Using WPS Hide Login Plugin
With today’s cyber-attacks, and brute force attacks on the Internet which are targeting websites, trying to keep your WordPress website secure should be a top priority.
Cybercriminals are getting more sophisticated by the day, so it’s crucial that you protect your content and data from being hacked by these criminals.
There are multiple ways you can secure your WordPress website from being hacked, but here I’m going to show you a very easy-to-do solution, even for the non-techie person.
The most obvious way for a hacker to gain access to your website is by trying to guess your username and password.
To not make things easy for the hacker you should have changed the standard username “admin” to a more difficult-to-guess username and a very strong password.
Even with a difficult-to-guess username and a very strong password, your website could still be hacked only it will take longer for the hacker to figure out your login details.
Your WordPress login page is the most obvious entry point for hackers, so in this post, I’ll show you how you can make your login page more difficult for hacker to gain access.
What Should I Do?
Everyone knows that to log in to the back end of a WordPress website, all you have to do is add ‘/wp-admin at the end of the site’s URL, (for example www.mywebsite.com/wp-admin) press enter and you are presented with the login page.
There is good news though, you can change this default URL to something unique like www.mywebsite.com/enter or anything else if you like.
You can do it the hard way by adding HTML code to your WordPress site but that is only if you know what you are doing. I know very little about HTML and certainly not enough to go and change or add HTML code to a WordPress site.
The Solution Is…
The easiest way is to use a WordPress plugin that does all the work for you. The WordPress plugin that I use is called WPS Hide Plugin
This is a lightweight plugin with over 200,000 installs, high ratings, and frequent updates has the ability to customize your login URL. It makes it one level harder for your site to get hacked.
WPS Hide Login allows you to change the login URL without changing the files in your WordPress core code. Instead, when a hacker tries to login using the standard /wp-admin, the admin directory and wp-login page become inaccessible.
If you deactivate the plugin you will revert the WordPress login URL back to the standard wp-admin.php and wp-login.php.
Before you install the plugin, make a backup of your website in case something goes wrong. Next, you will install and activate the plugin. I assume you know how to install a plugin, if not watch this video below:
Once the plugin is activated, go to Settings > General > WPS Hide Login. Scroll down to the bottom of the page, and you should see the image below:
Here you can create a new login URL with your website’s domain as the root.
After activating WPS Hide Login, the default URL will be your website URL, www.mywebsite.com/enter. Remember or write down in a safe place, this URL in case you forget that you installed the plugin otherwise you will be locked out of your own website!
The best thing you can do is change your login URL immediately after activation. To make it more secure, use a mix of letters, numbers, and special characters. If it will be hard for you to remember, make sure to bookmark the new URL.
Congratulations! You can now use this new, more secure URL to access your login page.
Here below is a video on how to install and configure the WPS Hide Plugin if you prefer watching instead of reading.
