Why you shouldn't use Hide My WP or similar plugins for your PBN

Unfortunately, there are major issues with using these plugins. Yes, you could hide WordPress completely. However, that is a very complex task that requires moving of wp-admin and wp-content folder and rewriting paths for CSS and Javascript. It also means most plugins and themes would stop working because they use hard-coded paths to wp-content.

Plugins like HideMyWP or HideWP do not do that. They do it on a lesser level and as such still leave obvious footprints that the website is WordPress. Two examples of those footprints are directly pingable files xmlrpc.php and wp-cron.php (in root).

Besides that, there is another issue, specifically with Hide My WP - server footprints changer. In one case one of our users chose Microsoft IIS as server footprint. The plugin then created system layouts that resemble that server setup. However the server is still easily identifiable as Linux through server headers which makes the whole setup look ridiculous (you can’t run Microsoft IIS on Linux).

Our recommendation: if you want to randomize the backlinks to your sites, build a few Web2.0s instead. Or you can use plain site builders and upload them to a few shared hosts. Here are a few of them (PHP, no MySQL): HTMLy, Pico, FlatPress, GetSimple CMS, PivotX.

As for WordPress, keep it simple and plain as much as possible. If you’re interested in reading more on security, look at how we improve blog security on EBN, the leading PBN hosting service, and how to avoid deindexation by avoiding the PBN deindexation checklist.