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12+ Best WordPress Security Plugins

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Best WordPress Security Plugins

When it comes to your website, one of the most important tasks is to keep it secure from malware and hackers. Thankfully, there are various WordPress plugins that will help you protect your website.

If you’ve been looking for a plugin to make your site more secure, you’re in the right place. In this post, we’ve rounded up what are (in our opinion) some of the best WordPress security plugins.

The plugins on this list will make your site secure but keep in mind that you shouldn’t install all of them and have them active at the same time. Instead, use our list to find the best security plugin for your needs, just one will do.

1. Wordfence

ordfence Security Firewall & Malware Scan

Wordfence is one of the most popular security plugins on the official repository. It currently has more than 3 million active installations and 5-star ratings. The plugin’s primary feature is an endpoint firewall and malware scanner. The firewall blocks malicious traffic before it reaches your website while the scanner blocks requests that include malicious code.

Wordfence includes protection from brute force attacks by allowing you to limit the number of login attempts. The plugin also scans your site’s files and compares them against the files in the repository. If it finds any differences, it notifies you so you can repair them or remove them.

Pricing: The core plugin is free. Premium version that offers extra features such as country blocking, real-time firewall rule updates, and more starts at $99/year for one site.

2. Solid Security

The free Solid Security is a comprehensive security plugin that has more than 900000 active installations and 4,5-star rating. The plugin has more than 30 ways to protect your WordPress website which include brute force protection, website scan to reveal vulnerabilities and fix them, the ability to force SSL on admin pages, automatic bot banning, the ability to prevent file editing from the WordPress dashboard, and more.

Solid Security makes it easy to change the URLs for WordPress admin areas and the ability to completely turn off login for a given time period.

If you need even more features such as 2FA, the ability to change your WordPress Salts keys, and scheduled malware scans; you can upgrade to the premium version of the plugin.

Pricing: Free, premium version starts at $80/year for one site.

3. Hide My WP

Hide My WP

With more than 27000 sales and 4,5-star rating, the HideMyWP is one of the top security plugins on CodeCanyon. This premium plugin can help you reveal vulnerabilities as they happen and take proactive measures to secure your site.

The main features of the plugin include a firewall that monitors and prevents malicious requests, the ability to completely hide the fact you’re using WordPress by changing theme and plugin names, disabling directory links and more.

In addition to that, the plugin detects and blocks XSS and SQL Injection type of security attacks on your WordPress website.

Pricing: This plugin is available for $39 and grants you 6-months of support which can be extended to 12 months for an additional $12.75.

4. All In One WP Security & Firewall

All In One WP Security & Firewall

The All In One WP Security & Firewall is another comprehensive security plugin for WordPress. It has more than 800000 active installs and 5 star rating. The plugin reduces security risk by regularly checking for vulnerabilities. The plugin implements and enforces the latest WordPress security practices and techniques.

Once you install and activate this plugin, you can enforce strong passwords for all the users, detect if you have any users that use the same login and display name, protect your website from brute force attacks, force log out inactive users, and more.

In addition to that the plugin also offers firewall, database protection, and the ability to backup and restore your .htaccess and wp-config file.

Pricing: This plugin is free to download and use.

5. Cerber Security, Antispam & Malware Scan

cerber security and anti-spam plugin

The Cerber Security, Anti-spam & Malware scan helps you protect your WordPress website against malware, hacking attempts, and spam. The plugin has over 100000 active installations and 5-star rating.

It mitigates brute force attacks and stops spam by using Cerber’s anti-spam engine paired with Google ReCAPTCHA on your comment and contact forms.

You can prevent access to your site by whitelisting and blacklisting IP addresses and create a custom login URL to protect the access to your site. This plugin will also monitor the files on your WordPress website and compare them against those found in the repository. In addition to the features above, the plugin will also protect your WooCommerce login, registration, and lost password forms.

Pricing: This plugin is free to download and use.

6. Shield Security with Smart Automation

Shield Security & Firewall

This plugin aims to make WordPress security easy and eliminate the number of][ notifications you get from other similar plugins. It has more than 80000 active installations and 5-star rating.

Core features of the plugin include brute force protection, automatic IP block list, 2FA, automated spam blocking, the ability to block REST API / XML-RPC requests, and more.

There’s also a premium version of the plugin with added features such as plugin vulnerability scanner, plugin and theme hack detection, protection for WooCommerce, EasyDigitalDownloads, and more.

Pricing: Free with premium version starting at $1/month.

7. Defender WordPress Security

Defender

The Defender WordPress Security plugin was developed by a well-known name in the WordPress industry, WPMU DEV. The plugin has more than 20000 active installations and 5 star rating.

The plugin has a number of features to help you protect your website. You can easily enable 2FA, mask the login URL, lockout failed login attempts, block users based on their location, disable trackbacks and pingbacks for spam protection and more.

The plugin will also run malware checks to protect your site against malicious code and it will shut down any bots repeatedly visiting the non-existing pages on your website.

Pricing: Free, premium version is available as part of WPMU DEV membership priced at $49/month.

8. BulletProof Security

BulletProof Security

The BulletProof Security plugin offers malware scanner, firewall, login security, database backup, anti-spam protection, and more. The plugin has more than 60000 active installations and 5-star rating.

If you’re looking for a plugin that’s easy to set up, this is a good contender as it comes with a one-click setup wizard. The plugin includes features such as the ability to protect your .htaccess file and plugin directory, force logout for inactive or idle users, database table prefix changer, and the ability to put your website into maintenance mode.

Premium version offers more advanced features such as plugin firewall, real-time file monitoring, protection of your uploads folder, and more.

Pricing: Free with premium version starting at $69.95.

9. WP Guard

WP Guard

WP Guard is a powerful WordPress security plugin from CodeCanyon. The plugin has a 4-star rating and provides protection from SQLi attacks, XSS vulnerabilities, malicious files and code, spam, and more.

The plugin uses an intelligent algorithm that relies on code recognition and patterns to detect all known hacker attacks and new unknown threats.

Main features include a firewall that monitors your site, the ability to block specific IP addresses, operating systems, ISPs, and regions, automatic block of bad bots and crawlers, and more.

Pricing: You can purchase the plugin for $19 which gives you access to 6 months of support. You can extend support to 12 months for an extra $5.25.

10. JetPack

JetPack Plugin

JetPack is a popular plugin that offers a lot of features for free. On top of adding lazy loading, automated social media posting, and site statistics, JetPack comes with all the essential security features you’ll need to keep your site secure.

The plugin offers real-time backups with instant downtime alerts and one-click restore functionality.

JetPack also offers malware scanning and a one-time fix to remove the infected files or code. In addition to that, JetPack comes with an automatic spam block in the comment section and forms.

The core features of the plugin such as brute-force protection are included on the free plan but if you want the security features mentioned above, you’ll need a paid Jetpack plan.

Pricing: Free, with premium plans starting at $3.50/month.

11. BruteGuard

BruteGuard

BruteGuard is a brute force attack prevention plugin that protects your site against botnets by connecting its users to track failed login attempts across all sites that use the plugin. All active BruteGuard installations build an inter-connected protection layer against botnet attacks. By activating the plugin login attempts will get distributed to the cloud and checked against a big database of malicious IPs. A smart algorithm analyses all Iogin attempts and identifies patterns and filters or blocks them in the most efficient way possible.

BruteGuard works in conjunction with any other security plugin as it builds an additional protective layer in front of other security measurements. Thanks to the lightweight and simple architecture the plugin will add no bloat to your WordPress site and by preventing brute force attacks it will help you to protect you against server resource spikes from botnet attacks.

And as more people use BruteGuard the smarter the software gets. The goal is to not only prevent brute force attacks when they are happening but also make all websites in the network immune to attacks before they can even happen.

Pricing: This plugin is free.

12. NinjaFirewall

NinjaFirewall

NinjaFirewall is lightweight Web Application Firewall that can block threats even before they reach your blog. Because it loads before WordPress core, as well as your plugins and themes, it offers some unique security features not available in most other plugins. With more than 280 security rules, dozens of firewall policies and a powerful filtering engine able to detect Web Application Firewall evasion techniques used by advanced hackers, it provides a very strong level of security to WordPress.

NinjaFirewall brute force attack detection system is the fastest one available for WordPress. It can add a password protection or a captcha to the login page without loading the blog, which allows it to easily block any brute force attacks on WordPress, including distributed attacks. It can write the offender’s IP address to the Syslog server in order to work in conjunction with other third-party applications that can interact with the Linux kernel firewall like Fail2ban.

The firewall filtering engine contains a large set of security rules used to prevent most known vulnerabilities to be exploited, but also specific rules used to block generic threats (e.g., SQL injection, cross-site scripting, remote code execution etc.) and a heuristic detection engine to detect and reject unknown vulnerabilities. In addition to rejecting and blocking hacking attempts, it can sanitize incoming data on-the-fly so that suspicious input can be cleaned up before being safely re-injected into the HTTP request. HTTP headers, including cookies, can be manipulated for better security.

NinjaFirewall also includes a real time detection engine, a file integrity monitoring scanner and an anti-malware using the popular Linux Malware Detect (Maldet) signatures and is, to some extent, compatible with ClamAV signatures as well.

Pricing: Free with premium plans starting at $45/year per website.

13. WP Oauth

WP Oauth

WP OAuth Server is the only plugin that enables WordPress to become a full OAuth2 provider (the industry standard in authorization protocol). WP OAuth Server started in 2012 as a plugin that provide a large college with the ability to provide SSO between its satellite site (running WordPress) and new smaller flash sites that were being launched.

WP OAuth Server is easy to use and is ready to use in no more than 5 minutes. The majority of the server settings can be configured directly in the plugin settings page. For more advanced configuration, the plugin is built using WordPress style filters and actions. These filters and actions extend almost ever aspect of the server.

The plugin is designed to make it possible for developers to cut development cost while building on the best security protocols. Developer can connect mobile applications, desktop software, servers and any other website to a single site running WordPress with WP OAuth Server installed. The only limitation to a system being connected to a WordPress site (with WP OAuth Server installed) is if the device/software can can not connect to the internet.

Pricing: This plugin is free.

Bonus: Security Ninja Check

Security Ninja Check

Security Ninja Check offers malware scanner and firewall for your WordPress website. The plugin has 4,5 star rating and more than 9000 active installations.

Once you install and activate the plugin, it can perform 50+ security tests with one click and allows you to take proactive measures to protect your site from security vulnerabilities.

Main features include zero-day exploit prevention, database optimization, brute force protection, update checks, and more.

Pricing: Free with premium version starting at $39.99/year for a single site.


There you have it! With the help of one of these plugins, your website will be secure, giving you a peace of mind that hackers and malware won’t bring it down. All that’s left to do now is to install, activate, and configure one of these WordPress security plugins on your website.

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2 Comments

  1. Dimiter Kirov

    Malcare with 7 days trial and after that $99/year.
    Been using it for years but it hasn’t made it to Your list. Any specific reason?
    Not good according to You or?

    • Kyla

      They just didn’t make it this time – for some reason I though of Malcare as a scanning and Malware removal tool. We do add to our lists over time, so they’ll likely be considered when we update 🙂

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