Security Guide Part 5/9: Hide Your WordPress Version
Welcome to our 9-part series of the Ultimate Guide to Protecting Your WordPress Website.
This is Part 5: Hide Your WordPress Version
You won’t have to be too technical to do these yourselves and I’ll be here showing you on the screen, step by step how to do it.
Here are a few things you’ll need to prepare before starting:
- WordPress Administrative Area Login URL which is typically in most cases /wp-admin after your domain name
- Your WordPress administrative username
- Your Password
Today I’m going to show you how to secure your WordPress website by hiding your WordPress version.
You should not make the WordPress version that you are using visible to others since WordPress is an open-source project, any major vulnerabilities are usually announced publicly.
The specific WordPress version that you are using will give the attacker an upper hand in finding a way to break in. Also a great reason that updating your WordPress often is extremely important.
Let’s get started.
First let’s log into the WordPress Administrative Area, then go to Appearance > Editor, and find the Functions.php in your current theme.
If you disabled the editor like in the last video, you can use your FTP program to locate this file in the public_html/wp-content/themes/ and find your theme and locate the functions.php file.
In order for you to completely remove your WordPress version number from both your head file and RSS feeds, you will need to add the following function to your functions.php file (this piece of code will also be given to you at the end in case you couldn’t follow)
function wpup_remove_version() {
return '';
}
add_filter('the_generator', 'wpup_remove_version');