Securing your WordPress admin panel is one of the most important steps you can take to protect your website from unauthorized access and attacks. Although implementing proper password management practices is the cornerstone of admin panel security it’s far from being the end of the story.
Keeping your /wp-admin accessible to the world still leaves it exposed to brute-force attacks, potential future exploits and discovery by malicious bots and scanners. Which is why your second step in protecting your WordPress admin panel should be introducing IP-address-based access restriction that effectively hides your admin panel from anyone trying to access it from an unauthorized IP address.
That however comes with its own host of issues caused by the fact that in the modern Internet a typical user changes their IP address several times a day.
zenVPN WordPress plugin
zenVPN takes care of these problems by allocating a dedicated IP address to your team and routing all their traffic to your website via that IP address. This way only your zenVPN team members can “see” your site’s admin panel (even the login page). Meanwhile, thanks to our split tunneling feature they access the rest of the Internet the usual way, thereby experiencing minimal overhead from this extra security measure.
We have developed a plugin for WordPress that makes setting up this protection scheme almost trivial and not requiring any technical expertise. All it takes is a few clicks.
Setting up IP-address based protection for your wp-admin
Setting things up consists of two major stages: configuring your zenVPN account and installing the zenVPN plugin into your WordPress website.
zenVPN setup
- First, you’ll need to create a zenVPN account by signing up.
- Second, purchase a subscription. You’ll need a business subscription with one server (or two if you’d like to have a failover). Make sure to set the number of user seats to the number of people on your team who will be accessing your site’s admin panel.
- Now, create a dedicated server under Dedicated Servers.
- Next, go to “My site” and create a tunnel to your site via your newly created dedicated server.
- Invite your colleagues to your zenVPN team by clicking “Invite people” and selecting “Invite a team member”.
- Finally, you and your team members will each need to install zenVPN client software. Get it on the Downloads page.
Installing the plugin
- Go to Plugins -> Add new
- Type zenVPN into the search field
- Click “Activate” on zenVPN plugin
- Now go to Settings -> zenVPN and click “Connect to your account”
That's it