Hackers are smart enough to find vulnerabilities and strike your website. You have optimized your website to get the best page speed score, but what if an anonymous sends multiple requests just to make your website down? It won’t be more cramped than a nightmare!
Useless traffic and tons of comments spam can devour your bandwidth and make your website unavailable for others. Blacklisting IP’s can be a stopgap solution, but not a robust resolution! Yes, we do have some steadfast ways to resist DDoS attacks which would no doubt work all the time.
1. Hiding Login Page
When you install WordPress, it creates a default URL for users to get into the login panel. Similar to the gaming world internet does have bots that keep spamming fake traffic on your website. The only things that bother hackers are barriers. Keeping them will lower down the plausibility of getting server errors. Hackers will continuously try wrong username/password combinations to drain your resources. It will end-up placing a colossal load on the database. PHP pages are never cached; rather they are generated at each turn. To address it as a barrier for a hacker, you can redirect the login page to the “404” error Page.
2. Keep spammers away with Google CAPTCHA
WordPress does have some plugins which will keep your website safe but it does consume server performance while processing its queries. What we suggest is to use Google CAPTCHA which will keep your website free from spammers that too without easting up your performance. Google CAPTCHA has been helping out thousands of websites to get an extra layer of security.
Don’t Ignore Contact Pages!
Form 7 does have re-CAPTCHA v3 but it just displays the score instead of protecting the contact form. Contact forms are vulnerable as they accept input from users which would try to contact the database and eat up server performance. Always remember to add an extra layer of security to avoid database hammering through unprotected contact forms.
3. Cloudflare: The ultimate solution
Now there may be conditions when you are fully loaded up with making money from your website which will catch the eyes of hackers. Here you will have to tighten up your securities. What exactly does it mean? It means keeping an eye on DDoS attacks. How?
Cloudflare has an “I’m Under Attack” mode which you can activate to temporarily show a captcha to all users. As discussed, CAPTCHA will keep away database hammering but black-listing IPs should stop DDoS attacks temporarily. This will give you enough time to cross-check for any vulnerability and tighten up your security. But what if it goes even worse? To deal with it, you can use Cloudflare which will route your traffic and give you an extra layer of security.