leave your contact forms broken or your shopping cart refusing to cooperate. We would consider that a very unsuccessful update.
3. Stop Making Passwords Easy to Guess
Somewhere out there, someone is still using “admin123” to protect something important.
Hopefully, it isn’t you.
Weak passwords are an obvious security risk, but reusing passwords can be even more dangerous. If your credentials are exposed in a breach involving another service, criminals may try those same credentials against your WordPress website, email, hosting account, and other systems.
When creating passwords for your various accounts, use a different, lengthy password for every account. Many platforms requiring passwords have character minimums, but if you come across one that does not, we recommend at least 8-10 characters. More is better. A reputable password manager can generate and remember them, saving you from having to memorize a sequence of numbers, letters, and symbols that looks like your cat took a walk across your keyboard.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is equally important. It adds another verification step when someone attempts to log in, making stolen passwords considerably less useful.
And don’t overlook your email account. If someone controls the email address used to reset your website’s passwords, they may not need your WordPress credentials at all.
4. Give Your Website a Proper Firewall
A web application firewall, commonly called a WAF, helps filter suspicious traffic before it reaches vulnerable parts of your website.
Think of it as having someone watch the entrance rather than waiting to discover an intruder wandering around inside.
Security solutions such as Wordfence, Cloudflare, and Sucuri can help identify malicious requests, block automated attacks, and restrict suspicious activity.
But installing a firewall doesn’t mean you’re finished.
Security monitoring and malware scans remain important, as does having someone respond when a genuine threat is detected. An alert sitting unread in an inbox for six weeks isn’t particularly helpful.
Neither is a firewall protecting a website that hasn’t been updated since 2019.
5. Be Careful Who Has Administrator Access
WordPress allows you to assign different permission levels to different users. That’s a feature worth taking advantage of.
Someone responsible for updating blog posts doesn’t necessarily need administrator privileges. Neither does a contractor uploading photographs.
Administrator accounts can make substantial changes to a website, including installing software, changing settings, and managing other users.
Limit that access to people who genuinely require it.
Avoid predictable administrator usernames such as “admin,” remove accounts belonging to former employees or contractors, and make sure everyone uses their own login credentials.
Shared administrator accounts might seem convenient until something goes wrong and nobody can determine who made the change.
6. Protect Your WordPress Database
Your WordPress database is where much of your website’s important information lives.
It’s worth looking after.
Proper database security includes strong credentials, restricted access, current database software, and dependable backups.
You may also encounter recommendations to change the default WordPress database table prefix, wp_.
While a custom prefix can interfere with certain simplistic automated attacks, it offers limited protection against more sophisticated threats. It shouldn’t be mistaken as a meaningful substitute for proper security controls.
Changing the prefix on an established website also requires care. Done incorrectly, it can break things rather spectacularly.
Focus first on protecting database credentials, limiting unnecessary access, and ensuring your backups work.
Those measures will generally accomplish far more.
7. Disable Directory Browsing and Secure Sensitive Files
Here’s something you probably don’t want: visitors being able to browse directories containing files that were never intended for public viewing.
Depending on how your web server is configured, directory browsing may expose file names and folder structures that provide useful information to an attacker.
Disabling it is a straightforward precaution.
Your hosting environment should also restrict access to configuration files, database backups, logs containing sensitive information, and other resources that don’t belong on the public internet.
These are largely server-level considerations, which is another good reason to choose a hosting provider that understands WordPress rather than simply offering somewhere inexpensive to park it.
8. Review Whether You Need XML-RPC
WordPress includes a feature called XML-RPC that allows certain external applications to communicate with your website.
It has legitimate uses, although many modern WordPress websites don’t require it.
Unfortunately, XML-RPC can also be targeted by automated login attacks.
If your website doesn’t depend on the feature, restricting or disabling it may reduce unnecessary exposure.
Before making changes, check whether any existing integrations rely on it. Turning off something without understanding what it does is a surprisingly effective way to create an entirely different problem.
9. Turn Off Comments If Nobody Uses Them
Not every business website needs a comment section.
If you’re operating a professional services website and haven’t approved a genuine comment in years, there’s little reason to leave comments enabled while spam submissions pile up.
Disable comments where they serve no useful purpose.
If comments, user registrations, or submission forms are important to your website, protect them with appropriate spam controls, software updates, and moderation.
Also consider what information you’re collecting through those forms. Every unnecessary piece of personal data creates another responsibility if your website is compromised.
Secure Hosting Is Where Everything Comes Together
You can have excellent passwords, updated plugins, and a perfectly configured firewall, but none of that makes up for unreliable hosting infrastructure.
Choosing a hosting provider based entirely on price is a little like selecting a business insurance policy because you liked the colour of the brochure.
The details matter.
A good managed WordPress hosting provider should offer reliable backups, proactive maintenance, server-level security, monitoring, and knowledgeable technical support.
Equally important is what happens when something goes wrong.
Who investigates a suspected compromise? Who restores your backups? How quickly can you reach someone who understands your website?
It’s worth getting clear answers before you need them.
For Canadian businesses, server location and data-handling practices may also matter, particularly when personal or confidential information is involved. Canadian hosting can be helpful, although server location alone doesn’t guarantee privacy or regulatory compliance.
How Digital Tea Helps Keep Your Website Secure
At Digital Tea, we’ve been designing, developing, and hosting websites since 1999. We’ve also learned that maintaining a website deserves considerably more attention than it usually receives.
Our Managed WordPress Hosting and Website Maintenance services include nightly backups, daily plugin and theme maintenance, and servers protected by built-in firewalls.
We host websites on servers located in Edmonton, Alberta, backed by a local team that understands the websites we build and maintain.
There are no guarantees in cybersecurity. Anyone promising a completely hacker-proof website is making a claim they can’t reasonably support.
What we can do is reduce avoidable risks, keep important systems maintained, and help ensure there’s a plan for recovering when things don’t go as expected.
Frequently Asked Questions About Website Security
How often should a WordPress website be backed up?
Daily backups are a sensible minimum solution for most business websites. Websites processing frequent orders, registrations, or higher customer transactions may need more frequent backups. Keep historical copies offsite and periodically test restoration.
Can hackers steal customer information from a WordPress website?
Yes. Hackers can steal customer information from a variety of different sites. Depending on the vulnerability and information stored, attackers may gain access to customer records, account information, or other sensitive data. Proper access controls, software maintenance, secure hosting, and appropriate data protection measures help to significantly reduce that risk.
Is WordPress secure enough for a business website?
Yes, provided it’s properly configured, hosted, and maintained. WordPress is actively developed and receives regular security updates. When problems do arise, its frequently caused by vulnerable third-party software, poor credentials, or inadequate website management.
Does having an SSL certificate protect my website from hackers?
An SSL certificate enables encrypted connections between your website and its visitors. That’s important, but it doesn’t protect against compromised administrator accounts, vulnerable plugins, malware, or server configuration problems.
What should I do if my website has already been hacked?
Hacking is serious and should be treated as an emergency. Step one is to contact your hosting provider or website developer immediately. The affected website may need to be isolated from other sites on the server while the incident is investigated. Recovery can involve removing malicious files, addressing the original vulnerability, changing credentials, and restoring a verified clean backup. If personal information was compromised, you may also have legal notification obligations.
A Little Prevention Beats a Very Expensive Recovery
Most business owners have better things to do than monitor suspicious login attempts or check whether a plugin released a security patch overnight.
That’s understandable.
But ignoring website security doesn’t make the risks disappear. It simply leaves them for another day, potentially a much more expensive one.
Take the time to review your backups, software updates, user permissions, and hosting arrangements. Make sure someone is actually responsible for keeping those protections in place.
And if you’re not entirely confident about how well your website would survive a serious security incident, that’s a conversation worth having.
Digital Tea can help you protect your website and the business that depends on it. Learn more about our secure hosting and maintenance services or give us a call at 780-473-4600.
