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.

Pluralistic: AI "journalists" prove that media bosses don't give a shit (11 Mar 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Avi Alkalay: Uniqlo T-Shirt Bash Script Easter Egg from Fedora People
Offline 23 hours a day from Derek Sivers blog
Pluralistic: California can stop Larry Ellison from buying Warners (28 Feb 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
On Alliances from Smashing Frames
Acting ethically in an imperfect world from Smashing Frames
Diffusion of Responsibility from Smashing Frames
My AI Adoption Journey from Mitchell Hashimoto

Generated by openring

Lev Lazinskiy

Secure Your Self Hosted Wordpress

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Keeping sponsor lists up-to-date

Code as a Tool of Process

Paris's Bicycle Mayor and the Hormuz Shock