8 Best WordPress Security Plugins Compared (2019)

Do you want to keep your WordPress site secure? Great idea! Since WordPress is the most popular website platform, it’s often targeted by malicious hackers and spammers.

Unfortunately, many website owners fall into the trap of thinking hackers only target big companies or popular blogs, so they undervalue the importance of keeping their website secure. But, in reality, hackers attack websites not only for stealing personal data and building backlinks but also just for fun.

In other words, having a small website doesn’t guarantee that your site is safe from malicious attacks. Unless you take security measures to prevent attacks, you’re allowing the bad guys to destroy your search rankings and online business.

The best way to keep your website secure is by installing a WordPress security plugin on your site.

In this article, we’ll compare the most popular WordPress security plugins to help you find the best WordPress security plugins for your site.

Why Use a WordPress Security Plugin?

Ensuring security for your WordPress site can be tricky, especially if you’re not a WordPress expert. But with the right WordPress security plugin, you don’t need to get into technicalities of keeping your website secure.

A good WordPress security plugin should come with the following features:

Firewall: Firewalls monitor all traffic on your website and filter out vulnerable bots before they reach your website server.
Scan: Scanning your website on a regular basis is recommended to find malware or other potential threats.
Fixes: A good security plugin should guarantee malware removal and fixes on the site should you get attacked.

1. Sucuri

Sucuri is a complete website security solution and one of the best WordPress plugins. It protects your site from malware, brute force attacks, and other potential vulnerabilities.

Once you activate Sucuri, all your website traffic goes through their CloudProxy servers and every request is scanned to filter out malicious requests. Because of this, Sucuri can reduce server load and improve your site’s performance by not allowing malicious traffic to reach your server.

It protects your website against SQL Injections, XSS, and all known attacks. In addition to that, they proactively report potential security threats to WordPress’ core team and to third-party plugins as well.

Aside from blocking all the attacks, some other ways Sucuri protects your website are:

Its antivirus package monitors your website every 4 hours to ensure your website is free from potential vulnerabilities and malware.
It keeps track of everything that happens on your site, including file changes, last login, failed login attempts, and more…
It allows you to conduct server-side scanning to protect your website from compromised and server-level infections.

Get started with Sucuri today.

2. StackPath

StackPath is known mainly as a CDN (content delivery network) that allows you to deliver your website from all over the world at lightning speeds. But StackPath also offers full security for your site, it’s actually the world’s first secure edge platform.

StackPath offers platform-wide DDoS protection. Their advanced architecture identifies and redirects DDoS attacks into strategic sinkholes, all StackPath offerings have Layer 3 and 4 DDoS protection, and protection is geographically distributed.

StackPath’s network is also designed to defend new threats as they emerge by providing network-level encryption, network scanning, as well as malware defense. But security isn’t a second-thought addon to StackPath, it’s a first-order priority.

The StackPath plugin will not only keep your website safe and secure from attacks, but it will also drastically speed up your site.

Get started with StackPath today.

3. SiteLock

SiteLock is another popular website security solution that offers DDoS protection, malware scans, and more. It comes with all the necessary features you need to secure your website.

It’s one of the fastest website scanning solutions in existence that automatically finds, fixes, and prevents vulnerabilities, giving you the peace of mind you deserve.

On a daily basis, SiteLock scans your WordPress themes, plugins, and files for potential vulnerabilities that can cause website blacklisting or poor visitor experience.

If malware is found on your website, SiteLock fixes it automatically and notifies you about it. Based on the detailed scanning report, you can take immediate action to secure your site.

With their web application firewall, you can differentiate human traffic from bot traffic and secure your website from bots and attacks by blocking them before they reach your site.

Get started with SiteLock today.

4. Jetpack Security

Jetpack is a popular all-in-one plugin for security, performance, and site management with over 5 million active installs. This well-know plugin by Automattic also includes website design features as well as automated marketing tools.

Focusing on security though, Jetpack monitors your WordPress site and alerts you the moment it detects that your site is down and guards your site against brute force login attacks, spam, and harmful malware injections.

Other security features include:

Secure Authentication: Provides secure authentication via WordPress accounts.
Updated Plugins: Keeps all of your plugins automatically updated and allows bulk management.
Site Activity: Easily see all of your website’s activity in an organized, chronological list of events.
With the premium version of the plugin you also get site backups, 1-click restore, malware scanning, automatic comment filtering, and pingback spam, and more.

But because Jetpack is so bloated with features from security to marketing, many people find that the plugin can actually slow down your site.

Get started with Jetpack today.

5. Wordfence Security

Wordfence is one of the most comprehensive WordPress security plugins available. A free lite version of the plugin is available in the official WordPress plugins repository. The free plugin comes with important features like web application firewall, malware scanner, and protection from brute attacks. With 2+ million active installs, it’s the most popular security plugin for WordPress.

Wordfence monitors brute force attacks and locks out any attempts after too many login attempts. You can lock out anyone who uses an invalid username and even enable 2-factor authentication for better security.

With its country blocking feature, you can stop attacks and content theft originating from a specific geographic region. Based on pattern matching and IP ranges, you can block entire malicious networks and human activity that looks suspicious.

It lets you check your IP address reputation so you can ensure your customer emails aren’t marked as spam.

The downside of Wordfence is that it runs on your own server instead of being a cloud-based provider.

Get started with Wordfence today.

6. BulletProof Security

BulletProof Security is another popular WordPress security plugin that allows you to scan your website for malware, set up firewalls, back up your database, and more.

It comes with a 1-click automatic setup wizard that makes it easy to run the plugin without tedious manual setup or configuration. After the setup, the plugin automatically detects and fixes security threats in real-time.

That being said, it’s recommended to scan your website for any pre-existing hacker files or code after the setup. Any plugins or themes installed at a future time will be checked in real-time.

With its IP-based Firewall, you can secure all your plugins from being publicly accessed and exploited.

BulletProof Security might be the best choice for you if you’re on a limited budget. For a one-time fee of $69.95, you can install the plugin on unlimited websites. After the purchase, you get free upgrades and support for the lifetime of the product.

Get started with BulletProof Security Pro today.

you might also want to read the Types of SSL Certificates.

Sources: –isitwp.com