Guest Post: Security Basic for Bloggers

Today’s post was contributed by friend Cody Lents, partner and change manager at Covi, a professional services information technology agency in Indianapolis, IN.

SECURITY BASICS FOR BLOGGERS

1. Start by securing your admin portal. Here are 14 tips for doing this with WordPress.
2. Make sure your blog is being automatically backed up with alerts for successful and failed backups. Then, occasionally double-check to make sure the alerts are accurate. Here are some plugins to help.
3. Some of us want others to share our content as much as possible. But, in some cases protecting our authorship is a priority. Try using something like 33 Across’ Site Ctrl to protect from cut & paste plagiarism, and no matter your philosophy on ‘borrowed’ content you should set up your Google Authorship to maximize SEO.
4. Implement hotlinking protection. I recommend CloudFlare or a WordPress plugin for this.
5. Only install ‘Trusted Plugins’
6. Ensure security plugins are installed. Here are 8 recommendations from one of my favorite cybersecurity organizations. – Make sure you choose one with built-in firewall security or get a separate firewall plugin.
7. If you’re uncomfortable managing your sites security, pay a professional to do it. Typically, a simple blog site can be maintained for $100 – $200 per month.

Bonus:  If you really want to deter content theft you could dabble in this plugin. – Prevent Content Theft