After you’ve found your land, dug and poured your foundation and framed your house, you need a roof. The roof provides additional structural support and security.
Security’s also an important ingredient in your website’s success. Without security the hackers can have a field day and destroy in seconds what it’s taken you time, effort, energy and money to build.
For purposes of this analogy — that your WordPress website is your online virtual house — I’m equating the roof to security. We all know, though, that in real life security means protecting what you have at several entry points. The roof protects you from rain, sleet and snow as well as the hot sun. But you also have doors and windows.
Your WordPress website needs basic protection in two areas:
- Spammers
- Hackers
Spammers are annoying but they’re not usually a big threat to your security. Spammers are those ill-behaved site visitors who leave inappropriate comments on your site, for example. Maybe your site is all about cats and dogs, and some idiot comes along and leaves a long comment (with links, of course) about something completely unrelated like auto insurance.
Still, you want to keep them at bay.
Click here to see your first line of defense against WordPress comment spam.
Hackers, on the other hand, can do some serious damage. They can plant malicious code inside your site which infects your visitors’ computers, they can change your pages or they can take down your entire site.
It’s vital to protect yourself as much as possible from hackers.
Just as you can’t keep a bad guy from blowing a hole in the wall of your house when he’s absolutely determined to get in — anyone besides me watch Burn Notice? — there’s no way to protect yourself 100% from hackers.
There are some steps you can take, though, to turn away all but the most determined assaults.
Learn how to protect your site from hackers here.
Once your roof is complete, it’s time to start installing the interior walls of your virtual house. That’s Building Block 5.