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| Web Application Firewall |
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| Site Integrity Software |
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| Malware Scanning |
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Every web platform has security vulnerabilities. WordPress, however, is by far the most popular content management system (CMS) around the world, making it an especially attractive target for hackers. These cybercriminals spend a ton of time and energy identifying WordPress vulnerabilities.
So how can you protect your site? See which best WordPress security plugin we’ve uncovered in our best WordPress security plugin reviews. We’ve included several options for your specific needs, and while many of these solutions offer “plugins” for WordPress, many of them are fully featured cloud-based services that run independently of WordPress.
Article Overview
- What Are My WordPress Security Options?
- Web Application Firewalls (WAF)
- Site Integrity Software
- Malware Scanners
- WP Security Best Practices (Video)
- More About DNS-Level Security
What Are My WordPress Security Options?
You have multiple types of WordPress site security options based on the type of service and coverage you need. It’s a confusing decision, even for tech-savvy folks.
What we need to clarify upfront is that the “best WordPress security plugin” is not always going to be a plugin.
Many of these security services are fully-featured security solutions that reside on external servers and are available for any website platform, not just WordPress. They may offer a plugin to interface with their service, however.
Some are offered as fully featured plugins that you can just install and run with. We’ll make that distinction clear and what’s involved as we review each service.
What’s more, some of our top recommendations fall into several categories because they offer multiple means of security, i.e., Wordfence gives you an all-in-one solution for a WAF (Web Application Firewall), malware scanning, and site integrity features.
Best Web Application Firewalls For WordPress
Winner: Sucuri Security | Cloudflare | Imperva | SiteLock | Wordfence
Winner: Sucuri Security Review
Sucuri Security is a global leader in WP website security and our pick for the best WAF — as well as a solid choice for malware scanning (see our best malware scanner winners below).
The Sucuri Security Platform includes a top-notch, cloud-based WAF, malware and blacklist monitoring and cleanup, and security monitoring at WordPress core and server levels.
What is a DNS or cloud-based WAF?
A DNS (Domain Name Resolution) firewall protects against attacks in a vulnerable area of the internet that can compromise your website or application before traffic even finds its way to your hosting server. Think of it as posting additional sentries at the gate to your driveway, vs inside your front door.
Sucuri is an excellent option if you’re looking for combined WAF and malware protection. After testing several security solutions, this is the one we opted for on We Rock Your Web. We’ve so far had one major malware attack that Sucuri successfully analyzed and defeated.
Sucuri also saves your activity monitoring log in the Sucuri Cloud (if you take advantage of the additional WP plugin interface) so that hackers can’t delete your files. While expensive, Sucuri requires little legwork because most of the scanning and back-end work is either automated or via a single-click process.
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Pricing
The following pricing is for one website for its security platform, which includes malware protection. The price goes down a bit if you only want the firewall, but we recommend against that. You can also save by paying annually.
- Basic: $199.99/year
- Pro: $299.99/year
- Business: $499.99/year
- View all plans
Runner-Up: Cloudflare Review
Cloudflare is a robust content delivery network (CDN) that offers a free WordPress plugin, which gives you a one-click installation of settings specifically developed for the WordPress platform. With the free version, you get a strong WAF with protection against DDoS attacks and automatic cache purging.
Cloudflare offers higher level DDoS protection with its paid plans. If you’re looking for application-level security scans in addition to a WAF, you’re out of luck here. Cloudflare doesn’t offer malware protection, blacklist removal, security, or monitoring for file changes.
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Pricing
- Free: Basic WAF
- Pro: $20/month/site
- Business: $200/month/site
- Enterprise: Contact Cloudflare
3rd Place: Imperva Review
Imperva (formally Incapsula) is another CDN like Cloudflare that gives you a powerful DNS-level WAF and other security features for e-commerce and sites that deal with sensitive data (Incapsula is also one of our top picks for site integrity features).
Imperva can also help your website load faster since their servers will absorb much of the bandwidth (and clean it) before it hits your server.
Their control panel gives you detailed information on each hacking attempt, and it allows you to act on that information. Imperva’s standout security features include DDoS protection, SQL injection protection, XSS attack protection, and backdoor protection.
It also does a great job of protecting your site from spam, malicious bots, and the Open Web Application Security Project’s Top 10 Vulnerabilities. Imperva, however, doesn’t offer application-level security scans, like malware and blacklisting.
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Pricing
You can test-drive Imperva with their 14-day free trial of the Pro version.
- Pro: $59 per site per month
- Business: $299 per site per month
- Enterprise: Contact Imperva
SiteLock Review
SiteLock is another CDN with a strong DNS-level cloud-based WAF. All of their plans include daily vulnerability scans, automatic malware removal, and basic DDoS protection. Their premium plans give you advanced DDoS protection, file change monitoring, and protection against cross-site scripting, RFI, SQL and XSS injection, and OWASP top 10 threats.
Their Enterprise level provides backdoor protection and blacklisting of IP addresses, web clients or entire countries. SiteLock partners with many hosting companies, like Bluehost, to offer their basic plan as an add-on.
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Pricing
SiteLock offers four pricing plans, but you must contact SiteLock for a quote.
Wordfence Review
With more than two million active installs, Wordfence is the go-to solution for many businesses, government agencies, bloggers, and more. Wordfence is the only service in our reviews that we include in all three “best of” categories.
Their free plugin gives you an excellent DNS-level WAF, protection against brute force attacks, and a real-time threat defense feed. You can get country blocking with an upgrade.
Regarding malware scanning and other security features, Wordfence’s plugin scans for over 44,000 known malware variants. The premium version adds more frequent scans, two-factor authentication, password auditing, spam, and spamvertising checks.
What is spamvertising?
Spamvertising is essentially spam that’s used to advertise a product or service. For example, you’ve probably moderated comments on your website where they at first appear to be a legitimate engagement in your article’s topic, but upon closer inspection they are simply posting so they can plant a backlink to their website or service.
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Pricing
The following prices are for a one year license. Wordfence offers significant discounts if you purchase their API key for multiple years.
- Free version available
| Free | Premium | Care | Response | |
| Cost (annual) | $0 | $119 | $490 | $950 |
| Firewall | Rules delayed 30 days | Real-time rules | Real-time rules | Real-time rules |
| Malware scanner | Signatures delayed 30 days | Real-time signatures | Real-time signatures | Real-time signatures |
| Customer Support | Volunteer forums | Ticket based | Priority ticket based | 1-hour response time |
| Security audit & recommendations | Once yearly | Once yearly + optional second audit |
Best Site Integrity Software For WordPress
Winner: iThemes Security| BulletProof Security | Imperva | Wordfence
Winner: iThemes Security Review
iThemes has been producing top-notch WordPress themes, plugins, and more since 2008. Their security plugin is an industry leader, giving you more than 30 ways to protect your website.
iThemes offers one of the most popular free WP security plugins, but to get a much-needed layer of extra protection, you’ll want to go for their Pro package, which includes two-factor authentication, file change detection, scheduled malware scans, Google reCAPTCHA integration, and more.
iThemes Security also detects hidden 404 errors on your site that can affect your SEO, such as bad links and missing images. You can test-drive iThemes Security with their free version.
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Pricing
All of iThemes Security pricing plans include one year of updates, ticketed support, and 10 iThemes Sync sites (unless otherwise noted).
- Free version available
- $99/year for 1 site
- $199/year for 5 sites
- $299/year for 10 sites
- View all plans
BulletProof Security Review
BulletProof Security is easy on the budget, but that’s about all that’s easy with this WordPress plugin. Not meant for beginners, BulletProof takes a lot of manual configuration with a confusing and quirky interface.
The free version offers a decent set of tools, including login security, idle session logouts, regular database backups, and .htaccess website security protection to protect your site against XSS, RFI, CRLF (Carriage Return Line Feed) injection, CSRF (Cross Site Request Forgery), Base64, Code Injection, and SQL Injection attacks.
With the pro version, you get a real-time file monitor, and you can secure your ‘wp-admin’ folder and Root website folder with a single click.
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Pricing
BulletProof Security is a one-time purchase that gives you lifetime updates and lifetime tech support.
- Free version available
- $69.95 for unlimited sites
Imperva Review
In addition to a strong WAF, Imperva (formally Incapsula) gives you a ton of high-level security features to enhance your basic protection.
Imperva’s control panel gives you detailed information on each hacking attempt, and it allows you to act on that information. Their standout security features include DDoS protection, SQL injection protection, XSS attack protection, and backdoor protection.
It also does a great job of protecting your site from spam, malicious bots, and the Open Web Application Security Project’s Top 10 Vulnerabilities.
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Pricing
You can test-drive Imperva with their 14-day free trial of the Pro version.
- Pro: $59 per site per month
- Business: $299 per site per month
- Enterprise: Contact Imperva
Wordfence Review
In addition to providing powerful firewall and malware scanning features, Wordfence gives you fantastic tools to protect the integrity of your website.
Wordfence maintains a record of every WP core, theme, and plugin file ever released to the official WordPress repository. They use their source code verification feature to tell you what’s changed and help you repair hacked files.
The premium version adds two-factor authentication, password auditing, spam, and spamvertising checks.
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Pricing
The following prices are for a one year license. Wordfence offers significant discounts if you purchase their API key for multiple years.
- Free version available
| Free | Premium | Care | Response | |
| Cost (annual) | $0 | $119 | $490 | $950 |
| Firewall | Rules delayed 30 days | Real-time rules | Real-time rules | Real-time rules |
| Malware scanner | Signatures delayed 30 days | Real-time signatures | Real-time signatures | Real-time signatures |
| Customer Support | Volunteer forums | Ticket based | Priority ticket based | 1-hour response time |
| Security audit & recommendations | Once yearly | Once yearly + optional second audit |
Best Malware Scanners For WordPress
Winner: Wordfence | 6scan | Jetpack | Sucuri Security
Winner: Wordfence Review
Wordfence wins our top spot as the best malware scanner (and is the only service in our reviews that we include in all three “best of” categories).
Their free plugin scans for over 44,000 known malware variants and covers all the places hackers can hide — core files, themes, and plugins for malware, code injections, and backdoors.
It also checks URLs against Google’s safe browsing list and scans for DNS changes. The premium version lets you scan as often as every hour.
Wordfence also provides an excellent DNS-level WAF, protection against brute force attacks, and a real-time threat defense feed. The premium version adds country blocking, two-factor authentication, password auditing, spam, and spamvertising checks.
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Cons |
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Pricing
The following prices are for a one year license. Wordfence offers significant discounts if you purchase their API key for multiple years.
- Free version available
| Free | Premium | Care | Response | |
| Cost (annual) | $0 | $119 | $490 | $950 |
| Firewall | Rules delayed 30 days | Real-time rules | Real-time rules | Real-time rules |
| Malware scanner | Signatures delayed 30 days | Real-time signatures | Real-time signatures | Real-time signatures |
| Customer Support | Volunteer forums | Ticket based | Priority ticket based | 1-hour response time |
| Security audit & recommendations | Once yearly | Once yearly + optional second audit |
6Scan Review
6Scan is an old-timer in the security world and was the first automated security suite. This WordPress security solution has a decent set of features but isn’t quite up to par with the top players. There’s no free version, and the Starter plan only gives you monthly malware scanning and blacklist protection.
To get unlimited malware scanning you have to fork over a whopping $800+ per year. We recommend you look elsewhere for more robust and cheaper security solutions.
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Pricing
The following pricing is for one site license.
- Free: $0
- Basic: $9.99/mo
- Professional: $29.99/mo
- Enterprise: $49.99/mo
- Compare plan details
Jetpack Review
Jetpack is a widely used plugin in the WordPress world. This plugin has many different modules that perform a range of functions, including site design, marketing, and security. Jetpack’s free Protect module guards against brute force attacks and gives you two-factor authentication and secured logins.
You’ll need to go with their Premium or Professional plans to get malware scanning, code scanning, and threat resolution. Jetpack can be a good solution if you plan on using several of its modules, but for security alone, you can find better options.
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Pricing
All of the following prices are for a one-site license with updates and tech support for one year.
- Free: Brute force attack protection, uptime monitoring, and secure logins
- Personal: $39/year for daily backups, one-click restores, spam filtering, and 30-day archive
- Premium: $99/year for scans for malware and threats with manual resolution
- Professional: $299/year for real-time backups, on-demand scans with an automated one-click resolution
- View all plans
Sucuri Security Review
Sucuri Security is a global leader in WordPress (WP) website security and offers excellent malware scanning, in addition to being our top choice for the best WAF for WordPress.
The Sucuri Security Platform includes a top-notch, cloud-based WAF, malware and blacklist monitoring and cleanup, and security monitoring at WordPress core and server levels.
Sucuri is an excellent option is you’re looking for combined WAF and malware protection. After testing several security solutions, this is the one we opted for on We Rock Your Web. We’ve so far had one major malware attack that Sucuri successfully analyzed and defeated.
Sucuri also saves your activity monitoring log in the Sucuri Cloud (if you take advantage of the additional WP plugin interface) so that hackers can’t delete your files. While expensive, Sucuri requires little legwork because most of the scanning and back-end work is either automated or via a single-click process.
Pros |
Cons |
|
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Pricing
The following pricing is for one website for its security platform, which includes malware protection. The price goes down a bit if you only want the firewall, but we recommend against that. You can also save by paying annually.
- Basic: $199.99/year
- Pro: $299.99/year
- Business: $499.99/year
- View all plans
WordPress Security Best Practices (Video)
It’s important to keep several WordPress best practices in mind to ensure your site’s basic security. Check out the following video for some great tips.
Want To Learn More About DNS-Level Security?
Checkout our best CDN comparison, along with other companies to consider for your WordPress security needs.
What’s the biggest website threat you’ve had to manage? Let us know in the comments!
Tagged With: Comparison, WordPress
