After setting up your new WordPress website, one of the first things you should do is install a security plugin. This is strongly recommended and will make your website much more secure. There is not much worse than spending hours and hours building up your new website, only to find out some morning that it has been hacked into and used to send out huge amounts of spam emails or to display less than desirable content.
So what do security plugins do, and how much input/ongoing work is required from you? Alot and very little, respectively! A good WordPress security plugin will be able to detect outdated plugins and themes installed on your website, help you set up more secure ways of logging in to your Dashboard (and prevent others from doing so), set up automatic backups of your content and email it to you (very useful), as well as automatically block out malicious traffic.
Setting up a security plugin for the first time can take 10-15 minutes, but once everything is in place it does not require much/any input from you going forward. Taking time to go through this initial set up process is highly recommended.
As far as which security plugin in particular you should use, we would suggest using the iThemes Security plugin. It is easy to use and comes with a thorough walk through ensuring all aspects of your WordPress website are kept secure. For instructions on how to install a security plugin (or plugin or any type), please visit our KB article here.