It is surprising to see most of the WordPress website or blog owners do not know much about their weak security. In case of a crash or being hacked, they may lose all they have because they don't have a timely periodical backup or disaster recovery plan.

For beginners or old timers, the WordPress plugin "Better WP Security" is a must for most websites.
Installation is easy: just from your Dashboard, go to Plugins and Click Add New and type in "Better WP Security" to search and install. Then under Settings on the left, you will find "Security" Menu and you may click Dashboard to set up and enable the basic security features. Be careful of what you are doing, if you are not sure, you may want to call a "WordPress" professional to help you test it on a sandbox and then do it on your production website, which you may not want to let it down one minute at the important moment. This plugin has a great feature to set up database backup and email it to your mailbox (if your database is not too big for your inbox. Otherwise, a zipped database file over 100mb may blow up your mailbox.)

Talking about WordPress Backup, you may want to install another great plugin called "Online Backup for WordPress", which offer you to backup all your WordPress files along with database.  You can directly download the whole backup file after the backup is completed. In case of the crash or even when your website is gone, you may choose another web server and upload the files and recreate the database with the dump file and your web site will be up within 30 minutes.

Here's some detailed description about Better WP Security:

#1 WORDPRESS SECURITY PLUGIN

Better WP Security takes the best WordPress security features and techniques and combines them in a single plugin thereby ensuring that as many security holes as possible are patched without having to worry about conflicting features or the possibility of missing anything on your site.

With one-click activation for most features as well as advanced features for experienced users Better WP Security can help protect any site.