6 Best WordPress Security Plugins to Protect Your Site (Compared)

Are you looking for a WordPress security plugin for your website?

A WordPress security plugin protects your website from malware, brute-force attacks, and hacking attempts. Security plugins are designed to prevent attacks and provide complete security reports for your WordPress site.

In this article, we will share some of the best WordPress security plugins you can use to protect your website.

Why Use a WordPress Security Plugin?

Millions of websites are infected with malware at any given time each week. An average website is attacked 94 times daily, including both non-WordPress and WordPress websites.

A security breach on your website can cause some serious damage to your business. Here are some examples:

• Hackers can steal your data or the data belonging to your users and customers.
• A compromised website can be used to distribute malicious code to unsuspecting users and other websites.
• You can lose data, lose access to your website, get locked out of it, or your data could be held hostage.
• Your website can be destroyed or defaced, affecting your SEO rankings and brand reputation.

You can scan your WordPress site for security breaches at any time. However, cleaning a hacked WordPress site without professional help can be difficult for non-technical users.

To avoid being hacked, you must follow security best practices to protect your website. We have compiled them in an easy-to-follow step-by-step WordPress security guide for beginners.

One of the most important steps in securing your WordPress site is to start using a WordPress security plugin. These plugins help you harden WordPress security while blocking brute force attacks on your website.

Let’s take a look at some of the best WordPress security plugins and how they help you protect your website or blog.

Note: You only need to use one plugin from this list. Having multiple plugins active can lead to bugs.

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1. Sucuri

Sucuri is the industry leader in WordPress security, and they have one of the best WordPress security plugins on the market. They offer a basic free Sucuri Security plugin that helps you harden WordPress security and scan your website for common threats.

But the real value is in the paid plans, which come with the best WordPress firewall protection. A firewall helps you block brute force and malicious attacks from accessing WordPress.

Sucuri website firewall filters out bad traffic even before it reaches your server. They also serve static content from their own CDN servers.

Apart from security, their DNS-level firewall with CDN gives you a tremendous performance boost and speeds up your website.

Most importantly, they offer to clean up your WordPress site if it gets affected by malware at no additional cost. You can even take a website already affected by malware, and they will clean it up for you.

We use Sucuri on all our websites. For more information, see our complete Sucuri review to learn how it helped us protect our websites.

2. MalCare

MalCare is a complete security plugin that has recently gained popularity in the WordPress community. It comes with an in-depth malware scanner, 1-click malware removal, and an endpoint firewall.

The powerful scanner runs automatically every day and scans every part of your WordPress site, including files and database. You can also scan your website on-demand if needed.

Plus, unlike other security plugins, MalCare doesn’t use the site resources to scan for malware. The scanning takes place on MalCare servers, which helps keep your website fast and responsive.

MalCare offers a free plan that includes a daily malware scan, vulnerability monitoring, and more. However, the free scan will only tell you if your site has malware. If malware is detected, you’ll need to upgrade your plan to use the automated cleaner.

3. Wordfence

Wordfence is another popular WordPress security plugin. They offer a free version of their plugin, which comes complete with a powerful malware scanner, exploit detection, and threat assessment features.

The plugin will automatically scan your website for common threats, but you can also launch a full scan anytime. You will be alerted if any signs of a security breach are detected with the instructions to fix them.

Wordfence also comes with a built-in WordPress firewall. However, this firewall runs on your server just before loading WordPress. This makes it less effective than a DNS-level firewall like Sucuri.

For complete instructions, see our guide on how to install and set up Wordfence Security in WordPress.

4. iThemes Security

iThemes Security is a WordPress security plugin from the people behind the popular BackupBuddy plugin. Like all their products, iThemes Security offers a nice clean user interface with many options.

It comes with file integrity checks, security hardening, the ability to limit login attempts, strong password enforcement, 404 detection, brute force protection, and more.

iThemes Security does not include a website firewall. It also does not have its own malware scanner and uses Sucuri’s Sitecheck malware scanner instead.

5. All-In-One WP Security

All-in-One WordPress Security is a powerful WordPress security auditing, monitoring, and firewall plugin. It enables you to easily apply basic WordPress security best practices on your website.

It comes with features like login lockdown to prevent brute force attacks, IP filtering, file integrity monitoring, user account monitoring, scanning for suspicious patterns of database injection, and more.

It also comes with a basic website-level firewall that can detect common patterns and block them for you. However, it is not very efficient, and often you will be required to manually blacklist suspicious IPs.

6. Anti-Malware Security

Anti-Malware Security is an excellent and useful WordPress anti-malware and security plugin. The plugin comes with actively maintained definitions that help it find the most common threats.

Its malware scanner allows you to easily scan all files and folders on your WordPress site for malicious code, backdoors, malware, and other known patterns of malicious attacks.

The plugin requires you to create a free account on the plugin’s website to access the latest definitions and get some premium features like brute force prevention. The plugin also calls developers’ websites to look for updated definitions.

While the plugin runs thorough tests, it often shows many false positives. Matching each one with the source file is quite a lot of work.

Bonus: WPScan Security

WPScan is a unique WordPress security plugin because it uses its own manually-curated WordPress vulnerability database that is updated daily by dedicated WordPress security specialists and community members.

They scan your site for over 21,000 security vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins, themes, and core software.

You can schedule automated daily scans and get email notifications of the results. They have a free security API suitable for most websites, but you can upgrade to the paid plan if you have a larger site and use a lot of plugins.

We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress security plugin to protect your site. Below are some of the links that will help keep your website more secure and optimized.

Best Guides to Protect Your WordPress Site

• How to Secure Your WordPress Pages with SSL
• How to Protect Your WordPress Site from Brute Force Attacks
• WordPress Brute Force Attacks and What You Need to Do About It
• How to Stop and Prevent a DDoS Attack on WordPress
• Beginner’s Guide to Preventing Blog Content Scraping in WordPress
• Best Ways to Prevent Image Theft in WordPress
• Best Identity Theft Protection Services for Small Business
• Best WordPress Backup Plugins (Pros and Cons)
• How to Backup Your WordPress Site (4 Easy Ways)
• The Ultimate Guide to Boost WordPress Speed and Performance

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