WordPress is without doubt the most widely used content management system (CMS) on the web. And this is for a good reason. Even for an amateur without any coding skills at all, WordPress provides you with a packed arsenal of cool tools to get your website running in no time. You get to enjoy amazing themes to design an appealing site as well as tons of plugins to help you with your day to day running of your site.

However, the same way that WordPress attracts lots of users, so it does malicious actors and hackers. WordPress themes and plugins are some of the most targeted by hackers as they figure that compromising them would open the floodgates to gaining access to loads of sensitive user information such as emails. That is why it is necessary to install SSL certificate in WordPress even before you start publishing content and receiving user sign ups. 

Tips to Repair and Rebuild Your Broken WordPress Site

1: Check and Update Your WordPress Security Plugins

For a nation’s borders to remain safe and impenetrable, the soldiers have to remain well fed, in good health and shape so as act swiftly and put up the best defense when trouble comes calling. The same goes for your WordPress site. You need to have sophisticated WordPress security plugins and always make sure that they are up-to-date to fend off any attacks.

Remember that hackers are always one step ahead of their victims constantly looking for any vulnerabilities in your security software so that they can strike. Whenever a new patch is released to fix any bugs in your security plugins, be the first to install it. Popular WordPress security plugins include iThemes Security, Google Authenticator, VaultPress, Defender, All in One WordPress Security and Firewall, WordFence and Sucuri Security.

2: Install SSL Certificate in WordPress

As mentioned earlier, an SSL certificate with proper encryption levels is an absolute necessity for your WordPress site.  It’s first important to understand the impact that SSL Certificates can have on your WordPress site. Let’s say that you have opened your website to blog about your favorite hobby – cooking. Chances are that as you start posting great content like mouthwatering recipes, a lot of readers will want to connect with you deeper by signing up for your newsletters and getting notifications whenever new posts go up. To do so they will provide personal details like name and email address. 

Assume that even you become a hit and now have to sell your cookbook. Here they will need to provide sensitive details like credit card info or PayPal email address. Now assuming these details are exchanged as plain text from the client browser to your web server, a hacker could easily intercept them which could cause serious problems from attracting fines to losing customer trust. That is why you need SSL Certificates to encrypt any data being shared on your site. If you are unaware about the reputed brands in SSL industry, you can go with few of them like Comodo SSL certificates, Rapid SSL, GeoTrust, Thawte SSL certificates etc.

3: Activate Your Site Visibility in Search Engines

You may have designed a stunning WordPress site and started to post some high-quality content but still no readers seem to be engaging with your site. The reason could be that you have set your privacy settings to private and so no one is actually able to see your site. Check your privacy settings and ensure that your site is set to public view.

Additionally, you also want to be visible to search engines so that they can crawl and index your site. Check your robots.txt file and ensure that it is set to allow search engine crawlers so that you can be visible on SERPS. To make your journey to the SERPS quite faster, you should also create and upload an XML Sitemap of your site using a plugin like Yoast SEO.

4: Check and Fix Broken Links

One thing that easily pisses off your site visitors and brings about a high bounce rate is broken links. Imagine someone who is searching for highly informative content online and stumbles upon your promising link only to click on it and hit a dead end! This can be very frustrating. A first-time visitor who stumbles on an error page on your site is likely to never come back.

This records as bad user experience to search engines which can be punished with low rankings. It can be hard to keep up with all the broken links in your pages manually and so you need a reliable tool like Broken Link Checker which will scan all posts, pages, images and so on to identify any broken links.

5: Run New WordPress Core Updates

The beauty about being a member of a community like WordPress is that they have a highly skilled team of experts that works round the clock to check for any loopholes in security and fix them. Whenever a new WordPress core update is rolled out, be quick to upgrade your site because the team will usually have found some security vulnerabilities in the previous version that hackers may take advantage of.

However, do not forget to check all your plugins and themes to see if they are compatible with the new core version. Get rid of any outdated themes and plugins as these may offer a backdoor to hackers.

6: Scan Your Site for Malware

Although WordPress has many inbuilt security plugins that are able to detect security issues like malware and fix them in real time, hackers can still manage to seep through the tough defenses at times. That’s why it’s important to invest in complex anti-malware tools that will also guard your workstation and personal computers to ensure that no malware is getting through.

7: Get Secure WordPress Hosting

One of the most important decisions you are going to make for your WordPress site is deciding which hosting company to go with. An ideal hosting company is concerned with the performance of your site such as ensuring that you have enough bandwidth for your site’s traffic and also your security where your site is monitored 24/7 to highlight any minor changes that may warrant security concerns.

8: Back Up Your Site

Prevention is always better than cure. So is preparedness. A good way to stay a step ahead of any bad occurrences is to back up your site regularly. Most hosting companies will offer this as an additional service but you can also use WordPress plugins like JetPack. You can actually keep offline copies of all your database, content and files to avoid starting from scratch when an attack happens.

Parting Thoughts

WordPress is by all means a great platform. A lot of website owners have brought their dreams to life here without any substantial IT prowess or coding knowledge. Hackers are however never left behind and as such have set their sights on this goldmine always looking for some unsuspecting victims to take down. That is why you can never take your security for granted. Cheap SSL Certificates will always ensure that all data being transmitted to and from your website in encrypted.