As WordPress has rapidly risen to become king of the web it has also sadly become the primary target for hackers. What does this mean for you? Well, now more than ever it is essential that you protect your WordPress site from vulnerabilities that could expose backdoor access for hackers.

So, we decided to compile a list of the 8 best free WordPress vulnerability scanners on the market to give you some options to help protect your website.

1. WordPress Security Scan

WordPress Security Scan is a free online scanner that checks not only your plugins but your web server, hosting environment and application security. It analyzes your sites HTML code to check for externally linked iFrames, JavaScript, directory indexing, user enumeration and web links.

2. First Site Guide

First Site Guide is a real-time hacking scanner and protector WordPress. It is simple to use for beginners by providing an interactive dashboard. 

It excels as detecting major hacks by performing multiple scans in a timely fashion and resolves said issues with ease.

3. WP Scans

WP Scans compares your WordPress website against their index of known vulnerabilities and suspicious looking code. It displays the results in combination with your current WP version and plugins and presents it in an easy way to digest.

4. Securi

SiteCheck by Securi who also provide firewall and security scanning. This service will do an extensive check of your website for malicious code, spam injection and defacement which also works for externally hosted scripts and links.

You will also be informed if your website has been added to any blacklists such as Google Safe Browsing, SiteAdvisor, Phish Tank and more.

5. WordPress Vulnerability Scanner

WordPress Vulnerability Scanner will scan your WordPress site and check your version, plugins and themes for known vulnerability’s. There services also include a section for advanced users that help with detecting other compromised security.

6. Web Inspector

Web Inspector is a dedicated security scanner that scans and detects malware downloads, malware, shady code, worms, iframes, trojan horses, scripts, files and backdoors and then combines checks from Google Safe Browsing and Comodo analyst indexes to perform a well rounded solution.

7. Google Safe Browsing

Google’s Safe Browsing tool analyzes your URLs to see if any have been flagged as unsafe by Google. URLs are flagged when Google suspects that a website might contain malware.

This poses a real problem as users visiting your site will be presented with a warning page stating your site is unsafe.

8. Upguard

Upguard’s Cloud Scanner is a service that scans your WordPress site for security vulnerabilities. It checks for malware, shady links, phishing and malicious code directly on your site. 

In addition to this it investigates your domain records, open ports, mail configuration and DNS records. All of which can be compromised by hackers for malware and spam purposes.

Conclusion

If you want to keep your WordPress website secure from hackers, then any of the tools mentioned above will help to achieve this. Feel free to use more than one at a time for a more complete solution. It is always better to practice prevention than to suffer through the clean-up if your site does happen to get hacked.