Hiding your WordPress login URL is an excellent way to vastly increase the security of your site, especially from brute force attacks. In this article, we will show you how to effectively and easily change your WordPress admin URL with just a few clicks.
Hiding your WordPress Admin URL
- First, log in to your WordPress admin dashboard.
- You will need to have iThemes Security installed and activated. If you do not, you may follow our article on installing iThemes Security.
- Within your WordPress admin, hover over Security on the left side menu, and click on Settings.
- The settings can be filtered as Recommended and Advanced if all of them are not showing. You’ll see the filter options in the top right corner of the listed settings. Click on Advanced.
- Find Hide Backend and then click on Configure Settings.
- After enabling the checkbox in the previous step, you will see options appear that allow you to configure how your login URL will be set. In the Login Slug field, enter your new login location.
- After enabling the checkbox in the previous step, additional options will appear. In the Login Slug field, enter your new login location. Make sure that you record this setting or set a bookmark to it. If you forget your new login URL, then you won’t be able to login to your site.
- You will see other options, but for simplicity leave the defaults for Enable Redirection and Redirection Slug as they are. You can change the redirection slug if you feel it’s needed, but the Enable Redirection should be checked to prevent error messages.
- Once your changes have been made, click Save Settings in the bottom lefthand corner.
Now that you have hidden your login URL with iThemes Security, your site login URL will be harder to locate, and thus make it more secure from brute force attacks. Note: As a reminder, be sure to remember what you set in the Login Slug field as, without it, you will not be able to log into your WordPress admin dashboard.
