You don’t need to be told how important security is for your WordPress website, but how you make your site secure is another matter. Using a plugin like Wordfence or Sucuri can be an easy and secure approach, but which one is best? Let’s find out.

Trying to find a reliable security plugin for your WordPress website that you can not only trust, but also helps to actually protect your website is hard work. Two of the top contenders out there, Wordfence and Sucuri, are both fighting for the top spot, but still, the question remains;

Which one is right for you?

This is what we’re going to focus on in today’s guide, so, without further ado, let’s jump straight into it.

Is Security Important?

The short answer; yes, it is. A GoDaddy survey found that 90% of all CMS websites that were hacked back in 2018 were WordPress websites and that 10,000 websites are blacklisted by Google every single day, meaning these sites will be lucky if they lose 95% of their traffic.

Making sure your website is protected from being hacked and doesn’t lose traffic is essential, which is why it’s so important to ensure you’re using a protective plugin that keeps people and malicious software out.

How are Websites Hacked?

Where there are dozens of ways a hacker could get into your website, the most common, discovered by a Kinsta WordPress Security article, found that plugins were by far the biggest risk.

“This means people are downloading and installing plugins onto their websites that are either designed to be malicious or contain security weaknesses that people can exploit. WordFence found that 55.9% of every backdoor hack happened through plugins and that 61% of website owners didn’t even know the hack had taken place,” shares Emma Austin, a project manager at Britstudent and Phdkingdom.

Other types of popular hack include

• Brute-force password attacks
• Core WordPress hacks
• Hosting scams
• Theme hacks
• Phishing
• Password theft
• Workstation hacking
• Server hacks
• FTP hacks

So, with these stats in mind, we can easily see why we need a plugin like WordFence or Sucuri, but now we need to know which is best at protecting you from all these potential issues.

How WordFence and Sucuri Works

Both WordFence and Sucuri work in the same way. They first aim to prevent hacks from taking place in the first place, whether by setting up firewalls and fixing and protecting problem files.

“Then, they aim to secure your website through detection, which means making sure any malicious or unwanted activity is detected and stopped as soon as it’s noticed, which aims to be as soon as possible. If something does happen, both apps will then notify you as soon as possible and aim to fix any problems causes ASAP,” explains Nicki Harper, a tech blogger at NextCoursework and Write My X.

Both apps offer many security features you’ll be looking, including;

• Website integrity scans
• Free versions
• Firewall
• Malware removal

But they do offer differences as well.

The Differences between WordFence and Sucuri

As you can see, there are some big differences between the services that you’ll want to consider, clearly leaning in favor of Sucuri. However, while far richer in features, we need to make sure the plugin is trustworthy and easy to use.

In-Depth Look into the Plugins

Starting with Sucuri, the plugin holds a 4.5/5-star rating, which is exceptional across 320+ views and is installed on over 600,000 websites. There are three versions available; Free, Firewall, and Platform, the latter being the most expensive, but it does give you access to everything.

You can easily change your settings and preferences using the built-in dashboard, and everything is pretty easy to wrap your head around, even if you’re using something like this for the first time.

Moving onto WordFence, it has a higher 4.8/5-star rating with over 3,400+ reviews and is active on over three million WordPress websites, which is far higher than Sucuri. There’s no denying that WordFence is optimized far better, meaning you’ll get more from your website, but this does come at a cost.

The dashboard is incredibly innovative and easy to use, and you can tell there’s so much investment gone into the experience, but the lack of features is hard to ignore.

The Lowdown

All in all, if you’re looking for a feature-rich and affordable security option, Sucuri is definitely the way to go, but if you’re looking for the popular option you can trust, then definitely opt for WordFence, it won’t let you down. Unless you get DDos’d.