The best security plugins for WordPress (2020)

Want to keep your WordPress site safe? A security plugin is a great idea!
Since WordPress is the most popular CMS and therefore often the most sought after by malicious hackers and spammers.

Unfortunately, many website owners fall into the trap of thinking that hackers only target large companies or popular blogs, so they underestimate the importance of keeping your website safe. But in reality, hackers attack websites not only for stealing personal data and creating backlinks, but also for fun.

In other words, having a small website doesn’t guarantee that your website is safe from malicious attacks. Unless you take security measures to prevent attacks, you are allowing the bad guys to destroy your search rankings and your online business.

The best way to keep your website safe is to install a WordPress security plugin on your website.

In this article, I will compare the most popular WordPress security plugins to help you find the best one for your website.

Why use a WordPress Safety Plugin?

Ensuring the safety of your WordPress can be complicated, especially if you are not a WordPress expert. But with the right security Plugin, you don’t need to get into technicalities to keep your site safe.

A good WordPress Security Plugin should come with the following features:

Firewall : Firewalls monitor all traffic on your website and filter out vulnerable bots before they reach your website’s server.
Scanning : it is recommended to scan the web regularly for malware or other potential threats.
Fixes : a good security plugin should guarantee the removal of malware and fixes on the web in case you are attacked.

All In One WP Security & Firewall plugin

All In One WP Security & Firewall is a free WordPress security plugin that takes your web security to a whole new level. The best thing about this plugin is that all its functions are classified as basic, intermediate, or advanced, making it easy for anyone to enable a group of functions without breaking the website.

You can find a security strength meter directly in your WordPress panel. It tells you how secure your website is based on the security point rating system. The Plugin also ships with another dashboard widget that recommends that you enable certain functions on your site to achieve a minimally acceptable level of security.

Sucuri Security Plugin

Sucuri is a complete website security solution and one of the best WordPress plugins. It protects your website against malware, brute force attacks, and other potential vulnerabilities.

Once you activate Sucuri, all your web traffic passes through its CloudProxy servers and each request is scanned to filter out malicious requests. Because of this, Sucuri can reduce server load and improve your website performance by not allowing malicious traffic to reach your server.

It protects your website against SQL injections, XSS and all known attacks. In addition, they proactively report potential security threats to the WordPress core team and also to third party plugins.

In addition to blocking all attacks, some other ways Sucuri protects your website are

Their antivirus package monitors your website every 4 hours to ensure it is free of potential vulnerabilities and malware.
It keeps track of everything that happens on your website, including file changes, last login, failed login attempts and more…
It allows you to perform server-side scans to protect your site from compromised, server-level infections.

Wordfence Security Plugin

Wordfence is one of the most comprehensive WordPress security plugins available. A free lite version of the Plugin is available from the official WordPress Plugin repository.
The free Plugin comes with important features such as a web application firewall, malware scanner, and protection against brute force attacks. With over 2 million active installations, it is the most popular security plugin for WordPress.

Wordfence monitors brute force attacks and blocks any attempt after too many login attempts. It can block anyone using an invalid username and even enable 2-factor authentication for better security.

With its country blocking feature, you can stop attacks and content theft from a specific geographical region. Based on pattern matching and IP ranges, it can block entire malicious networks and human activities that look suspicious.

It allows you to check the reputation of your IP address to ensure that customer emails are not marked as spam.

The disadvantage of Wordfence is that it runs on your own server rather than being a cloud-based provider.

SiteLock Security Plugin

SiteLock is another popular website security solution that offers DDoS protection, malware analysis, and more. It comes with all the necessary features you need to secure your website.

It is one of the fastest website scanning solutions that automatically finds, corrects and prevents vulnerabilities, giving you the peace of mind you deserve.

On a daily basis, SiteLock scans your WordPress themes, plugins, and files for possible vulnerabilities that can cause blacklisting of websites or a bad experience for visitors.

If malware is found on your website, SiteLock automatically corrects it and notifies you accordingly. Based on the detailed scan report, you can take immediate action to protect your website.

With its web application firewall, it can differentiate human traffic from bot traffic and protect your website from bots and attacks by blocking them before they reach your website.

StackPath Security Plugin

StackPath is primarily known as a CDN (content delivery network) that allows you to deliver your website from around the world at the speed of light. But StackPath also offers total security for your web, it is actually the world’s first secure edge platform.

StackPath offers DDoS protection across the entire platform. Its advanced architecture identifies and redirects DDoS attacks into strategic sinks, all StackPath offerings have Layer 3 and 4 DDoS
protection, and the protection is geographically distributed.

The StackPath network is also designed to defend new threats as they emerge by providing network level encryption, network scanning, and malware defense. But security is not a secondary plug-in for StackPath; it is a top priority.

The StackPath Plugin will not only keep your web safe and protected from attacks, it will also dramatically accelerate your web.

Jetpack Security Plugin

Jetpack is a popular all-in-one plugin for security, performance and site management with over 5 million active installations. This popular Automattic plugin also includes website design features as well as automated marketing tools.

However, focusing on security, Jetpack monitors your WordPress and alerts you the moment it detects your website is down and protects it against brute-force login attacks, spam, and harmful malware injections.

Other security features include:

Secure Authentication – Provides secure authentication through WordPress accounts.
Updated Plugin – Keeps all your Plugins automatically updated and allows for mass management.
Site activity: Easily view all your web activity in an organized, chronological list of events.

With the premium version of the Plugin you also get site backup, 1-click restore, malware scanning, automatic comment and pingback spam filtering, and more.

But because Jetpack is so full of features from security to marketing, many people find that the plugin can really slow down your website.

iThemes Security Plugin

iThemes Security, formerly known as Better WP Security, provides multiple ways to protect your WordPress website.

It protects your website from brute force attacks by limiting the number of failed login attempts. You can receive email alerts to be notified of recent file updates so you know if your website has been hacked.

Depending on the limits you set, iThemes Security blocks any suspicious IPs that look for vulnerabilities on your website. It can even set a default mode for your website so that your WordPress control panel is inaccessible depending on your settings.

In addition, you can schedule database backup to your preferred off-site storage destinations.

Some other features you will find useful are:

2-factor authentication that provides additional layer protection to your website.
User Security Control to review individual user activity. Notify you if there are outdated themes or plugins and if there are any critical issues that need to be fixed.

Shield Security Plugin

If you’re looking for a smart, automated solution for your WordPress security, then Shield Security will be the right choice. This plugin makes sure you only receive the right alerts with actionable information to fix those vulnerabilities.

Shield Security is easy to set up and has some absolutely adorable features such as Core File Scanner which helps detect malicious files in your database, Automatic IP Blacklist which keeps you out of the hassle of manually blocking suspicious IP addresses, Automatic Brute Blocking Power -Bots Force and much more.

A free lite version is available from the WordPress Plugin repository. But you can upgrade to the Pro version that comes with Themes Hack Detection Scanner, more frequent scans, Vulnerability Scanner Plugins and more.

What is the best WordPress Security Plugin?

After our comparison of the best WordPress security plugins, we found that Sucuri is the best WordPress security solution for your website. It comes with all the features you would need from a website security solution, including website scanning, DNS-level firewalls, and a content delivery network (CDN). A tool such as a website security scanner would be very useful in finding out the current state of your website’s security.