It was Monday morning and I was on a call with a dozen others who are my peers. Each of us helps the small business owner with their businesses in one way or the other. It was at the end of the call and we were each sharing our websites and going over how to make little improvements here and there. Time was running out and there was just enough time for one more website review, I volunteered. As my site was coming up for all to see suddenly the screen turned a maroon red with an outline of a security officer with his hand stretched out and the words of"don't precede malware danger." There was more but I was horrified to recall precisely what it said. I was concerned about my website on being ruined plus humiliated the people on the telephone had seen me vulnerable that I had spent hours.
By default, the latest version of WordPress is pretty darn secure. The development team of WordPress has considered anything which may have been added to any fix hacked wordpress site plugins. Before, WordPress did have holes but now most of them are stuffed up.
The approach, and the one I recommend, is to use one of the password generation and storage plugins available on your browser. RoboForm is liked by Lots of people, but I think after a trial period, you need to pay for it. I use the free version of Lastpass, and I recommend it for those of you who use Internet Explorer or Firefox. That will generate passwords for you.
Yes, you want to do regular backups of your site. I recommend at least a weekly database backup and a monthly "full" backup. More. Definitely more if you make additions and changes to your Homepage website. If you have a community of people that are in there all the time, or make changes multiple times a day, a backup should be a minimum.
Another step to take to make WordPress more secure is to upgrade WordPress. The main reason for this is that there also come fixes for security holes that are older which makes it essential to upgrade early.
Free software: If you have installed free scripts like Wordpress, search Google for'wordpress security'. You'll get tips on how to make your WP blog secure.