Secure Your Self Hosted Wordpress

August 20, 2014 | linux | security | devops |

update 6/12/2024: this post predates letsencrypt, you should just use that instead: https://letsencrypt.org/

Self hosting WordPress rocks. Unsecured websites do not rock. It does not matter how long or complicated your password is if it is being transmitted in plain text over HTTP. Luckily, it is easy to create a Self Signed certificate and use it on your website. Keep in mind that browsers become very unhappy with Self Signed Certificates and tend to yell at the user. So, if you have a lot of traffic and want your users to feel safe purchase an SSL certificate from a real Certificate Authority. In any case, at the very least you should be using a self signed SSL for all of the admin portions of your site. Here’s how to do it on Debian 7.5 running a standard LAMP stack.

Create your self signed Certificate by running the following commands sequentially.

mkdir /etc/apache2/ssl  
openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -nodes -out /etc/apache2/ssl/wp.pem -keyout /etc/apache2/ssl/wp.key

2. Create a Virtual Host for your website in /etc/apache2/conf.d/yoursite.conf

<VirtualHost 1.2.3.4:443>
SSLEngine on 
SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/wp.pem 
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl/wp.key 
DocumentRoot /srv/www/yoursite.com/public_html 
  <Directory>
  AllowOverride All 
  order allow,deny 
  Allow from all  
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Change yoursite.conf to something more meaningful
Change 1.2.3.4 to the IP of your server, which you can obtain by running ifconfig in a terminal
Change the document root to your actual document root.

3. Enable the SSL module in Apache

sudo a2enmod ssl

4. Restart apache

sudo service apache2 restart

All set! Now, you can navigate to https://yourwebsite.com, confirm the security exception, and administer and view your WordPress site securely.

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

The AGI economy is coming faster than you think from Freethink
Rolling the ladder up behind us from Xe Iaso's blog
In Praise of “Normal” Engineers from charity.wtf
Reports of Bluesky's death have been greatly exaggerated from The Torment Nexus
What Would a Kubernetes 2.0 Look Like from matduggan.com
We Can Just Measure Things from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
The Gentle Singularity from Sam Altman
Whale Watching from https://popagandhi.com/

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Pluralistic: Daniel de Visé's 'The Blues Brothers' (21 Jun 2025)

Today's links Daniel de Visé's 'The Blues Brothers': Far more than production gossip – an unmissable portrait of a turning point in American comedy and music. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 20…

via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow June 21, 2025

Hiding metrics from the web

In 2012, artist Ben Grosser released a browser extension called Facebook Demetricator. Once installed, it hid all metrics from Facebook’s interface: likes, comments, notifications, unread messages, and so on. “What’s going on here is that these quantifica…

via Manual do Usuário June 21, 2025

It's like surfing

The weird thing about engineering management is that you feel kinda useless. Yet if you stop, projects stop.

via swizec.com RSS Feed June 21, 2025

Generated by openring