6 Website Security Audit Plugins You Need to Know

Searching for the top website security audit plugins? Our experts bring it all to you in this article. Take notes and check out our suggestions, and if you need any help, don’t hesitate to hit a message to us!

You absolutely know someone who has experienced a hacker attack. The number of websites hurt by this kind of scam has dramatically increased during the last two years. Many business owners need help with the security level of their network, especially their websites. Implementing a website security audit is a must.

Let’s find out the best website security audit plugins you can install now!

Top Website Security Audit Plugins and Tools

It’s hard to build a business website without integrating a security infrastructure to keep your most important online asset safe and sound. Just remember how much you invest in establishing your site: A lot, right? There are many reasons to make so much effort when securing your website. Let’s find out the top all-in-one website security audit plugins- easy to use with multiple features.

Jetpack

Jetpack is one solution for WordPress security, offering many features, from boosting your website’s performance to backup solutions, automated scans, and hosting videos.

Jetpack is a really well-known plugin thanks to one-click fixes to scan your WordPress website for files and security vulnerabilities; no wonder the plugin has been installed over 5 million times. Just head to their website and find out what you can get from installing Jetpack, which can literally be your army against any specious attacks.

Pros

Backups: The security plugin offers real-time backups for every change you make to your website, which is a pretty generous amount of backup space that you can have with a monthly limit of 10GB. It seems insufficient for almost all websites, so you’d need your developer to help you out with this. 

You can restore your site and get it back online quickly with only one click. 

Tracking: The plugin also has an activity log that tells you exactly which action broke your site. 

Security: Jetpack has a decentralised malware scanning that protects your site from security threats, offering lots of antispam protection by automatically blocking spam in blog comments.

If there is any serious activity, you will immediately receive an email alerting you that the system has determined that your WordPress site is dying. So you’ll have immediate notification of any downtime.

The brute force protection defends your site against login attacks and harmful malware. By the way, those are common attacks that can happen on your WordPress website. 

Configuration updates: Using Jetpack will guarantee that all your WordPress plugins are automatically updated, enhancing your website’s security by cleaning up all bugs autonomously. So, you know that your plugins are always going to be updated, and that’s a really important feature when it comes to WordPress security.

Cons

First, the free version can slow down your website. If you’re willing to keep your website optimised with a perfect SEO score, it’d be better to upgrade your plan. And here is the tricky side: if you want to enjoy all the advanced features, it will charge you $720, which is HUGE! They will never say that, but it turns into this amount in the checkout stage when adding all the tools you will absolutely need.

Price

The free version of Jetpack includes WordPress security features, and the security plan starts at $20 a month; there’s also a scan add-on that you can get for $5 a month. So, something to think about whenever you are going onto your site.

WPScan

WPScan is a user-friendly tool; it’s been around since 2012 and will protect your website against any potential threats online. It works by cataloguing tons of known threats and reporting the important ones to use to avoid any unwanted security issues.

Pros

Security: It enables you to manage to scan for remote WordPress installations so that it can pinpoint any of your security issues. A dedicated WordPress security specialist updates their database of vulnerabilities. Also, your website will be examined by daily automatic scans to look for malicious code.

Tracking: You will receive email notifications for any issues on your site.

Cons

However, it offers many features for your website security audit, but you can rely on it as an ultimate security solution. It will reveal your website’s vulnerabilities, but this plugin cannot detect malware. So, you have to invest in a malware cleaner. 

Price

A free version of this plugin can be a good start. However, if you have a big site that uses a lot of plugins, then the paid version of WP Scan would be better for you. And it starts at around $2.31 a month. You can go to the pricing page and get a small business or enterprise quote based on your website and business size.

WordFence

In this security guide, we cannot overlook WordFence, with its firewall and scanner features, to protect your WordPress website and block any possible vulnerabilities hackers can use to jeopardise your online files.

Pros

Abundance: The free version is equipped with many outstanding features compared to the other plugins that you’ve seen so far. So you can use the basic version for free and enjoy simple integration with your WordPress dashboard. 

Security: WordFence monitors visits and hack attempts in real-time, including their origin and IP address, the time of day and the time spent on your site. The plugin gives you adequate protection against brute force attacks by limiting failed login attempts and sending customisable email alerts directly to your inbox. 

Tracking: WordFence tracks alerts about password usage so you can create new strong passwords immediately.

Cons

You can get lost with several hosting server settings, so hiring a developer to set it up for you if you have multiple websites would be better. 

Price

A free version is available with multiple features and robust security tools, including scans and two-factor authentication. 

Or you can invest more in the paid version, which costs $99 a year.

The Pro version will let you monitor all sites from a central dashboard to assess all your website’s security effectively. 

If you do have multiple sites, you can see all security scans of all of your sites in one place in the paid plan.

Bulletproof Security

Another WordPress security solution that offers less in the free version than some other plugins would be Bulletproof Security can be good for your website security audit for login security and monitoring, automatic updates, and more.

Pros

Security: The plugin gives you some basic security features for free, so it’s worth looking at and seeing if it works for you. Also, it has an easy-to-use set-up wizard equipped with malware scanning and firewalls. Also, you can launch database backups, not full site backups, which is an excellent option if you want to select specific files to save the storage. 

The plugin offers security logging features and tools for a healthy, flawless website with an advanced MScan malware scanner. Like other plugins, you will receive email notifications with security logs. So when a user gets locked out from field login attempts, you’re also aware of that. 

Tracking: The plugin optimises a new feature called Idle Session Logout (ISL). So, if someone has a session on Idle Session Logout (ISL) but has remained idle for several periods, they will get automatically logged out. There is no cost to build proof security; it is all free.

Cons

The free version lacks more essential features like firewall capabilities and two-factor authentication. If you make a quick comparison between all WordPress security solutions, Bulletproof Security might be the worse. Ultimately, it failed to detect some malware after examining the same website through other security solutions. 

Price

Obviously, the free version offers only basic features. So, you need to upgrade your plan and pay $69.95 as an only-one-lifetime payment to examine unlimited websites, which is a great deal!

All-in-One Security (AIOS)

Another good security plugin is All-in-One Security (AIOS), a comprehensive, easy-to-use, free application for all WordPress website ads. And they apply WordPress’s best practices for security to your small business website. 

Pros

Security: The plugin embraces some features to scan your website for malicious patterns. It offers IP filtering to block specific people and geographical locations. Also, it enables you to activate lockdowns after failed login attempts. 

Tracking: If needed, you can view a list of locked-out users to unlock individuals in just a few clicks. It gives you access to user account monitoring and a website-level firewall. 

Cons

After comparing a number of security plugins, we can tell that All-in-One Security is not as beginner friendly as the well-known solutions. You have to process lots of steps and settings to start monitoring your website, making it challenging for people with no technical background. 

Additionally, It lacks a DNS-level firewall, as some other plugins might offer, but you can manually blacklist suspicious IP addresses if you want to. 

Price

There is no cost to this one either; it’s completely free. But remember, it’s not a handy plugin for beginners, but it has many useful features to add to your website. If you want to spend less or know how to spend less on a security plugin, this is a good one.

However, you can upgrade your plan to get All-in-One Security (AIOS) Premium, where you can enjoy hands-on support through emails for a better communication experience- rather than going to WP discussion forums.

Plus, you will get exclusive access to advanced security tools such as Country Blocking, Advanced Two Factor Authentication, and more. It will charge you $70 a year.

Google Authenticator

It’s one of the best ways to add two-factor authentication to WordPress. Setting up two-factor authentication will give you an extra layer of login and security, and that’s a good idea.

Why? Because many of the plugins we’ve seen so far don’t offer that as part of their free features.

Pros

Security: It lets you pick which type of two-factor authentication you want to use, and it does offer short codes as well, so you can do things like use it on customer login pages. This amazing feature is entirely free. Google Authenticator also offers website scanning, DNS Firewalls and their cloud-based server and CDN network.

Easy to use: So it has a very simple beginner-level interface.

Free application: You can download the Google Authenticator application to manage logins to your website.

Cons

You need to configure a Google Authenticator account manually for each user. Also, you cannot depend on it to manage your website security; it’s just an add-on. 

Price

It’s totally free.

Things to Consider When Choosing Website Security Audit Plugins

The average website is hacked 44 times every day. If one of those tactics is successful, your business will suffer a lot. It might damage your reputation for good! Not only will your sensitive information be under threat, but it will also affect your appearance. 

Here we will discuss what you need to look more deeply into and other things to consider when executing a website security audit.

Your Budget

It always depends on how much you’re willing to spend and how much security you think you need. If you see a free plugin plan that’s fair for you, go ahead. However, we doubt it because laying a secure foundation for your website is more than just a one-and-done task. You need to establish a long-term strategy. You need to establish a long-term strategy, something that rinf.tech’s Automotive Cybersecurity study also emphasizes. At the same time, you don’t need to fall into the trap of cyber security enthusiasm and bring each tool you stumble upon. 

A good rule of thumb is to consult a dedicated agency to prioritise your expenses.

Taste Your Website through A Site Health Audit Tool

A site health audit can help you analyse your site’s usability and architecture. You can find issues like not applying meta descriptions to all pages or broken links, internal linking, site performance, site structure, page speed, page titles, and load times.

There are loads of tools out there to help you run a site health audit, but the two best available tools are Semrush and Google Analytics.

With Semrush and a simple audit test, you can ensure your site runs efficiently after considering all these factors and making the necessary edits.

In terms of Google Analytics, you need to make sure that you create a separate account for your website client and add the Google Tracking code to the dashboard.

Pro tip: With WordPress, you can do that by simply adding the tracking tag to your file codes, or you can install a plugin, like Google Tag Manager, to add the tag to the plugin, and it’ll also start tracking your site. As soon as the tag is on the site, Google will start tracking it immediately.

And then, within a month, you’ll have a month’s worth of analytics to go through and see what you can improve regarding all your paid campaigns, page titles, any missing meta descriptions, and things like that.

Check Your SEO Performance 

Your security audit optimisation interweaves with other processes. It’s not a once-checked deal. To be alarmed with lingering threats, you need to complete your audit by enhancing your overall website performance, such as SEO. 

Thankfully, there are loads of free tools out there, such as Seobility, Ashrafs, and Moz.

Our Today Pick for SEO Improvements: Seobility

But let’s see how you can use the first one. Seobility works similarly to GTmetrics; just type in the page URL link you want to check the SEO on.

It will then scan that link and run a quick SEO audit to make sure that you have the basic SEO rules in place. And whichever ones you’re missing, they’ll list them out for you.

And then, you will receive a list of actionable things to fix on your website or on that page to improve the site’s SEO.

Important: it’s not a free tool. You can register with your email to get access to the dashboard and SEO checker tool.

So, for example, once you have the report generated, it will give you a percentage of the most important elements of your website, such as Page quality, meta description, page structure, external factors, and more.

Then the tool will give you a total score. Additionally, it’ll give you a task list of SEO improvements, and you want to use this as a list of things to fix.

If you scroll down, you can see a more in-depth list of what they look out for, what you’re doing well, things like your domain length, image SEO, heading structure, page URL, and meta tags while they’re formatted. Plus, Seobility will also analyse your mobile optimisation.

All of these things are really important in making sure that your site is optimised as much as possible for SEO.

Expert tip: Don’t forget to run a competitor site audit when optimising your website through SEO tools. And through doing this, you can get a unique insight into what your competitors are doing to perform well and learn from their achievements and mistakes. 

You’ll be able to learn how to improve processes and deal with problems within your niche, which will help you implement a powerful and rounded digital marketing strategy.

In a nutshell, Seobility can essentially generate a checklist for you to go through each thing and make sure that your site can accommodate all of the things you’re missing and then improve that score as much as possible.

What’s Now?

Please remember: a delay in your website security plan will cost you!

That’s the truth! Hackers are doing their job by finding any vulnerabilities in your website that enable them to get into your network and spread malicious things. Protect your business by applying one of our cyber security solutions. Let’s build a secure, functional, and beautifully designed website that converts. Book a free consultation call now!