2 Tips How to Improve The Security of Your WordPress Blog

I have started a blog long time ago using the same domain as abegemok.com with wordpress but after a few months, I stopped writing. From that experience, security is one of the important thing needed to be improve as I realized that my blog are getting hacked too many times, or at least there are brute force attacked to many times i don’t even know what to do that time.

But thanks to WordPress seems like it’s getting more and more secure. But as secured as it is, there are still loophole that can give hackers tools to penetrate your site.

So I’m sharing 2 tips which I’m to at least avoid hackers getting your personal login info such as user name.

1. Choose a different Displayed Name from Login user ID

We are not able to change our user name and by default, the displayed name on our post will be our user name. That is pretty easy target for hackers as they have our user name, only to figure out password. However, WordPress is giving you an option to change your displayed name on each of your blog post.

How to do it?

i. Just login to your wordpress blog dashboard and go to User > Profile.

ii. Replace that Nickname and after replacing it, your new Nickname will show up on the >Display name publicly as drop down. Just change to a new nick name you just created and you’ll good to go.

The displayed name will be different than your username. As you can see from screenshot below, my displayed name is Abegemok but if you click that drop down, it will show the username.

Another alternative way to do this is by doing it via phpMyAdmin if you are using Cpanel, but changing it on your WordPress blog dashboard is already good enough.

2. Replace The Author Name Shown in Author Url

You have already hide you username from displaying by replacing the default displayed name but but if you go and view your blog source code (CTRL + U), you will be able to see your user name too. It is embedded in our “blog.com/author/your_username” url.

If you see my screenshot below, it still showing the author name on my author link “abegemok.com/author/my_username”. I found this when I tried to find other ways of looking at my user name.

I think this is how WordPress function which easily expose our username but there is a fix on this.

How to do it?

This can be change via phpMyAdmin.

i. Just login to your Cpanel control or your hosting account control panel.

ii. Go to phpMyAdmin or whatever databases your hosting is using. Mine looks like below.

iii. After you are in your database, looks for your blog database and click on it and look for wpdz_users.

iv. What you will see next will be as below. So proceed to click the edit button.

v. Replace the user_nicename into something you want it to be displayed (don’t put your username) and press go. This will change the name shown on the author url.

All this done, I believe we managed to hide our user name. However don’t take it lightly and ignore the security of your blog.

If you have other tips or ways to improve the security of WordPress blog, please share it in comment below.