QA 83 – 3 tips for keeping your WordPress site safe from hackers

In today's Q&A, we are helping Marnie figure out the top 3 strategies to keep her Wordpress website secure from any hackers or issues. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "Don't just ignore those update icons inside Wordpress"] Resources Mentioned in this Episode The Flip Your Life Community Let's dive into this week's question! JOCELYN: Hey y'all! You're listening to a Q&A with S&J. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let's get started. SHANE: What's going on guys? Welcome back to the Q&A with S&J. We got a great question today from one of our Flip Your Life community members and it is about security. We were in the middle of a series right now, about keeping your website and your business safe from hackers, how to avoid getting hacked and how to prevent identity theft. We had our members over in the Flip Your Life community submit a bunch of questions and we are going to answer one of those today. JOCELYN: Today's question is from Marney Ginsberg and Marney says, "For complete newbies, what are your top three, most important recommendations for protecting your website? Thank you for taking this terror and turning it into our good." SHANE: That is a good description of getting hacked, "Terror" 'cause man, it was really, really bad. JOCELYN: There was a lot of terror. SHANE: Lot of terror especially over the last few weeks; I would say that first and foremost, the number one thing that you can do today, right now as soon as you turn this podcast off, and we spoke a little bit about this in our podcast this week at fliplifestyle.com/podcast57 is to make yourself have long passwords. Don't have really short, easy-to-remember passwords that use real words, or names, or names of your kids and their birthdays or anything like that. The longer the password is, the better it is. So, I think the number one thing I would do like on your WordPress login is to make sure that you have a long password. Also, you don't need to use "Admin" as your username. Your username should also be something that is a little complex and that is hard to figure out; we don't even use real words in our username anymore. You can make WordPress show you as your name even if your email that you sign up for WordPress or you set up your website with is something like X4g3ztw@gmail.com. You don't have to use "Admin" as your login or your name. Don't make it something easy for someone to figure out. So the first thing I would do is definitely fix that username and password on your WordPress site. When you first set up your website, it may be, you know, "Admin" or you know, mine used to be "Shanesams" as your username and then your password. What you do is you set up, on your WordPress site or whatever it is right now, let's say you are still using "Admin" as your login or you have a really weak password, go in and actually create a brand new user and make it have administrative privileges, and make it something with an email that nobody knows, a username that nobody knows and then you can just make it show as your name. Set up a completely new user, give it a new password and then delete your old account, delete your old user completely. And what that will do is that will make your site really secure because it'll be really tough to login. So the first thing you do, the first tip is definitely don't use admin as your user name, create a really complicated username that nobody else can know but you, and second is having nice, long passwords; length is very important. JOCELYN: When you do create your new user account on WordPress, you do want to make sure that you attribute the content from the old one to th...