Many business owners treat WordPress website security incidents as something that happens to someone else. But the reality is that security breaches are common, with nearly three-quarters of respondents (72%) to a 2024 Melapress WordPress security survey reporting at least one security breach.
This is not surprising given the popularity of WordPress websites and the widespread reliance on third-party plugins and themes that contain security flaws. Implementing a security automation strategy to address this pervasive threat is a crucial step in proactively safeguarding your business website.
It’s understandable that site security is not always top of mind for business owners. But the threats from cyberattacks are many. Automating as much of the security practice for your WordPress website as possible can greatly reduce your risk.
Automation offers proactive protection, enabling continuous monitoring and defense against threats before they can do damage. It also reduces the risk of human error in your security management, preventing the kind of costly mistakes that humans are prone to. Importantly, automation can provide timely security assistance, enabling you to respond to threats in real-time or near real-time. Quick response is crucial for mitigating fast-spreading attacks.
Automating security delivers needed efficiencies for hardworking site owners, saving staff time and resources by reducing manual security checks and allowing staff to focus their efforts on more strategic efforts to help grow the business. As your business grows, automated security is easier to scale, keeping it secure every step of the way.
There are many aspects to securing your WordPress website. Knowing where to focus your automation efforts will save you lots of time and safeguard your business against the wide range of cyberthreats seeking to harm it. Automating processes in these seven areas will vastly improve your security posture and keep your site available and ready for business.
From a risk management perspective, it’s best to plan for circumstances when a cyberattack successfully takes down your website. The best defense for that scenario is having an automated backup process in place that regularly backs up your files on a regular ongoing timeframe, whether that’s monthly, weekly, daily, or hourly. Save your backups to a remote location for redundancy, using a cloud service like Amazon S3, Dropbox, or Google Cloud to accommodate your full backups. WordPress plugins like Duplicator, UpdraftPlus, or Jetpack VaultPress Backup can be used to automate your backups.
With many WordPress websites averaging 20-30 plugins, manually monitoring and updating plugins, as well as additional themes and WordPress core, is simply not feasible. Automating vulnerability scanning of your website provides quick updates to these core elements, as well as access to real-time alerts for identified vulnerabilities. The WPScan plugin can help automate this valuable process, as can Patchstack.
Malware is sneaky and can be operating hidden on a website for some time before it gets noticed by an admin. Automating the scanning and quarantine or removal of malicious files and suspicious code on a continuous basis can greatly reduce the window of time a malware threat has to operate. Malcure is an effective plugin for defending against malware.
Automating firewalls helps you guard your WordPress website from malicious traffic. You will want a firewall tool that can protect at the DNS level, routing your traffic through cloud proxy servers and delivering only genuine traffic to your servers. Application-level firewalls are also good options, examining traffic once it reaches the server but before loading WordPress scripts. DNS-level firewalls have the benefit of reducing overall traffic to the website, while application-level tools do not. You will want to have the firewall rulesets set to update automatically to address new threats as they emerge. Cloudflare and Sucuri are two effective firewall plugins to consider.
Managing website intrusions requires a lot of security knowledge and greatly benefits from automation. As part of your overall security strategy, you need an intrusion detection system (IDS), which is focused on continuously monitoring your WordPress website fo r suspicious activity. Automating this process generates an automated log of website activity and also generates email alerts to admins when a problem is detected. Some plugins will have rules-based responses that automatically block malicious traffic or access to specific files on your website. Wordfence is an IDS plugin that offers strong security support.
Automating the update process for WordPress Core, plugins, and themes provides greater security by patching up vulnerabilities as soon as they are detected and fixed by the developer. This prevents cyberattackers from taking advantage of them and keeps your website and its valuable data secure. The WP Auto Updater plugin automates the update process for WordPress Core, plugins, and themes. You can also secure the update process with a tool like WP Staging that tests updates in a staging environment to mitigate any risks before taking the new plugin or theme live on your website.
Being able to automate access control on your WordPress website makes it easier to enforce strong password policies to safeguard your site. This can include limiting login attempts to prevent brute-force attacks and supporting two-factor authentication (2FA) enforcement, which provides a second layer of security to screen users, requiring users to verify their identity in two ways, such as a username and password as well as a verification code pushed out to their mobile device. The WP 2FA plugin can provide that second layer of security for your site.
Automating as much of your WordPress website security as you can is itself a good best practice to follow to maintain your website. In your efforts to automate security, be sure to choose reputable and well-maintained security plugins. There are many options available, so do your research so you know exactly what you’re getting. Be careful and thorough as you configure and automate your security plugins.
Once set up, regularly review the security logs and reports. Stay familiar with the regular traffic and activity patterns of your website so you can spot anomalies when they occur. Also, be sure you stay on top of software updates so no easy opportunities are left open too long for attackers to exploit.
In automating security efforts as much as possible with your WordPress website, you are proactively getting out ahead of security threats before they impact you. This promotes timely responses to security threats, which reduces the opportunities for attackers to strike. This will save you staff time and effort, allowing you to focus on efforts to grow and scale your business. Security is an ongoing process, but the quicker you are in a position to automate and manage it, the stronger you will be in the long run.
As a security-focused hosting provider, Pressable understands how important security is to the overall success of WordPress websites. We support our customers by regularly scanning for known threats and WordPress vulnerabilities. We also keep our WordPress core updated, give you access to the latest version of Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP), back up your website daily, and run a web application firewall (WAF) — all to keep your business safe and thriving.
Pressable—part of the Automattic family that also includes WordPress.com, WordPress VIP, and WooCommerce—offers experts with the skills and knowledge to effectively manage your WordPress site.
If you’re thinking about switching to managed WordPress hosting, schedule a demo to see how Pressable can support your continued security and growth.
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