Enhance Joomla website security by hiding admin login URL

Security has no boundary. It’s much more than a complex password. What if we could prevent attackers from getting into the login page entirely? This would give your site a better state of security. The default admin login URL of a Joomla site looks like “www.yoursite.com/administrator”. This address brings the admin login area by default. Now we will see how to change this URL to hide the backend login door.

We can do this in a few moments. It’s that much easy. But don’t dare to treat this trick as a silly thing. It can save your site from destructive cyber attacks. Okay, we will use a free extension “jSecure Lite” in this purpose. Download the extension from the its developer’s site. You will need to register and login to their site for downloading the extension.

After completing the download, you will get a zipped folder which accommodates separate ‘jSecure Lite’ builds for different Joomla versions. Now go to your Joomla admin panel. Navigate Extensions > Manage. There you will get an option to upload extension package file.

Upload and install the appropriate jSecure Lite build matching with your Joomla version.

Once you’ve installed and activated the title, go to the admin control panel again. Navigate Components > jSecure Lite > Basic Configuration.

Ensure that the functionality is enabled and the Pass Key option is set for URL (see the screenshot above). Now set a Pass Key and save. You must remember this key because it will be required to put inside the login URL, otherwise you would not get the login form. After successfully saving the key, your login URL structure will be like this “www.yoursite.com/administrator/?key”. The default “http://localhost/joomla/administrator” will not work.

jSecure is a premium extension which has many other security features. In jSecure Lite version, you can get just a flavor of the original title. You may find the full feature list of this extension here.

Hopefully I’ll be back with more tips and tricks in near future. Stay tuned!