Best WordPress Security Plugins 2024

WordPress Hacking is BIG Threat and you need to have effective security mechanism to keep hackers at bay in 2024? This works in same way as we have to install security cameras to protect a commercial space. ?️ Wondering, which are the best wordpress plugins for security? In this post, We have listed various security plugins for WordPress site and how to install and use these plugins to protect your website against malware threats, brute force attacks, DDOS attacks etc.

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You might be also interested in – Best WordPress Vulnerability Scanners Online 2024

In previous article, we discussed about different WordPress Vulnerabilities. We already know that a major reason behinds the vulnerability is abandoned or outdated plugins. Now you must be thinking that Which is the best wordpress security plugin? There are hundreds of plugins available for WordPress to protect and safeguard your site from a number of web vulnerabilities. Check out our huge list of  WordPress security plugins ranked on basis of popularity, reviews and number of installs.

NOTE – A wordpress security plugin can also help you detect vulnerable wordpress plugins during each sca. Such vulnerable plugins are the top reason websites get hacked, generally. Check out our WordPress Security News page for weekly updated list of vulnerable plugins.

Why Do You Need A WordPress Security Plugin?

Don’t take website security too casually. Do you know that: at any given time, there are about 18.5 million websites on the internet which are infected with any kind of malware, with the average website attacked over 40 times per day. There are number of ways to hack WordPress, some of the most common ones are WordPress malware redirect, Japanese keyword hack, WordPress pharma hack, WordPress DDOS attack, WordPress XSS attack, brute force attack on WordPress, and many more.
The End point is – Your site gets hacked and blacklisted in google and even more deadly cases, your SEO is lost, Google Ads are Disapproved Due To Malware and Google starts showing “This Site May Be Hacked” message in Google
Hacked website can result in:

• inability to visit / login wp-admin
• Loss of access to your website,
• Loss of your data,
• Theft of private information
• Use of your website to distribute malicious code or WordPress ransomware
• Surge in number of wordpress errors on your website. some of the most common ones are 503 Service Unavailable Error, Parse Error: Syntax Error Unexpected, Error Establishing a Database Connection and many more.

There are number of factors which can be exploited by a hacker to break into your site. Here are some of them:

• WordPress Hosting vulnerabilities.
• WordPress plugin security.
• FTP vulnerabilities.
• Weak passwords.
• Users permissions.
• Your computer security.
• WordPress Theme security.
• Incorrect File and folder permissions.
• WordPress database security.

There are a number of free and paid plugins that you can use for your WordPress website. These plugins offer you a wide range of features to make your website secure against external threats. You need to keep these plugins up-to-date with every latest version available to keep a check on latest exploits and threats.
You can add following features to your site with the help of these plugins:

• Support for Major Theme and Plugins
• IPv6 Compatible.
• Login Security.
• WordPress Firewall.
• IP Blocking Features.
• Security Scanning.
• Multi-Site Security.
• Monitoring Features. [Also Read – Track (Monitor) User Activity in WordPress ]

If you are a WordPress website owner and still unaware of WordPress security installation, thankfully we are here to guide you with the wordpress security plugins in 2020. But before that, a few quick bites for you.


Before getting started with the complete list here.

Do a WordPress Security Scan ?

Do you think that your WordPress site has been hacked? Or you want to find out what is going on with your site right now? A WordPress security scan is the way to go before we proceed to the list of security plugins.

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PLUGIN NAME	RATINGS	ACTIVE INSTALLS
Wordfence	4.6 / 5	2+ million
BulletProof Security	4.6 / 5	90,000+
iThemes Security	4.7 / 5	800,000+
MalCare	4.5 / 5	20,000+
All In One WP Security & Firewall	4.8 / 5	600,000+
WebDefender	4.3 / 5	2,000+
Shield Security	3.6/5	70,000+
Akismet Anti-Spam	4.8 / 5	5+ million
Anti-spam	4.8 / 5	100,000+
WPBruiser	4.9/5	10,000+
WPS Hide Login	4.5 / 5	200,000+
IP Geo Block	4.7 / 5	30,000+
Login LockDown	4.6 / 5	200,000+
AskApache Password Protect	3/5	3,000+
Brute Force Login Protection	4.2/ 5	20,000
VaultPress	4.5 / 5	90,000+
UpdraftPlus	4/5	1+ million
User locker	4.5 / 5	3,000+
BackWPup	4/5	600,000+
BackUpWordPress	4.7 / 5	200,000+
Email Address Encoder	4.6 / 5	100,000+
TG Email Protection	1/5	100+
WebEmailProtector	4.4/5	800+
Jetpack	4.5 / 5	4+ million
WP Mailto Links – Manage Email Links	4.6 / 5	10,000+
WP Force SSL	4.7 / 5	50,000+
Admin SSL	4.3 / 5	1,000+
Really Simple SSL	4.8 / 5	700,000+
SSL Insecure Content Fixer	4.8 / 5	100,000+
WP Security Audit Log	4.7	10,000+
Hide My WP	4.5 / 5	9,000+

WordFence – FireWall & Malware Scan

WordPress Security plugin Wordfence is the world’s most popular WordPress firewall and security solution that protects your site with new firewall rules malware signatures and malicious IP addresses required to keep your website clean.

Download Wordfence

BulletProof Security

BulletProof Security is another popular WordPress security plugin that takes care of different security threats as:

• Limits failed login attempts, checks for fake traffic, IP blocking and code scanners.
• Keeps on checking the code of WordPress core files, themes and plugins.
• Optimizes the performance of your website by adding caching.
• Protects WordPress websites against various WordPress vulnerabilities including XSS, RFI, CRLF, CSRF, Base64, Code Injection, SQL Injection and many other.

It also has a pro version with advanced features that works to improve the security of your website. But the free version is popular enough to make your website secure.

Download BulletProof Security

iThemes Security

Formerly known as Better WP Security, iThemes Security is built and designed with 30+ ways to protect your website from web attacks due to plugin vulnerabilities. Being a popular WordPress security tool since 2008, iThemes Security works to fix common loopholes, keeps checks on password strength, and locks down your WordPress website for any WordPress vulnerabilities.

Download Better WP Security

MalCare – A Complete WordPress Security Solution

MalCare is a comprehensive and powerful security plugin for WordPress websites that not only auto-cleans a hacked site but also prevents further security compromise. The security plugin’s main features include:

• A powerful Scanner that detects the most new and hard-to-find malware without slowing down your website.
• An easy-to-use Cleaner that wipes every trace of malware from your WordPress site.
• MalCare Firewall bans bad IPs as well as malicious login attempts made by bots.
• The security solution also enables users to Update Plugins, Themes, and WordPress Core of several sites from a single dashboard.
• The Site Hardening features prevent unauthorized personnel from making changes to your site.
• And regular Backups (powered by BlogVault) which you can access for up to 365 days.

Along with these notable security features, MalCare also offers White-Labeling and Client Reporting features that’ll prove to be helpful for anyone who manages client websites

All In One WP Security & Firewall

This plugin is a comprehensive security tool that will drive the security of your wordpress website to a completely new level. The All in One WP Security wordpress plugin implements latest recommended security checks and techniques WP in order to reduce vulnerability risks. It is completely free and easy to use. You can visit All In One WP Security & Firewall and easily download or update your plugin here.

Download All In One WP Security & Firewall

Anti Spam:

These plugins employ services to protect your website against various WordPress Vulnerabilities which leads to attacks such as Japanese SEO spam, gibberish keywords hack, WordPress Redirect Hack & many more. Popular anti-spam plugins offered by WordPress are:

WebDefender

Webdefender is the topmost security plugin that offers a variety of professional tools to protect and safeguard your website against web attacks. Main features are:

• • • Webdefender is built with a passive WAF (Web Application Firewall) which is a special security mechanism for hack protection.
    • A multi-functional antivirus scanner with advanced security features to protect your site from external threats.
    • An Updater to update your WP core versions, themes and plugins automatically.

Download WebDefender

Shield Security

Shield is a powerful wp security plugin that handles a number of security issues of your WordPress website. Shield offers an easy-to-setup user interface for its customers with salient features like:

• • • Blocks malicious URLs and requests
    • Prevents brute force attacks on each login attempt.
    • Verify user identity with email-based Two-Factor Authentication
    • WordPress Automatic Updates for Plugins, Themes and more.
    • Blocks all web requests that violate the firewall security rules.

The Shield is built to be highly reliable and easy to use by anyone. You can easily download download Shield Security and install in easy 4 steps.

Akismet Anti-Spam

If a visitor leaves any comment on your signup form or in the comment section below your blog post, it can be either a spam or a misleading link which may impact be malicious link injected to spread malware or to misguide users to other websites. Akismet is an anti-spam security WordPress plugin featured to check all comments that come from user end protects your site from publishing malicious content. It filters out the spam messages and only approved ones are visible to website users.

Anti-spam

Anti Spam is the one of the most popular WordPress Anti Spam Plugins that is easy to install and use and blocks spam in comments under blog section or malicious links given by hackers. It’s an open source software and you can download Anti-spam to block spams in particularly comment section.

WPBruiser

WPBruiser{no- Captcha anti-Spam} is an anti-spam wp security WordPress plugin that detects the spam bots without any captcha tool. The captcha tools have resulted in annoying site visitors and are hard to read sometimes so take time to enter the website. Thus, WPBruiser is smartly designed with the purpose to eliminate spam-bot signups, spam comments, even brute force attacks on your WordPress website.
Login Protection: The simplest way to deal with login security issues and different login attacks is to install best login protection plugins to your latest WordPress installation.

WPS Hide Login

WPS Hide Login is a very lightweight essential WordPress security plugin that permits you to change the URL of the login form page very securely. When you enable this plugin to your WP site, the wp-admin directory and the wp-login.php page become inaccessible so you need to add the bookmark before implementing the plugin to your WordPress site. WPS Hide Login is compatible with other plugins that are linked to login page, for example – Login Limit Attempts. This is a open source software and you can use it very easily.

IP Geo Block

This plugin blocks the undesired access to the back-end or admin section of the website. IP Geo Block validates the access to the entrances into back-end such as wp-comments-post.php, xmlrpc.php, wp-login.php, wp-signup.php, wp-admin/admin.php, wp-admin/admin-ajax.php, wp-admin/admin-post.php through IP address using country code. Thus protects your website from being hacked. Additional features includes prevention against brute force attacks, limited login attempts and many more. IP Geo Block Plugin is one of the best free WordPress security plugins downloaded by millions of WordPress users.

Login LockDown

Login LockDown is one of the best WordPress plugin for secure login that tracks every failed login attempt and records its IP address and time stamp. When more than a certain number of login attempts are made from a particular IP within a short duration of time, the IP is blocked or login services are denied for all requests from that IP. This also prevents the brute force password discovery and keeps your website safe. To install this plugin, click here

AskApache Password Protect

Unlike other WordPress plugins which operate at application-level, this plugin operates at network level by creating a virtue wall — using builtin Apache Server security — around your content allowing it to stop attacks through automated attackers attempts to exploit vulnerabilities on your blog that result in a hacked site. This plugin requires world’s most popular web server, Apache along with web host support for .htaccess files. You can set up password protection for your blog with AskApache Password Protect using HTTP Basic Authentication or HTTP Digest authentication for more security .

Brute Force Login Protection

A Brute force attack is one of the most common login attacks in which a hacker attempts to login again and again until it is successful. Brute Force Login Protection is a lightweight plugin that prevents login attack to your WordPress website using .htaccess against brute force login attacks. After a specified limit of login attempts within a specified time, the IP address of the hacker will be blocked.

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Backups and Restoration:

If you are not keeping any sort of backup or using softwares to backup wordpress dtabase manually, then you must pick one of these five plugins and start using it right away. ? Also Read – Export WordPress Database Via PhpMyadmin

VaultPress

Vaultpress is one of the best wordpress security solutions to your WordPress website. This plugin syncs all of your WordPress website content daily and keeps backup of every post, comment, action, dashboard settings on your site in real time and thus, preventing your site content from malware injections, accidental loss etc. VaultPress is easy to use and open source WordPress plugin tool that offers comprehensive security scans everyday to ensure the security of your site.

UpdraftPlus

You can’t predict if someday while working, your servers crash down or your website gets hacked or something wrong happens. What if you haven’t kept any backup? Maybe you have added some backup plugins in your WordPress security installation but can you rely on any backup plugin? Well, you can’t take risk with your long term investment.
This is why we recommend you UpdraftPlus. This plugin is the world’s highest ranking backup plugin installed by million active WordPress users. It simply backups your WordPress files, media, database into the cloud restore with just a single click!

User locker

The default WordPress installation many security loopholes that may put your hard work in danger. So before getting your website hacked, we strongly recommend to use User Locker. This plugin authenticates a certain number of login attempts and when someone exceeds this number, it blocks the account of the person. To unlock the account, the hacker must know the password or ask for the new password which is impossible for an attacker. This makes brute force and dictionary attacks nearly impossible.

BackWPup

This plugin is used to keep the backup of your entire WordPress installation into an external storage like Dropbox or such other backup services. This will include all your wp content, media, files, login files etc. With a single backup .zip file you are able to easily restore an installation. BackWPup is one of the perfect WordPress backup login available with free and premium version. With its premium version i.e BackWPup Pro Version, you get first class support and more features.

BackUpWordPress

When you create a WordPress website, you might not be so sure that it will run smoothly all the time. It may happen that something went wrong with your website and it gets crashed or gets hacked due to security loopholes. Defense is better than loss so why not backup your website to safeguard the content of your website. BackUp WordPress is the simplest WordPress backup plugin that helps you to create backup of your entire website including all your files as well as database on a schedule that is suitable for you.

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Email Protection: Are you insecure about sharing your email address on your website for being caught by spam bots? When you add an email link or plain text email address, it will most likely be copied by a spam email harvesting bot. Here are five most popular plugins which can easily protect your emails from spammers.

Email Address Encoder

Email Address Encoder is an open source WordPress plugin that is built and designed to provide spam protection from email harvesting robots. This lightweight plugin allows you to encode your ascii email addresses and mailto links into decimal and hexadecimal entities.

TG Email Protection

These days spammers use email harvesting or email spider software to collect email addresses that are displayed on your website. To hide them from spammers also leads to hide the email addresses from genuine visitors. Thus it is essential that these are appeared for genuine users but not harvested by hackers. This requires obfuscation and using TG Email Protection, you will get two effective options to obfuscate email addresses making it secure from email spam bots.

WebEmailProtector

WebEmailProtector is the most powerful email protector plugin used by hundreds of the Word-press website owners. It helps you to list all the email addresses displayed on your website and hide them from being harvested by email spammers or spam bots. WebEmailProtector detects when someone tries to access any of your email address and using secure server side authentication it checks whether its a bona fide user or an email spammer.
The email addresses and decoders are not stored on your website but on their servers. So every visitor will require to first register himself there. If its a genuine one, the registration process will be successful and all links will be shown as regular email links. But if its a spammer, he will be blocked at the time when they process any request to contact you. In order to protect your website from being harvested, download WebEmailProtector on your latest WordPress installation.

.Jetpack

Jetpack is all in package type of WordPress plugin that provides you with the marketing, design and security benefits. Installation of Jetpack to your WordPress will help you customize any type of website with these superb features:

• • • Designing Benefits:
      • Number of professional themes for any kind of website.
      • Super Fast & Quality content delivery network
      • Powerful Customization tools and many more features.
    • Marketing Services:
      • Stats & Analysis
      • Social Media marketing
      • SEO tools
      • Advertising programs like – Facebook Ads, AdSense, Google Adwords etc.
    • Security Services:
      • Real time backup of your entire website
      • Spam protection
      • Malware protection
      • Secure login
      • Good support from WordPress experts

Jetpack is an excellent WordPress plugin with number of benefits. You can download Jetpack \and check out the performance and security measures of your WordPress site

WP Mailto Links – Manage Email Links

To help you with the security of your WordPress Website, WP Mailto Links is an easy-to-use plugin that requires only activation of the plugin. Once the plugins are activated, all the settings are default set to protect your emails as well as Mailto links from email spam bots.

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You may probably want to move your entire site from HTTP to HTTPS and install a SSL certificate. We are sharing five best wordpress SSL plugins that can make it easy to securely transfer data with the most secure connection. Check these plugins and pick the one that suits your operations:

WP Force SSL

This plugin helps you to redirect the HTTP traffic to HTTPS without making any changes in the code, provided:

• • • You need an SSL Certificate in order for WP Force SSL to work.
    • You need to add https to the WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL) parameters under General > Settings. (Required by WordPress itself).

Admin SSL

Using Admin SSL plugin, you can secure your login page, admin page, blog contents, pages and everything you want in your WordPress website. Download Admin SSL and activate the plugin after installation. Once you have activated it, go to the Admin SSL config page to enable SSL. Features:

• • • Forces SSL on all pages where passwords can be entered.
    • Works with Private SSL.
    • Custom additional URLS (e.g. wp-admin/) can be secured through the config page.
    • You can choose where you want the Admin SSL config page to appear!
    • Works on WordPress 3.0 – 3.1.1.

You need to update your WordPress to the latest version for Admin SSL to work.

Really Simple SSL

This plugin handles every issue which your WordPress website may have with SSL. The Really Simple SSL plugin automatically configures your website over HTTPS. The site url and home url are changed to https.By default all incoming requests are redirected to https. But you can also use .htaccess redirect. The major thing is that you must get an SSL certification if you want to enable this plugin on your WordPress website. Once installed, this plugin is easy to use. Just activate this plugin and enable SSL in one single click.
Before you use this plugin and go ahead with it, always have a backup of your entire site content. If you have installed WordPress backup plugins, it sounds good. But if you didn’t, we recommend you to have a sound backup plan.
Furthermore, you can consider buying the premium version of Really Simple SSL, which includes pro features and premium support.

SSL Insecure Content Fixer

If you are currently dealing with HTTPS insecure content and mixed content warnings then this plugin is especially for a website like yours. Installing the SSL Insecure Content Fixer plugin will solve most insecure content warnings. When you install this plugin on your WordPress website, it automatically starts fixing content warnings at simple fix level. You can select more comprehensive fix levels if required.

WordPress HTTPS (SSL)

This plugin is popularly known as “heavy hitter” among all SSL plugins for being all in one solution to using SSL on your WordPress website. This plugin is used to remove encrypted or mixed content errors that are loopholes to the security of your WordPress website.
We hope this article helped you in finding the best WordPress security plugins to be installed in your WordPress Website. To know more about WordPress security issues and how to fix them you can keep reading our blogs here.

WP Security Audit Log

To Download, Visit Here

It Keeps an audit trail of all changes on your WordPress – ensure productivity & thwart attacks with the most comprehensive audit trail plugin.

.Hide My WP

To Download, Visit Here

You can use this one to protect your WordPress website by hiding the WordPress Admin and Login URLs to increases your Wp Security against hacker’s bots. Main features include:

• • • Hide WordPress wp-admin URL and redirect it to 404 page or a custom page
    • Hide WordPress wp-login.php and redirect it to 404 page or a custom page
    • Change the wp-admin and wp-login URLs
    • Lite WordPress Security Features

Still facing security issues despite using Plugins?

In case, you are running a website that is injected with serious malwares or you are observing something wrong on your website despite of using wordpress plugins and still not sure whether your wordpress site is hacked or not, you can use our free WordPress Security Scanner that offers auditing, monitoring and malware scan for your website regularly. Thus, your website will be completely secure with us!
We hope this article helped you in finding the best wordpress security plugins to be installed in your WordPress Website. To know more about wordpress security issues and how to fix them you can keep reading our WordPress Security Blog. There are many other safe practices you can enable on your WordPress site for best practices.

How to keep your WordPress Website Secure?

Although WordPress is providing a vast array of plugins that can help you protect your website. But still there are few wordpress security tips and checklists that you must follow to prevent future hacks and web vulnerabilities. Follow these steps and make your website safe and secure:

1. First of all, make sure that WordPress ‘core’ along with all plugins installed and themes used are regularly updated. Reason being that the outdated software or plugins may contain malware which hackers can utilize to exploit your website.
2. The next step is to keep backup of your entire site along with content, media, database and other files so that even in worst case, your hard work does not go in vain.
3. Next thing is to generate strong passwords so that it is impossible for hackers to enter the website and make undesirable changes or take control over your website.

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