45 Best Security Plugins to Protect Your WordPress Blog

Updated on January 9th, 2017 by Quertime Team in WordPress

If you are running a WordPress blog, security is something you should never ignore. I strongly suggest you spend some time considering the security aspect of you site, otherwise you are taking risk of all your efforts going down the drain. To keep your blog away from hackers, spams and malicious Internet agents, you have to make sure that you are always updated with the latest version of WordPress, and that’s the least thing you must do. You should also take serious steps toward your blog security by installing some plugins.

In today’s post, I would like to share with you 45 very effective security plugins to protect your WordPress blog. They’re each devised for different purposes, so you will get the best protection from each field. Remember, spending a few minutes on securing your blog can save you hours or even days of trouble later.

Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam
This plugin lets users add CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress forms for comments, registration, lost password, login, or all. In order to post comments or register, users will have to type in the code shown on the image. This prevents spam from automated bots.

WP Security Scan
WP Security Scan checks your WordPress website or blog for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions such as passwords, file permissions, database security, and more.

Secure WordPress
Secure WordPress beefs up the security of your WordPress installation by removing error information on login pages, adds index.html to plugin directories, hides the WordPress version and much more.

Bad Behavior
Bad Behavior complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place. This keeps your site’s load down, makes your site logs cleaner, and can help prevent denial of service conditions caused by spammers.

WP-reCAPTCHA
This plugin integrates reCAPTCHA anti-spam methods with WordPress including comment, registration, and email spam protection.

Exploit Scanner
This plugin searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious. It also examines your list of active plugins for unusual filenames.

Role Scoper
Role Scoper is a comprehensive access control solution, giving you CMS-like control of reading and editing permissions. Assign restrictions and roles to specific pages, posts or categories.

AntiVirus
AntiVirus for WordPress is a smart and effective solution to protect your blog against exploits and spam injections. Malware protection for your blog.

Antispam Bee
Antispam Bee protects your blog from spam by replacing the comment field. It’s easy to use and effective.

Login LockDown
Login LockDown records the IP address and timestamp of every failed login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range. This helps to prevent brute force password discovery.

BulletProof Security
The BulletProof Security WordPress Security plugin is designed to be a fast, simple and one click security plugin to add .htaccess website security protection for your WordPress website. Activate .htaccess website security and .htaccess website under maintenance modes from within your WordPress Dashboard – no FTP required.

WP-Members
WP-Members is a plugin to make your WordPress blog a membership driven site. Perfect for newsletters, private blogs, premium content sites, and more! The plugin restricts selected WP content to be viewable by registered site members. Unlike other registration plugins and WordPress itself, it puts the registration process inline with your content instead of the native WP login page.

Limit Login Attempts
Limit Login Attempts blocks an Internet address from making further attempts after a specified limit on retries is reached, making a brute-force attack difficult or impossible.

NoSpamNX
NoSpamNX automatically adds additional form fields to your comment form, invisible to human users. If a spambot fills these fields blindly (which most of all spambots do), the comment will not be saved. You can decide if you want to block these spambots or mark them as spam.

AskApache Password Protect
This plugin doesn’t control WordPress or mess with your database, instead it utilizes fast, tried-and-true built-in security features to add multiple layers of security to your blog. This plugin is specifically designed and regularly updated specifically to stop automated and unskilled attackers attempts to exploit vulnerabilities on your blog resulting in a hacked site.

TAC (Theme Authenticity Checker)
TAC stands for Theme Authenticity Checker. Currently, TAC searches the source files of every installed theme for signs of malicious code. If such code is found, TAC displays the path to the theme file, the line number, and a small snippet of the suspect code.

Math Comment Spam Protection
Math Comment Spam Protection asks the visitor making the comment to answer a simple math question. This is intended to prove that the visitor is a human being and not a spam robot. Example of such question: Sum of 9 + 9 ?

Better WP Security
Better WP Security takes the best WordPress security features and techniques and combines them in a single plugin thereby ensuring that as many security holes as possible are patched without having to worry about conflicting features or the possibility of missing anything on your site.

Semisecure Login Reimagined
Semisecure Login Reimagined increases the security of the login process by using a combination of public and secret-key encryption to encrypt the password on the client-side when a user logs in. JavaScript is required to enable encryption. It is most useful for situations where SSL is not available, but the administrator wishes to have some additional security measures in place without sacrificing convenience.

Admin SSL
Admin SSL secures login page, admin area, posts, pages – whatever you want – using Private SSL. Once you have activated the plugin, go to the Admin SSL config page to enable SSL, and read the installation instructions.

User Locker
This plugin closes security holes by introducing maximum number of invalid login attempts. When someone exceeds this number, his/her account becomes locked, and can be unlocked only by requesting new password (using Lost Password option) or asking Admin for help. This makes brute force and dictionary attacks nearly impossible.

WordPress Firewall 2
This WordPress plugin investigates web requests with simple, WordPress-specific heuristics, to identify and stop the most obvious attacks. There are a few powerful, generic modules that do this; but they’re not always installed on web servers, and usually difficult to configure.

Ultimate Security Checker
This plugin helps you identify security problems with your WordPress installation. It scans your blog and gives a security grade based on passed tests.

Audit Trail
Audit Trail is a plugin to keep track of what is going on inside your blog. It does this by recording certain actions (such as who logged in and when) and storing this information in the form of a log. Not only that but it records the full contents of posts (and pages) and allows you to restore a post to a previous version at any time.

Defensio Anti-Spam
Defensio is an advanced spam filtering web service that learns and adapts to your behaviors and those of your users. In addition to simple spam filtering, we also provide world-class malicious content detection, profanity filtering, URL categorization, script detection and much more.

WordPress File Monitor
This plugin monitors your WordPress installation for added/deleted/changed files. When a change is detected an email alert can be sent to a specified address.

Page Security by Contexture
Page Security by Contexture International (PSC) lets you decide which users can access which content. Add users to groups, set granular permissions for content, and finally take control of your website.

Timthumb Vulnerability Scanner
The Timthumb Vulnerability Scanner plugin will scan your entire wp-content directory for instances of any outdated and insecure version of the timthumb script, and give you the option to automatically upgrade them with a single click. Doing so will protect you from hackers looking to exploit this particular vulnerability.

Chap Secure Login
Whenever you try to login into your website, you can use this plugin to transmit your password encrypted. The encryption process is done by the Chap protocol; this is particularly useful when you can’t use ssl or other kinds of secure protocols.

Replace WP-Version
If you’re running an older version of WordPress, anyone can view source to see what attacks might work against your blog. This plugin replace the WP-version with a random string < WP 2.4 and eliminate WP-version > WP 2.4.

WordPress Firewall
This WordPress plugin investigates web requests with simple WordPress-specific heuristics to identify and stop most obvious attacks. There exist a few powerful generic modules that do this; but they’re not always installed on web servers, and difficult to configure.

Block Bad Queries (BBQ)
Block Bad Queries (BBQ) helps protect WordPress Against Malicious URL Requests. BBQ checks for excessively long request strings (i.e., greater than 255 characters), as well as the presence of either “eval” or “base64” in the request URL.

User Spam Remover
User Spam Remover is a plugin for WordPress that automatically removes spam user registrations and other old, never-used user accounts. It also blocks the notification e-mail that WordPress normally sends to the administrator whenever a new user registers and logs it instead.

HTTP Authentication
The HTTP Authentication plugin allows you to use existing means of authenticating people to WordPress. This includes Apache’s basic HTTP authentication module, Shibboleth, and many others.

Secure Contact
Secure Contact is a drop in form for users to contact you. It can be implemented on a page or a post. It offers enhanced security by using captcha image.

Enmask Captcha
EnMask Captcha is based on encrypted text and paired with matching web fonts so user will see clearly the challenge text while the spam programs see the underlying encrypted text. Users will have much better Captcha experience then trying to guess the difficult twisted image based Captcha solution. It’s fun and helps improving user accuracy rate when the answer characters showing the same font.

wp secure
WordPress Security Plugin – Perform over 23 Basic Security Activities for your blog and get a free malware scan at the same time.

WordPress File Monitor Plus
This plugin monitors files under your WP installation for changes. When a change occurs, be notified via email.

WP Email Guard
WP Email Guard protects your email addresses included on any post or page from being crawled by spammers. It converts every email written within your post body into a JavaScript code, so the emails is readable and can be clicked by humans only.

Email Protect
The Email Protect WordPress plugin protects email addresses from being harvested from spam robots by converting them into forms that aren’t recognized. With Email Protect you can choose to obfuscate your email addresses in text form or image form automatically.

WordPress Backup Plugins
No plugin can guarantee your WordPress blog 100% hacker-proof, however, if all else fails make sure you continually and automatically backup your databases with the following plugins:

WP-DB-Backup
WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.

WP-DBManager
This plugin allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. It supports automatic scheduling of backing up, optimizing and repairing of database.

BackUpWordPress
BackUpWordPress will back up your entire site including your database and all your files once every day.

Remote Database Backup
This plugin creates SQL dumps of your wordpress database. It is based on the WordPress Database Backup plugin but it removes some of the security restrictions in the plugin to enable automated remote backups. You still need the admin user name and password to do a remote backup.

Simple WordPress Backup
Simple WordPress Backup allows you to back up your WordPress Database with just one click.