Review of Udemy's “WordPress Security – How to Stop Hackers” By Andrew Williams
Today's review WordPress Security “How To Stop Hackers” by Hackers by Andrew Williams is a Udemy course I had to pick up out of necessity. My sites were getting hacked, or more specifically negative SEO'ed. As a matter fact, I'm still getting hacked right now. I'm blocking all this traffic. So at some point, it will come down to diminishing returns as the hackers run out of IPS and Proxies. My first mistake that was using was using WordFence. Which is unstable and drains the resources on your server, especially if you enable the “live traffic”. Then there is also the problems that it is the most commonly used WordPress plug-in for security. So any hacker worth his salt knows how to get around it.
Is The an Alternative To WordFence?
Frustrated, I searched Udemy for “WordPress security” (using the method I alway use to find the best courses on Udemy). As soon as I started watching it, I liked what I was hearing because instructor Andrew Williams got it! Because of his background in SEO and he understood, hacking isn't all about bringing down your site. The onslaught of brute force attacks, 404 and 503 responses will deflate the “User Experience”. Over time search engines will stop suggesting your site because it is of poor quality.
Negative SEO IS Dead? When people would try to say “Negative SEO IS Dead,” I couldn't agree less. Negative SEO is alive and stronger than ever! To some hackers attack just to be jerks? Sure! The vast majority of people hacking your site are your competitors trying to tank your site in Google's eyes IF they can usurp your SERP they move up. The zero-sum game: Your loss is my gain!. The whole negative SEO is something; I've been screaming a year. Hacking is how the new negative SEO game played.
So What Is In This Course? The intro poses a question: Is WordPress secure? Yes (for the most part), or WordPress wouldn't have such a huge share of the CMS market. WordPress does have a security term that will make the public aware as soon as an exploit is found. Users can make WordPress insecure and so can poorly code / outdated plugins. WordPress as a core CMS is quite stable.
He follows this question up by going through every significant vulnerability and hack you can think of, from using the “admin” username to MYSQL injections. Depending on how much you know about WordPress security, this may or may not be news. The Instructor covers enough ground to where you will have a working knowledge of the treats.
You Could Skip The Intro
He suggests an alternative to Wordfence called All In One WP Security & Firewall. If you follow Andrew Williams recommendations, within an hour you will have a 95% bulletproof WordPress site and won't have your site slowed by live traffic.
Why Experts Sometime Make Matters Complicated The author is not a security expert (which I like), because you are aren't learning things that don't matter! This training teaches what's important most important to have a secuer site and what you can ingnore, which is a huge time-saver configuring All In One WP Security & Firewall is a free plugin. Your average user could easily become confused configuring this security plugin. If I had never used it (sans-guadance) I probably would have locked crashed my site. Udemy's “WordPress Security – How to Stop Hackers” By Andrew Williams is excellent and it it honestly saved my ass, and for that, I'm giving this course five stars.