How to Make Your Wordpress Website More Secure with Single Sign On

Your Wordpress website has a public log-in page, often found at example.com/wp-login.php, and it is possible to someone gain access to your site by guessing your password through repeated trial and error method. To harden your Wordpress secuirty, it is therefore recommended that your password-protect the Wordpress admin folder and also use 2-factor authentication.

How to Secure Wordpress with Single Sign On

Wordpress Single Sign On offers an even more secure option for protecting your website from brute force attacks as you 'outsource' the authentication part to Wordpress.com. Once enabled, the log-in screen on your Wordpress website is disabled and you are required to sign-in to your Wordpress.com account in order to access the admin dashboard of your own self-hosted Wordpress blog.

There are several advantages here:

1. Since Wordpress.com accounts support 2-factor authentication, the same level of security is now enabled for your blog as well without requiring another plugin.
2. All log-in requests on your site, including the malicious log-in attempts, are now automatically redirected to WordPress.com and thus it reduces the load on your server and database.
3. If you manage multiple sites, you can log into them all with a single Wordpress.com account and no longer have to remember multiple usernames and password.

How to Implement Wordpress Single Sign On with Jetpack

Here is step-by-step guide that explains how you can enable Single Sign On for your Wordpress website:

Step 1: Create an account on Wordpress.com using this link. Skip this step if you already have an account. You may be required to create a dummy blog on wordpress.com as part of the registration process.

Step 2: Once your account is created, click here to enable 2-factor authentication. Specify your phone number, Wordpress will send a verification SMS and you need to type the same code to verify your number.

Step 3: Go to your Wordpress blog, install the Jetpack plugin, activate the plugin and then click the green button that says "Connect to WordPress.com" to link to your blog to your Wordpress account.

Step 4: Once the connection is established, go to Jetpack settings and activate the "Single Sign On" module.

Step 5: Go to your Wordpress installation folder via FTP or SSH, switch to the current theme folder (wp-content/themes/themes-name) and edit the functions.php file. Here copy-paste the following line of code after the first line:

add_filter( 'jetpack_sso_bypass_login_forward_wpcom', '__return_true' );

Step 6: Go to Users - Your Profile and, at the bottom of the page, click the button that says, "Log in with WordPress.com" - this will essentially link your WordPress account to the username that you've used to log into the site.

This will completely disable the login form of your Wordpress site and instead forwards the users to login screen on WordPress.com. Once you login through Wordpress, you are immediately redirected to the admin dashboard of your self-hosted WordPress blog. 

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