As with all things digital, security is a key consideration for stable functioning websites.  Using WordPress as a platform is very secure in itself, however there are certain ways in which you can harden the security.  There are multiple things which you can do to make your website more secure at a server level, at a website level, and as a content management system.

Securing a website is a preventative measure largely low level hacking where people have been hired to embed code across the internet to improve the search engine results of other websites. Google and search engines pay serious attention to the reputation of your website and offer a great deal of free help and support to ensure a secure web experience.  The more secure your website, the better the reputation.

You can see what Google say about how and why a website is hacked, also what there is to be done about it:

Sucuri is a globally distributed security company, focused on detecting and remediating compromised websites. Their technology is heavily used as an early warning system to detect malware, spam and other indicators of compromise on websites and Denial NS hijacking.  Sucuri offers a Website Antivirus and Firewall (WAF) (CloudProxy), to protect sites from web attacks and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

They offer a free website Malware and Security Scanner which is a handy development tool for analysing websites for various weaknesses and potential issues.

Computer security is an ongoing issue, in as much as there are certain maintenance tasks which must be performed regularly and over time to ensure that everything is up-to-date and functioning as it should.  All tasks are ones which you can learn how to do if you have the time to maintain things yourself.

sitecheck.sucuri.net

The results of a scan look like this:

Sucuri offers a range of security services and have established for themselves a significant reputation as a web security company.  Their services run from the cloud and interface with other security products in the form of WordPress plugins. Issues they deal with are as follows:

• Web-based Integrity monitoring – Alert on changes to web sites
• Web-based Malware detection – Crawler and detects malware on web sites
• Whois monitoring – Tracks your Whois records for changes
• DNS Monitoring – Tracks your DNS (IP addresses, domains for changes)
• Web interface – Management interface to manage it all.
• Malware Removal – Exploit remediation and server hardening
• Website Firewall – Protection for websites against common threats and DDoS attacks

Social Server can offer technical set up of all services and maintenance on a parts and time basis.