7 Security Tricks to Protect your WordPress Website from DDoS Attack
Who doesn’t know about WordPress?
Everyone, indeed!!
Because of its outstanding features and functionalities, it has become one of the leading CMS in the world. Stats says that it has empowered 35% of all the websites.
But, even with all these astonishing factors, it came under malicious Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
Have you heard about the DDoS attack before?
Online businesses must be familiar with this term. It has been here for a while, approximately since the 90s. This attack is being used to make the WordPress websites out of the league by transferring several requests to the victim server.
Getting your website prone to DDoS attacks is because of your successful online presence. That is to say, the more thriving your WordPress website is, the more are the chances of getting attacked.
Besides, things are not out of hand even. You can diminish the uncertainties of your website getting attacked by DDoS attacks.
What is a DDoS Attack?
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It is fully abbreviated as a Distributed Denial of Service attack. DDoS occurs when some WordPress website is overwhelmed by many requests in less time, intending to destroy the site and cause it to crash.
Here ‘Distributed’ signifies that the attack is approaching from different locations at one time. When your website becomes prone to DDoS attack, then the server response slows down, and in most of the cases, it becomes totally useless.
October 21, 2016, has experienced a massive occurrence of DDoS attacks that affected the large and leading companies, like, eBay, Twitter, Reddit, Spotify, and PayPal. This day is termed as DNS Doomsday.
Hence, it makes it clear that with an increase in the websites, the rate of occurrence of DDoS attacks is also increasing, and it is an alarming situation. It is estimated that these attacks are getting dangerous day by day.
Reasons for DDoS Attack Occurrence
Below we have jotted down the main reasons behind the DDoS attack existence:
- Cheap Hosting is the first reason when it is about DDoS attack breaching. It has two drawbacks- the volume of clients and lack of support.
- Not preparing the website to persist itself with the DDoS attack.
- Updation of plugins, themes, or WordPress is required to secure the website from DDoS attack.
Leading Ways to Secure the WordPress Website from DDoS Attack
DDoS attacks not only target large websites, but small websites also get prone to this. It becomes necessary to follow the measures that can save your WordPress website from that vulnerability. Check out below one of the best ways to eliminate DDoS attacks from your WordPress website. Besides, you can also hire a WordPress developer who can help you out in protecting your WordPress website with the tried and tested approaches.
1. Activate WAF (Website Application Firewall)
The simple yet powerful way to prevent unusual requests is to activate the WAF. It works as a proxy among the traffic and the website. The best thing about WAF is that it employs the smart algorithm for detecting every suspicious request and then blocking them.
Sucuri is one of the best WordPress website firewall and security plugin that you can use. It works on the DNS level that discovers the DDoS attack before it tries to send the request to the website. Sucuri takes $20 per month (paid yearly) to start with.
Also, Cloudflare can be used. Though, it only gives inadequate DDoS protection to your website. The other thing is that to use this; you have to purchase a business plan of around $200 per month for layer 7 DDoS protection.
2. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
The Content Delivery Network is basically the services that cache copies on their data centre on the WordPress website. The outstanding CDNs provide the data centres everywhere. The data centres then become mediocre between your website and website visitors.
Whenever feasible, the Content Delivery Network acts as a cached copy of the WordPress website from the servers. The CDNs reduce the overall loading time as it has been built by keeping higher performance in mind. It is also a fireguard that blocks the resulting traffic to flood the website.
3. Using Best Security Plugins
WordPress has a tremendous list of security plugins in its pocket. Configuring the Security plugin to the WordPress website act as a layer of protection. Here, our recommendation is to use the WordFence Plugin. It controls and stops the DDoS attack from occurring on any of the WordPress websites all around the sphere.
The Security Plugins monitors the web servers and take the chunk out of it. Its integrated script uses different resources that find out many security threats that your website is prone to.
4. Get a New Hosting Provider
There are many web hosts that are known for their best performance. Also, not all of them show the best results performance-wise. Most of the web hosting servers take a lot of time to load in moderate strain. It makes them more prone to DDoS attacks.
Besides, the popular web hosting providers integrate a protection layer for the traffic floods at the server level. Web host, SiteGround handles the hardware firewall and uses only a significant amount of connections.
5. Block the Suspected IP addresses
Blocking those IP addresses that are susceptible also works. For that, you need to examine the IP addresses that are attempting to access the WordPress website and shows some unusual activities, like:
- Repetitive login attempts
- Unreasonable visits
- IP clusters overwhelming the website with traffic
WordPress authorizes you to block the IP address from the .htaccess file.
All In One WP Security & Firewall WordPress plugin can be used to block the susceptible IP addresses.
6. Regular Updating the WordPress Website
The best part about the WordPress website is that it gets updated regularly. It carries more improvements in security every time. It is advised to update the WordPress website regularly. Below are some of the mandatories that require updating regularly.
- WordPress installation
- WordPress plugins
- WordPress themes
- Apache version
- OS version
- MySQL version
- PHP version on the server
- Other Software or script that you use
7. Blacklist the XML-RPC Functionality
The latest version enables this functionality automatically. It offers services like trackbacks and pingbacks. These make the WordPress websites to send the HTTPs requests to the targeted websites. And, when there are several websites that are targeted then, surely the DDoS attack will occur.
Therefore, it is recommended to abandon the XML-RPC functionality on the WordPress website. It decreases the chances to launch the DDoS attack that uses the trackbacks and the pingbacks.
Disabling XML-RPC Pingback plugin can also disable the trackback and pingback functionality. It retains the different functions of XML-RPC intact.
Wrapping Up
There is no doubt that WordPress is 100% secure. But, the hackers never miss the chance to target it. So, it is important to protect the websites from any vulnerabilities.
We have tried to give you significant information on stopping the DDoS attack to mushroom. There are several ways from which you can protect your WordPress website. We have mentioned the important one.
Try them- surely, you will get the visible results.
Are you following some other measures to protect your WordPress website from DDoS attack?
Share your view and experience with us!!
Thanks for reading!!
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