Blog

On the hunt for quality WordPress analytics plugins?

If you want to understand how your site is performing, you need data. And to collect that data, you’ll usually want the help of a WordPress analytics plugin.

With WordPress analytics plugins, you can track your website’s performance in detail and more deeply understand user behavior on your site. 

Once you have this data, you can use it to…

• Optimize the design of your website.
• Improve your website marketing strategies.
• Create a better user experience.
• More closely track return on investment (ROI) for any paid promotion campaigns that you’re running.
• Etc.

To help you collect the right data for your WordPress website in the most straightforward way possible, you can use one or more of the plugins in this post – let’s dig in!

18 WordPress Analytics Plugins to Collect Helpful Data

Below, you’ll find 18 different WordPress analytics plugins. Depending on your needs, you might want just one of these plugins. Or, you might want to install multiple plugins to collect different types of data – it’s totally up to you!

1. Jetpack

Jetpack is a feature-rich plugin from the same team behind WordPress.com that can help you set up analytics on your site, in addition to offering a number of other features.

Jetpack can help with WordPress analytics in two ways:

1. You can access the free WordPress.com Site Stats (even if you’re self-hosting your WordPress site), which gives you access to all the key metrics on your site. The example screenshot above comes from Jetpack Stats.
2. Jetpack can help you set up Google Analytics tracking for even more in-depth analytics, including eCommerce tracking support. The Google Analytics feature requires the Jetpack Professional plan to use.

Note – if you created your website with WordPress.com, you don’t need to install the Jetpack plugin separately. 

As a WordPress.com user, you’re already benefiting from all of the features in Jetpack, including Jetpack Stats and Insights. We’ll talk about this in more depth later on. Or, you can head to the Stats tab in your WP Admin to start viewing analytics data right now.

2. Google Site Kit

Google Site Kit is an official plugin from the Google team that helps you integrate Google tools into your WordPress site, including Google Analytics.

In addition to helping you add the Google Analytics tracking script to your site, Google Site Kit also lets you view relevant analytics data from inside your WP Admin.

Without leaving WP Admin, you’ll be able to see data including (but not limited to) the following:

• Total traffic to your site
• Top-performing pages
• Bounce rate
• Session duration
• Acquisition channels (e.g. search vs social media)
• User locations
• User devices

Overall, if you want to use Google Analytics but you prefer the convenience of being able to see fundamental data without leaving your WP Admin, this is a good one to consider.

Site Kit can also help you view Google Search Console data in your WP Admin, which offers helpful Google search analytics in addition to web analytics. For example, you can see which queries users searched for to find your site.

The Google Site Kit plugin is 100% free and comes directly from the Google team.

3. GA Google Analytics

GA Google Analytics is a straightforward plugin that helps you add the Google Analytics tracking script to your WordPress site and control its behavior.

Unlike Google Site Kit and some of the other WordPress analytics plugins on this list, GA Google Analytics does not let you view data from your WP Admin. Instead, you’ll need to browse your site’s data on the Google Analytics website.

However, GA Google Analytics does give you some useful features for controlling how Google Analytics functions on your site.

For example, you can exclude your admin account (and other admin users) from being tracked so that you don’t pollute your analytics data while you’re working on your site. You can also exclude other types of users if needed, such as excluding authors.

GA Google Analytics has a free version that should work fine for most sites. If you want some more advanced features, there’s a premium version that starts at just $15.

4. MonsterInsights

Like Google Site Kit, MonsterInsights is a WordPress analytics plugin that helps you both add the Google Analytics tracking script to your site and view data without leaving your WP Admin.

When you set up the Google Analytics tracking script, you have the option to enable more advanced types of tracking, such as tracking button clicks or custom dimensions.

You’ll also be able to view lots of different reports right from your WP Admin, including overall traffic, top-performing pages, analytics for individual pages, and more.

If you have a WooCommerce store, MonsterInsights also has a dedicated WooCommerce integration to help you enable Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking in Google Analytics. This lets you see conversion rates, revenue, and more.

MonsterInsights has a basic free version that works fine for general web analytics. If you want more advanced analytics and configuration options, there’s a premium version that starts at $199.

Note – most of the advanced tracking configurations require the premium version.

5. PixelYourSite

PixelYourSite is a WordPress analytics plugin that helps you set up analytics tracking pixels for websites such as Facebook, Pinterest, and more.

If you rely on these social media sites for traffic (or if you’re running advertisements on them), adding these tracking pixels will help you better understand how that social media traffic behaves and converts on your site.

If you’ve created an eCommerce store with WooCommerce, PixelYourSite also offers a dedicated WooCommerce integration so that you can track eCommerce-related events and value.

For example, you could see what percentage of visitors from a certain Facebook ad purchased products, along with the value of those products. That way, you can calculate the return on investment (ROI) from your Facebook ad spend.

You can also set up your own custom tracking events if needed – this applies to all sites, not just WooCommerce stores.

PixelYourSite has a free version that works for basic use cases. If you want more functionality, the premium version starts at $160.

6. Burst Statistics

Burst Statistics is a privacy-friendly WordPress analytics plugin that keeps all of your analytics data on your WordPress site’s server.

The plugin uses a cookieless tracking approach, which means that all of the user analytics data is anonymized.

You can still see important metrics such as overall site stats, page-level stats, user devices, and referrers. But you’re also able to preserve your visitors’ privacy (and avoid the need for a cookie consent banner because Burst Statistics doesn’t use cookies).

If you value this self-hosted, privacy-focused analytics approach, Burst Analytics could be a good option for your site. However, one of the downsides of this cookie-less approach is that you can’t differentiate between new versus returning visitors or analyze visitors’ paths across your site.

Currently, Burst Statistics is 100% free, though the developer might launch a premium version in the future.

7. Download Monitor (File Download Analytics)

Download Monitor is a little different from the other plugins on this list in that it’s not a tool for general web analytics.

Instead, Download Monitor helps you gather file download analytics on your site, which can be really handy if you offer any type of downloads to your visitors.

For example, maybe you have a recipe blog and you offer downloadable PDF versions of your recipes in addition to the web-based recipes.

With Download Monitor, you could track how many people are downloading each PDF, which would help you understand whether or not your users are actually taking advantage of this feature.

To start, you can track overall downloads. If you allow user registration on your site, you can also get more granular analytics such as the number of download attempts for each user.

Beyond its download analytics features, Download Monitor just generally offers lots of tools to help you manage downloadable files, including the ability to restrict access to downloads and/or charge for access.

8. HubSpot

HubSpot is not just a WordPress analytics plugin – it’s a full-service customer relationship manager (CRM).

If you’re not familiar with what a CRM is, the basic idea is that it lets you store detailed user profiles and information about individual users. You can then use these profiles to improve your sales and marketing efforts.

As part of those user profiles, HubSpot includes detailed web tracking to help you see which pages a person views, which forms they fill out, and so on.

You can then use this analytics data in conjunction with other HubSpot features. For example, you could automatically send a user an email if they visit a certain page on your site.

Overall, HubSpot can be a good option if you want a complete marketing suite that includes web analytics. However, if you just want a standalone analytics tool, that’s not what HubSpot is best for.

The core HubSpot WordPress plugin, CRM, and analytics features are free. If you want more advanced marketing or sales features, you might want to upgrade to a paid plan.

9. Matomo Analytics

Matomo Analytics is a free WordPress analytics plugin that helps you use the open-source Matomo Analytics suite (formerly known as Piwik).

Matomo is an open-source alternative to Google Analytics and one of the most popular Google Analytics alternatives in general.

There are two ways that you can use Matomo Analytics:

1. You can self-host the software on your own site/server, which keeps all of your data entirely on your own server.
2. You can pay Matomo to host the software for you.

The free Matomo Analytics plugin offers the easiest way to get started with the self-hosted approach. There’s no need to deal with any configuration – you just install the plugin and you’re ready to start collecting analytics data.

In terms of the depth of analytics, it lets you go as deep as you want, with real-time reports, segmentation, geolocation reports, and lots more.

Overall, if you want an open-source Google Analytics alternative, this is an excellent option for WordPress users.

If you’d rather have Matomo host the software for you, you can integrate it with your site using the separate WP-Matomo Integration plugin.

Header Footer Code Manager is not a standalone analytics plugin, per se. Instead, it’s a useful tool that helps you add analytics tracking scripts from other services to your WordPress site.

You can use it for services such as Google Analytics, Clicky, Matomo, Facebook Pixel, Google Tag Manager, and so on.

Once you have the tracking script from your preferred analytics service, you can add it to Header Footer Code Manager to include the snippet sitewide or only on certain types of content.

Header Footer Code Manager has a free version that should be fine for most sites. If you want more advanced conditional targeting rules to control when/where to add tracking scripts, there’s a premium version starting at $35.

11. ​​Analytify

Analytify is another WordPress analytics plugin that helps you integrate Google Analytics into your site and view the analytics data from your WP Admin.

To start, it can help you add the Google Analytics tracking script to your site. Beyond that, it also includes lots of options to set up more advanced types of tracking including the following:

• Affiliate link clicks
• Form conversion rate
• WooCommerce data
• WordPress author analytics
• Custom goals

In addition to setting up those more advanced types of tracking, Analytify also lets you view data and reports from your WP Admin. These reports include sitewide data as well as page-level analytics for every piece of content on your site.

Analytify has a free version that should work fine for many sites. For more features, the pro version starts at $99.

12. GTM4WP

GTM4WP, short for Google Tag Manager for WordPress, is a free plugin that helps you integrate Google Tag Manager into your WordPress site.

Google Tag Manager itself is a Google service that you can use to implement Google Analytics or other analytics tools on your site.

One advantage of using Google Tag Manager is that you can also pass custom information to your “dataLayer” to collect more detailed analytics.

To help you do this, the GTM4WP plugin includes a bunch of presets to track details such as post/page information, user logged-in status, user role, WordPress site search, and more.

However, using GTM4WP is a more advanced tactic than most other analytics solutions on this list. As such, it might not be the best option for you if you’d prefer a non-technical approach to WordPress analytics.

13. Clicky by Yoast

Clicky is a standalone web analytics service similar to Google Analytics.

With the free Clicky by Yoast WordPress plugin, you can easily integrate Clicky into your site, including setting up a few configuration choices such as excluding WordPress admin users from being tracked.

In general, a lot of users like Clicky because it offers a simpler way to view the core metrics that most WordPress webmasters care about.

So if you feel overwhelmed by the complexity of Google Analytics and just want a simple way to view fundamental data for your site, Clicky could be a good option.

The Clicky by Yoast plugin is 100% free. However, you’ll also need the Clicky service to use it.

Clicky has a free plan that supports up to 3,000 daily pageviews. After that, paid plans start at $10 per month.

14. Fathom

Fathom is a SaaS (software as a service) Google Analytics alternative that emphasizes user privacy.

If you feel a bit put off by the idea of handing your users’ data over to Google Analytics, Fathom could be a good alternative for you.

It still lets you see important data about your site while fully anonymizing all user data. Fathom also doesn’t rely on cookies like most other services, which means you don’t need a cookie consent banner to use it.

To easily integrate Fathom into WordPress, you can use the official Fathom Analytics plugin.

While the plugin itself is free, you will need a paid subscription to Fathom Analytics to use it. Plans start at $14 per month for up to 100,000 monthly page views.

15. Beehive Analytics

Beehive Analytics is another Google Analytics dashboard for WordPress that helps you set up the Google Analytics tracking script and view reports from inside your WP Admin.

It doesn’t offer quite as many tracking script customization options as plugins like Analytify and MonsterInsights, but it does offer beautiful reports and charts.

You can see all of the most important information including sitewide stats, page-level analytics, top referrers, top countries, and more.

If you mainly want a way to bring regular Google Analytics data into your WP Admin, that could make Beehive Analytics a good option.

Beehive Analytics has a free plan that should work for most sites. You can also access the premium version via the paid WPMU DEV membership.

16. Statify

Statify is another self-hosted, privacy-focused WordPress analytics plugin that uses a cookieless tracking approach, similar to the Burst Analytics plugin above.

Because it doesn’t use cookies, it keeps your visitors’ data anonymous and also doesn’t require you to add a cookie consent banner.

At the same time, you can still view core data about your site inside your WP Admin, including overall visits, top pages, top referrers, and more.

The plugin specifies that it tracks “page views” and not “visitors”, which is important to understand. You can see which pages on your site have been viewed, but you wouldn’t be able to track visitor-specific information such as the path that a visitor followed across multiple pages on your site.

Statify is 100% free.

17. Koko Analytics

Koko Analytics is also a self-hosted WordPress analytics plugin. However, unlike Burst Analytics and Statify, Koko Analytics gives you the option to choose whether or not to use cookies.

If you leave cookies enabled, you’ll be able to detect full visit paths, along with new versus returning visitors. On the other hand, if you disable cookies, the plugin will only track pageviews, much like those other self-hosted analytics plugins.

Either way, Koko Analytics does not log any personal information about visits, which helps preserve your visitors’ privacy.

Koko Analytics is 100% free.

18. WP Search Analytics

Like Download Monitor, WP Search Analytics is a bit of a departure in that it’s not focused on general web analytics like these other WordPress analytics plugins.

Instead, the plugin focuses on helping you track which terms your site’s visitors search for on your site.

It integrates with the native WordPress search function and stores all of the data on your own server.

While you can also track site searches using Google Analytics, WP Search Analytics has one distinct advantage in that it can also track the number of search results for each term.

Having both pieces of information can provide some very useful insights. For example, you might see that a particular search term is popular but you don’t have any content (or products) covering that term.

Now that you know your visitors are interested in that term, you could create new content to meet their needs.

WP Search Analytics is 100% free.

Other Options to Consider for WordPress Web Analytics

In addition to the WordPress analytics plugins above, here are a few other options to consider when it comes to setting up analytics on your site.

Use the Jetpack Stats and Insights Built Into WordPress.com

If you created your WordPress site with WordPress.com, you might not even need a separate WordPress analytics plugin because WordPress.com already offers built-in web analytics via Jetpack Stats and Insights.

Jetpack Stats and Insights can help you view lots of helpful statistics about your site including the following:

• Overall views and views for individual pages
• Visitors, including views per visitor
• Referrers (the page/source where your visitors came from)
• Countries where your visitors come from
• External link clicks
• Downloads
• Traffic by author on your site
• Video views

You also get a number of helpful insights that can help you dig deeper into your site’s analytics.

For example, you can see your site’s most popular day and hour, how your most recent posts are performing, and more.

Best of all – you don’t need to do anything extra to set up Jetpack Stats and Insights – it automatically starts working as soon as you create your site with WordPress.com.

To access all of this information, you can go to the Stats page in your WP Admin.

Explore Other WordPress Analytics Plugins

While we highlighted 18 useful WordPress analytics plugins above, these are far from the only options that are available.

If you want to discover even more options, you can browse the full list of analytics plugins here.

Try These WordPress Analytics Plugins Today

WordPress analytics plugins help you understand what’s happening on your site so that you can track performance, understand user behavior, and use data to create a better web experience.

If you made your website with WordPress.com, you can already start exploring Jetpack Stats and Insights to learn more about your site without needing to install a separate analytics plugin.

If you’re using the WordPress.com Business plan or eCommerce plan, you can also install one or more of the WordPress analytics plugins above to expand on the built-in analytics capabilities in WordPress.com.

If you’re using one of the other plans, you’ll still be able to access the Jetpack Stats and Insights. Or, you can upgrade to the Business plan today to gain the ability to install all of these analytics plugins, as well as the many other must-have WordPress plugins out there.

Searching for the best WordPress security plugins to protect your website?

Having a security incident is every webmaster’s worst nightmare, so it’s natural to be looking for protection from the malicious actors out there.

Well, there’s good news and bad news here.

Here’s the good news:

The core WordPress software is secure. What’s more, many WordPress hosts build in added protections to keep your site safe, such as WordPress.com’s firewalls and other security protections.

But at the same time, WordPress sites are not immune from attacks. How you configure and maintain your site, along with which extensions you install, can open up potential vulnerabilities that malicious actors can exploit, whether that’s basic comment spam or more sophisticated malware.

For added peace of mind, you might want a dedicated WordPress security plugin to protect specific areas of your site (such as the login page) or to add general hardening and protection.

In this post, you’ll find the 26 best WordPress security plugins for a range of different use cases including brute force protection, malware scanning/protection, spam prevention, vulnerability detection, and more.

What Issues Can WordPress Security Plugins Prevent?

While using a secure hosting environment like WordPress.com can already prevent many issues, here are some of the areas where WordPress security plugins can add extra protection:

• Spam and bot prevention
• Brute force attacks and DDoS attacks
• Malware scanning and removal
• GDPR violations
• Admin page attacks
• Vulnerability detection for the WordPress core, plugins, and themes
• Email and phone number scraping

Below, we’ll divide the plugins into these different use cases so that you can quickly find the best WordPress security plugins for your specific needs.

How Does WordPress.com Protect Your WordPress Site?

If you’ve created your WordPress site with WordPress.com, you’re already benefiting from a lot of built-in security protections, which might eliminate the need to use certain WordPress security plugins.

Here are some of the many built-in security protections that WordPress.com offers:

• Spam and bot protection via Jetpack, which eliminates the need to use separate anti-spam plugins.
• Automatically enabled encryption via SSL, which protects data as it passes between you and your visitors’ web browsers and your WordPress site. For example, when you log in to your site, that data will be encrypted so that potential malicious actors on your network can’t see your username and password.
• Firewalls to proactively block threats before they can do anything malicious.
• Automatic backups and recovery so that if anything happens to your site, you still have a working copy.

WordPress.com also has a dedicated security team that’s regularly monitoring and testing security for WordPress sites to catch potential issues before they can be exploited in the wild. Beyond that, WordPress.com also has a bug bounty program via HackerOne, which rewards other people for reporting vulnerabilities.

If you want to learn more, you can check out the WordPress.com security documentation.

With that being said, if you’re using the WordPress.com Business or eCommerce plans, there are a lot of security plugins that are still compatible with WordPress.com, which you can find in the WordPress.com plugin marketplace.

Here are some of the best WordPress security plugins that you might want to consider for even more protection…

26 Best WordPress Security Plugins for All Types of Protection

To make it easier to find the right WordPress security plugins for your site, we’ve divided the plugins into seven different sections:

1. Brute force and DDoS protection
2. Anti-spam protection
3. Malware scanning and removal
4. WP Admin protection
5. Vulnerability detection
6. GDPR compliance
7. Email address protection

Best Plugins to Protect Against Brute Force Attacks and DDoS Attacks

Brute force attacks are when a malicious actor will guess a bunch of username/password combinations, hoping to find one that works. Distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), on the other hand, are when a malicious actor just floods your site with traffic in the hopes of crashing it.

Both types of attacks work by sending automated traffic at your site. However, to prevent brute force attacks, you’ll want to focus on limiting access to your login page, while preventing DDoS attacks requires a more holistic approach.

Here are some of the best WordPress security plugins to protect against these types of automated attacks…

Limit Login Attempts Reloaded

Limit Login Attempts Reloaded is a great option to protect against brute force attacks on your login page.

It lets you automatically block an IP address for a certain time period if a user/bot from that IP address enters too many incorrect usernames/passwords. You’ve probably encountered this technology before, as it’s used by pretty much every online banking system.

You can customize how many failed attempts trigger the ban, as well as how long you want to ban the IP address. You can also manually safelist or blocklist IP addresses as needed.

The free version of the plugin should work fine for most sites. There’s also a premium version that adds cloud-based protection and other cloud features starting at $8 per month.

Protection Against DDoS

Protection Against DDoS is a 100% free plugin that helps you protect against DDoS attacks by blocking access to common attack points including XML-RPC and RSS feed pages.

It uses .htaccess to protect these pages, which means that malicious requests will be blocked at the server level, rather than hitting your WordPress site.

If you’re using Cloudflare, the plugin also lets you allow/ban specific countries. For example, you could still let USA visitors access your feed pages, while banning visitors from the countries where you’re experiencing issues.

Advanced Google reCAPTCHA

Advanced Google reCAPTCHA lets you protect your login forms (and other important forms on your site, such as the password reset form) using the free Google reCAPTCHA service.

This can help you stop brute force attacks, as well as just generally cutting down on spam.

When you configure the plugin, you can choose which type of reCAPTCHA to use and which forms on which to activate protection.

Limit Login Attempts

Limit Login Attempts is another free plugin that lets you protect your login forms by setting up rules to limit the number of allowed failed attempts.

You can customize everything to suit your needs and also set up logging and email notifications to receive alerts if someone is trying to brute force their way into your WordPress site.

Limit Login Attempts is 100% free.

---

Best Plugins for Spam and Bot Prevention

Spam comments are not just annoying, but they can also negatively affect your site if the spam contains malicious content (e.g. links to bad websites) or attempts at code injection.

To protect against this security risk, you can use a WordPress anti-spam plugin. Here are some of the best…

Akismet

Akismet is a free anti-spam plugin from Automattic, the same team behind WordPress.com.

After a simple setup, Akismet can protect your WordPress comment forms from spam. Beyond comments, many WordPress form plugins also integrate with Akismet so that you can protect against spam form submissions, as well.

The setup process only takes a few seconds and then Akismet will start working automatically. All spam comments will be held in a special Spam area so that you can review them (if desired) and then permanently delete them with a single click of a button.

Akismet is 100% free for personal use (e.g. your personal blog). For commercial use, plans start at $8.33 per month.

Note – if you’ve created your site with WordPress.com, you’re already benefiting from Akismet’s spam protection, so there’s no need to install the plugin separately.

Jetpack

Jetpack gives you another way to access anti-spam protection from Akismet, along with a bunch of other helpful features to improve your site’s functionality, performance, and security.

If you’re interested in Jetpack’s other features, you can use the Jetpack plugin instead of Akismet. And again, as with Akismet, you’re already benefiting from Jetpack’s features if you’re using WordPress.com, so there’s no need to install Jetpack separately.

CleanTalk

CleanTalk is an anti-spam plugin that automatically protects pretty much every form on your site, including comments, contact forms, registrations, WooCommerce orders, and more.

In addition to protecting against spam submissions, it also offers a spam firewall that can block most spam bots from even loading pages on your site. It does this by checking visitor IP addresses against CleanTalk’s database of over five million spam bot IPs.

If you’re having unique issues, you can also manually create your own blocklist.

CleanTalk is a premium service. You can test it out with a free seven-day trial, but you’ll need to pay after that. However, paid plans are quite affordable, starting at just $12 per year ($1 per month).

WP Armour

WP Armour is an anti-spam plugin that protects the built-in WordPress comment and registration pages. Beyond that, it also integrates with most popular form plugins, as well as other plugins including bbPress (to prevent forum spam) and WooCommerce reviews.

The premium version also adds even more integrations including WooCommerce checkout, BuddyPress (for social communities), MC4WP (for email opt-in forms), and more.

The free version of the plugin should work fine for most sites. If you want the premium features, the paid plans start at $19.99.

Spam Destroyer

As the name suggests, Spam Destroyer aims to fully stop spam in its tracks. It works with native WordPress comments, as well as many other plugins including BuddyPress.

It’s very simple to use – just activate the plugin and it will start protecting your site.

It’s also 100% free forever – so it only destroys spam, and not your budget.

Anti Spam by Fullworks

Anti Spam by Fullworks helps you protect your WordPress comment forms from spam without affecting the user experience of your legitimate visitors.

You can review spam comments in a special “Spam” tab and the plugin will also automatically delete them after a certain number of days (which you can customize). Or, you can disable the automatic removal and only delete spam manually.

If you want even more spam protection, there’s also a premium version that can protect against other types of spam including user registration, WooCommerce registration, comment forms, pingbacks and trackbacks, and more.

If you need the premium version, it starts at just $9.99 per year.

---

Best Plugins to Prevent Malware

Malware is malicious code that’s been added to your site. In some cases, bad actors might modify legitimate files to include malicious code. Or, they might also add new files that contain malicious code.

To prevent malware, you can use WordPress malware plugins to scan your site. If the plugin does find malware, most of them can also help you remove it.

MalCare

MalCare is a popular WordPress malware plugin that helps protect your site without affecting its performance.

Instead of scanning files for malware on your WordPress site’s server, MalCare copies your site’s files to its own servers and runs the scan there.

If MalCare detects any issues, it can try to fix the problem with one click. You can also safelist certain files to avoid false positives.

Beyond malware scanning, MalCare also offers some general WordPress security hardening features, such as a firewall and login protection.

MalCare lets you scan your site for malware for free. However, to actually remove any malware that it finds, you’ll need the paid version. Paid plans start at $99 per year.

Sucuri Security

Sucuri Security is a free plugin that helps you detect malware issues that are visible on the frontend of your site. Beyond that, it will also check your site against common blocklists that your site might’ve been flagged in if it contains malware, such as Google Safe Browsing.

The free version of the plugin does not scan all of the files on your server. Instead, it just looks at the visible part of your site to detect visible malware.

If you want a full security scan of all your site’s files, you can upgrade to the premium plan starting at $200 per year. The premium plan also offers unlimited malware removals and hack fixes performed by Sucuri’s experts, as well as a web application firewall (WAF) to proactively block threats.

Malcure Malware Scanner

Not to be confused with MalCare, Malcure is another WordPress malware plugin that will scan all of the files on your server to detect malicious threats. That includes core WordPress files, plugins, your database, and more.

If you upgrade to the premium version, the plugin also offers a one-click option to repair or clean infected files. You can also manually safelist files, which helps you avoid false positives.

If you want the premium version, it starts at $247 per year.

Defender Security

Defender Security is an all-in-one WordPress security plugin that can help you with malware, as well as other key security areas such as login protection, firewalls, and basic security hardening.

The malware scan acts as a sort of file integrity checker, scanning your site’s files and detecting changes or suspicious files that should be there.

If Defender Security detects a file, you can delete it with just a few clicks. Or, if it’s a legitimate file, you can safelist it to avoid false positives in the future.

The free version of Defender Security lets you manually run malware scans. If you want scheduled scans and other advanced features, you can upgrade to the Pro version for $7.50 per month.

NinjaScanner

NinjaScanner is a free WordPress malware plugin that lets you scan your server for malicious files.

First off, it includes a file integrity checker that lets you check core WordPress files (as well as plugin or theme files) against the original versions of the files. If there have been changes, the plugin will alert you because that could indicate malware.

Beyond that, it can also detect malware signatures and the plugin can compare your database for changes between scans so that you can detect any malicious activity.

However, unlike some of the other malware plugins, NinjaScanner doesn’t offer one-click malware removal – you’ll need to manually remove any malware that it discovers. It does include a sandbox feature for quarantined files, though, and you can restore the original file when it comes to file integrity checks.

The free version includes all features for manual scanning. You can also upgrade to the premium version for scheduled scans, starting at just $19.50 per year.

BulletProof Security

BulletProof Security is another comprehensive WordPress security plugin that can protect against malware, along with implementing other protections and general WordPress security hardening.

In terms of malware, it comes with its own MScan malware scanner that can detect malicious files on your site. It also includes other checks such as file integrity monitoring and database differential checking.

If BulletProof Security detects an issue, you can remove it with just a few clicks.

BulletProof Security includes its malware scanner in its free version. However, there’s also a paid version that adds more protections for $89.95 with lifetime updates for unlimited sites.

---

Best Plugins to Protect Your Site’s WP Admin

While the brute force protection plugins above already do a pretty good job of protecting the WP Admin, there are other plugins that you can consider for even more protection.

SiteGuard WP Plugin

SiteGuard WP Plugin offers a number of ways to protect your WP Admin from malicious actors:

• Change the login page URL.
• Add an IP address filter to the WP Admin (only safelisted IP addresses can access the page).
• Add a CAPTCHA.
• Lock the login page after a certain number of failed attempts.
• Receive an email alert whenever someone logs in to your site.

Basically, it offers the most popular WP Admin protection techniques in one plugin.

Change wp-admin login

As the name suggests, Change wp-admin login lets you change the URL of the WP Admin login page to anything you want, which lets you protect the WP Admin area from malicious actors and bots.

In addition to changing the login URL, you can also redirect users who try to access the WP Admin area when not logged in.

---

Best Plugins to Detect and Protect Against Vulnerabilities on Your Site

In addition to finding plugins to scan your site for malware, you can also find plugins that will detect potential vulnerabilities in your site.

These vulnerability detection plugins can help you detect potential backdoors in your site before malicious actors are able to exploit them.

Jetpack Protect

Jetpack Protect is a free security plugin that scans your site for vulnerabilities and alerts you to any issues, powered by the WPScan security scanner.

This lets you detect potential vulnerabilities before malicious actors have a chance to exploit them.

It will detect new vulnerabilities in the core WordPress software, as well as any themes and plugins that are installed on your site.

The Jetpack Protect plugin is free to use. However, enterprise customers can consider using WPScan directly for even more functionality.

WPVulnerability

WPVulnerability is another free plugin that lets you scan your WordPress core, themes, and plugins for vulnerabilities so that you can fix them before a malicious actor exploits them.

To detect issues, it uses the free and open-source WordPress Vulnerability Database API.

Safe SVG

Safe SVG is a free plugin that fixes one specific type of vulnerability – SVG/XML vulnerabilities.

A lot of WordPress users want to upload SVG files, but WordPress blocks them by default because they’re a security risk.

Safe SVG lets you enable SVG uploads while also properly sanitizing those uploads to protect against vulnerabilities.

Best Plugins to Ensure Your Site Is GDPR-Compliant

While GDPR compliance might not be the first thing you think of when it comes to WordPress security plugins, complying with privacy laws is an important part of securing your site from legal challenges.

Here are a few of the top options…

Cookie Notice & Compliance for GDPR / CCPA

Cookie Notice & Compliance for GDPR / CCPA has two feature sets available in the plugin:

1. A basic tool to set up a cookie consent notice on your site.
2. A consent management platform (CMP) that handles all aspects of compliance, including consent record storage, automatic script blocking, and more.

If you want to ensure full compliance and have the records to prove it, you’ll want the CMP. It’s free for 1,000 visits per month and 30 days of consent storage. For unlimited usage and storage, plans start at $14.95 per month.

CookieYes

CookieYes uses a similar approach to the previous plugin.

At a basic level, it offers an easy way to set up a free cookie consent notice. However, you also have the option to connect it to the CookieYes web app to access a full consent management platform including cookie scanning, consent storage, and lots more.

The CMP app is free for 25,000 monthly pageviews. After that, paid plans start at $10 per month for 100,000 pageviews.

Complianz

Complianz is another freemium plugin that includes both a basic cookie notice as well as a more robust consent management platform to ensure full legal compliance.

There’s a free version and then you can upgrade to the paid version for $49 to access all of the features.

---

Best Plugins to Protect Your Email Addresses or Hide Other Data

If you want to make it easy for people to contact you, you might want to include your email address directly on your site. While this is convenient for your human visitors, it can lead to a lot of email spam.

One solution would be to just use a contact form instead of sharing your direct email address. Or, you can use one of these email protection plugins to prevent malicious actors from seeing your actual email address.

Email Encoder

Email Encoder is a free plugin that protects email addresses, phone numbers, or any other content.

It will automatically protect email addresses and phone numbers as soon as you activate the plugin, but it also lets you manually protect other types of content using a shortcode.

The plugin is 100% free.

Email Address Encoder

Email Address Encoder is a freemium plugin that lets you protect your email addresses, phone numbers, and other content using different encoding methods (no JavaScript needed).

The plugin works automatically for email addresses, but you can also manually encode other content using its shortcode.

If you want more advanced protection, there’s also a $19 premium version that adds new protection methods, including JavaScript and CSS techniques.

---

Bonus: A Few Other WordPress Security Tips (Beyond Plugins)

While the best WordPress security plugins can add extra layers of protection to your site, there are other areas of WordPress security that plugins can’t help with.

Most notably, it’s essential to use a strong, unique password for your WordPress account so that it’s hard for malicious actors to get their hands on your account credentials.

One of the best ways to achieve this is to use a password manager to generate a unique password for your account. Here are some of the best options:

If you allow other users to register for your site, you can make sure they’re using strong passwords with a plugin like Password Policy Manager.

We also recommend logging out of your WordPress account when you’re done working on your site, especially if you’re using a shared computer.

Improve Your WordPress Site’s Security Today

The core WordPress software is secure. When you combine that with creating your site on a strong foundation such as WordPress.com, you’ll already be protected from most threats.

With that being said, WordPress security plugins can extend that strong foundation with additional protections in certain areas, such as protecting against brute force attacks, combating spam, detecting potential vulnerabilities, and more.

You certainly don’t need to install every single plugin on this list. But adding some of the best WordPress security plugins to your site can give you added peace of mind.

If you’re using the WordPress.com Business plan, all of the security plugins above are fully compatible with WordPress.com’s ecosystem, so you can install them today.

If you’re not on the Business plan yet, upgrade your plan today to be able to install these WordPress security plugins, as well as all of the other useful WordPress plugins out there.