Best Free Security Plugins for WordPress
Wouldn’t it be great if you don’t have to worry about the security of your website?
Having a tool to protect your site will certainly give you peace of mind. Checking and stopping malware, preventing hackers, protecting your site from brute force attack, SL injections, or any kind of security threat – there are so many security jobs that a WordPress security plugin does to safeguard your WordPress website from any kind of harm.
Here, we have listed 10 of the best free WordPress security plugins for 2020.
Table of Contents
Jetpack by WordPress
Jetpack, unarguably the most popular WordPress security plugin, has over 5 million active installations. The plugin takes care of your website’s security, guards it against brute force attacks, and prevents any unauthorized logins.
This security plugin protects your site brute-force attacks, filters spams, and monitors downtime. You can also keep the backup of your site (premium) in real-time or daily. The plugin also secures your website with two-factor authentication. Besides, Jetpack also scans malware, code, and automated threats to make sure your site remains safe from them.
Not just that, Jetpack keeps a record of every single change that is done on your site so that you can easily find out the problem if any troubleshooting occurs.
Wordfence Security – Firewall & Malware Scan
Wordfence Security – Firewall, Malware Scan, and Login Security
Wordfence Security is one of the most popular free WordPress firewall and scanner plugins with over 3 million active installations. It has its Threat Defense Feed Wordfence that provides you with several layers of security to protect your website.
Its Web Application Firewall recognizes malicious traffic and blocks them. It enables deep integration with WordPress to protect your WordPress website at the endpoint. You can also blacklist and block malicious IPs’ traffic. You can also protect your site from brute force attack by restricting login attempts.
The plugin works as the WordPress security scanner on your site as it checks your themes, plugins, and core files for malware, malicious redirects, and bad URLs. And it alerts you if it finds any security vulnerability on your site.
When it comes to login security, Wordfence offers two-factor authentication and login page CAPTCHA.
The plugin lets you manage the security of multiple sites from one place. You can access the security status of your multiple sites from a single place and get notified of security issues.
This free WordPress security plugin is full of security tools; you can monitor live traffic and hack attempts from its analytics. Its premium version has a country blocking option as well.
All In One WP Security & Firewall
All In One WP Security & Firewall is an easy-to-use free WordPress security plugin that will add that one extra layer of security and firewall on your WordPress site. The plugin mitigates the security risk as it checks the vulnerabilities and implements the latest WordPress security practices.
The plugin has a unique and reliable security points grading system with which you will have an idea about how secure your website is. This grading system is calculated based on the security features that you have turned on your site.
The plugin uses a login lockdown to protect your site against the brute force login attack. You can also monitor and view all user accounts’ activities with other details like IP address, username, login/logout date and time, and so on.
In short, All In One WP Security & Firewall provides you with user accounts security, user login security, user registration security, database security, file system security, htaccess and wp-config.php file backup and restore option, comment spam security, brute force login attack prevention, front-end text copy protection, and so on.
Sucuri Security – Auditing, Malware Scanner and Security Hardening
Sucuri Security – Auditing, Malware Scanner and Security Hardening
Sucuri is widely popular in every topic related to website security, particularly WordPress security. This free Sucuri WordPress security plugin offers so many security features like activity auditing, file integrity monitoring, blacklist monitoring, effective security hardening, post-hack security actions, remote malware scanning, and more. And its premium version comes with website firewall.
Here is a detailed guide to beginner-friendly WordPress security guide for you.
iThemes Security
Solid Security – Password, Two Factor Authentication, and Brute Force Protection
Formerly called Better WP Security, iThemes Security is a free WordPress security plugin that secures your website from hacks, spam attacks, and other security vulnerabilities.
The plugin secures your website by locking down your site if any suspicious activity happens on your site. It fixes common holes, stops automated spam attacks, and also reinforces user credentials.
If you go for its pro version, you will get additional security features, including two-factor authentication, WordPress salts and security keys, malware scan scheduling, password security, password age expiration, Google reCAPTCHA, and so on.
Cerber Security, Anti-spam & Malware Scan
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-cerber/
Cerber Security is a free WordPress security WordPress plugin that defends your website against spams, hacking attacks, malware, and trojans. The plugin will reduce the brute force attacks by restricting the number of login attempts through forms, using XML-RPC / REST API, and by using cookie-based authentication.
With this plugin, you can also track the users and their activity with emails or mobile/desktop notification. To stop the spam, Cerber Security free WordPress plugin uses an anti-spam engine and reCAPTCHA, which will help your site get protected from the contact form and comment spamming.
Besides, this free WordPress security plugin provides your site with an advanced malware scanner, file monitoring, integrity checker, access restriction option with black and white API access lists.
Shield Security
Shield Security – Smart Bot Blocking & Intrusion Prevention Security
Shield Security is a free WordPress security plugins that people have loved more than any other security plugins. It is rated the highest among the popular security plugins, and for good reasons.
This free security plugin is super easy-to-use; you can simply activate it and let it take care of the security of your website. But, of course, you can dig deeper as you become familiar with it.
Unlike most other noisy security plugins, it does not ping you every time something happens. Instead, it does the security task sincerely and notify you when you really need to get notified of something.
Some of its major security features include login attempts limitations, automatic blocking of brute force bots, core file scanning, blacklisting IP automatically, two-factor authentication, reCAPTCHA, https headers, firewall, and more.
WP Hide & Security Enhancer
Compared to other WordPress security plugins, WP Hide & Security Enhancer is quite different. It hides your WordPress core files, login pages, WordPress themes, and plugins from being displayed. Others, including hackers, competitors, and spammers won’t know whether you run WordPress or not.
The plugin does not change the file or directory of your website; instead, it uses URL rewrite techniques and WordPress filters. It changes from login URLs of your site from wp-admin or wp-login.php to something unguessable, so hackers will never know the login page.
Some of its major functions include custom admin URL, blocking default admin URL, custom wp-login.php file name, adjustable theme URL, blocking XLM-RPC path, custom plugin URLs, minify Html, CSS, and Javascript, custom wp-include, and so on.
NinjaFirewall – Advanced Security
NinjaFirewall (WP Edition) – Advanced Security Plugin and Firewall
NinjaFirewall is actually a web application firewall that you can install and configure just like a WordPress plugin on your site. It lets the blog administrators and site owners take advantage of its powerful and advanced features fully.
So, specifically, what does this plugin do? NinjaFirewall hooks, scans, cleans, and rejects any HTTP/HTTPS request that reaches to a PHP script before reaching to your WordPress and plugins. Its powerful filtering engine detects web application firewall evasion tactics of hackers. It also protects your site from brute-force attack, detects PHP access at real-time, monitors file integrity, watches your site’s traffic in real-time, alerts you about specific events.
Titan Anti-spam & Security
Titan is another popular free WordPress security plugin that offers your site so many security features like anti-spam, firewall, malware scanning.
One of the main features of Titan is its anti-spam, which checks the comments on your site through its global database and its own neural network. It also provides the logs of all the processed requests. With its regular analysis, you can find new types of spam patterns.
Its WordPress firewall finds and blocks malicious traffic, and it also safeguards your website at the endpoint. It also restricts login attempts to protect your site against brute force attacks. Likewise, its premium version offers you features like checking already existing comments and users, detailed statistics of all logins and comments, register form protection, and more.
Conclusion
So, these are our top picks among the best free security WordPress plugins. Of course, there are many other excellent plugins like Defender Security by WPMU DEV, Anti-Malware Security and Brute-Force Firewall, BulletProof Security, and MalCare Security; these plugins mentioned above are on the league of their own.
So, choose one of these security plugins to secure your website and have peace of mind.