The Best WordPress Security Plugins Available Right Now

As the most popular blogging system online, WordPress is used for more than 60 million web sites.

An accessible interface, built-in SEO tools and commendable security make it an ideal tool for bloggers. Despite the WordPress system’s tireless efforts to improve security, the popularity of WordPress has made it an interest point for hackers throughout the world.

As a result, WordPress users would be wise to implement security plugins that take WordPress’ security to the next level— out of the reach of even the most experienced hackers.

Akismet

When your blog becomes indexed by search engines, it also opens it up to comment spammers. These types of spammers often leave nonsensical comments with links, in order to boost the search engine rankings of their own site or product.

As your blog grows in popularity, you will see even more of these comments. It’s impossible to rid of them entirely unless you want to disable commenting, so Akismet provides a quick and easy solution. It acts as a spam filter for your comments, checking them against their web service to see if they resemble spam or not. Akismet may not catch every single spam comment, but it’s one of the best WordPress plugins for comment spam prevention you will find.

Wordfence Security

It’s very commendable that Wordfence Security is free, and it has received universal acclaim for being an enterprise-level security plugin with an impressive number of benefits, including firewall, malicious URL scanning, live traffic analyzer and anti-virus scanning.

It also enables users to utilize a two-factor authentication when logging in, requiring both the user’s cell phone and web login. This significantly curbs the number of hack attempts on their blog. Wordfence acts as a continuous monitor of all threats; it’s truly the consummate WordPress security plugin. An added bonus is that the plugin’s support forum is very responsive, answering 43 of 44 support threads in the past two months.

BulletProof Security

An alternative to Wordfence is BulletProof Security, a plugin that prevents against a wide variety of hacking attempts in addition to providing login security, monitoring and a top-tier .htaccess security that stops hackers immediately in their tracks. Since .htaccess files are processed before any other files on a blog, BulletProof takes the immediate approach of safeguarding them. No manual configuration required also makes it an ideal choice for new users of WordPress, who may find the many features of Wordfence too daunting.

Anti-spam

While Akismet is the most popular comment spam prevention plugin, Anti-spam is rising through the ranks as a respectable rival. With an easier installation than Akismet, which requires signing up for an API key, Anti-spam is ready upon installation.

No captcha, moderation queues or options provide the simplest form of comment spam prevention for WordPress users. So if you have a blog about unique homes and a reader writes a great comment about the innovations of their luxury log home, you can be sure that it won’t be marked accidentally as spam.

WordPress File Monitor Plus

The most obvious example of a trespassing hacker on your blog is the deletion or addition of files on your server. WordPress File Monitor Plus notifies you whenever a file is added, deleted or altered in any way, sending an e-mail to the specified administrator. Additionally, multi-site support and the abilities to exclude specific files and directories from the scan make WordPress File Monitor Plus the best of its kind.

One of the best aspects of these WordPress security plugins is that many of them can be used simultaneously. Utilizing a spam comment filter (Akismet, Anti-spam), a consummate security plugin (Wordfence, BulletProof) and a file monitor (WordPress File Monitor Plus) in conjunction will prepare your blog for even the most advanced hackers, who – with these plugins installed – will find it very difficult to break into your blog.

11 comments

Alex F.

November 20, 2013

Great list you have there.I also suggest AIO WP Security & Firewall Plugin which i use on my site.Its really easy to configure.
PrIyAnGsHu

November 20, 2013

Comprehensive list of some of the great security plugins for WordPress. Among these plugins, I have so far used only Akismet and BulletProof Security, both of them are quite useful. But I got to check the others as well, they look promising too. Thanks for this excellent post mate, appreciate it.
varun

November 19, 2013

i am also a blogger.and i m using akismet…and that is perfect..there is no problem with it
Pamella Gorj

November 16, 2013

wordpress security is very important make your blog protected from hackers.Thanks for sharing these useful plugins.
Sohail

November 16, 2013

Hello katie,

Well no doubt security is the most important issue for any blog which ensure the blog to stable and secured from hackers. Akismet is an awesome plugin which works really great, protecting from spam comments. BulletProof Security is also nice plugin which i’ve used a long time ago.

thanks
Ogi

November 15, 2013

I think that I tried almost every security plugin. I used BulletProof Security for a while, then Better WP Security for more than a year, but recently I switched to All In One WP Security & Firewall.

For me, it’s the best security plugin at the moment, so I suggest it whenever I can. 🙂
Enstine Muki

November 13, 2013

Hi Katie,
Security is a top issue in blogging and wordpress to be very specific. I’m using Better WP Security and actually get good results with it.

Thanks for sharing these other helpful plugins 😉
Gautam

November 12, 2013

Akismet is the best and I use it on almost all of my blogs and I recommend it to others too.
Carl

November 12, 2013

While I use both Word Press & Blogger for both my business and my personal blogs I generally like the “feel” of WordPress better.

My only complaint is with Akismet, where I seem to be in the minority, I have found this a very poor spam tool as it constantly gives “false positives” for spam where by the comment is not a spammer and in fact is sometimes a regular person who has commented before.
On the other side, I am constantly having to moderate out true spam.
My personal opinion is WordPress can do much better than Akismet
Theodore Nwangene

November 11, 2013

Great list of wordpress security plugins Katie,
Ensuring the security of our blog is very crucial if you don’t want to lose your blog. All the plugins you mentioned here are indeed very important but as you, one cannot use all of them at once.

I’m using Akismet and Wordfence security and even Better security on my blog and, i love their performance so far.

Thanks for sharing Katie.
- Katie Elizabeth
  
  November 13, 2013
  
  Thanks for reading, Theodore! Akismet is definitely one of my favorite security tools. 🙂 It does a really great job of keeping spam comments off of my blogs which lessens the time I need to take to moderate and trash them!