I have had two WordPress blogs. That was at a time when I was doing virtually no online advertising, and until I found time to handle the situation (weeks later), these sites were penalized at the major search engines. They weren't eliminated, however the ratings were reduced.
Cloning your site is just another degree in clean hacked wordpress site which may be useful. Cloning simply means that you've backed up your website to a completely different location, (offline, as in a folder, in order to not have SEO issues ) where you can access it in a moment's notice if necessary.
Should your site's server go down, everything you have worked for will proceed with it. You will make no sales, get no traffic or signups to your website, until you get the website back up again and in short, you're out of business.
There's a section of config-sample.php that is headed"Authentication Unique Keys." There are. A hyperlink is within that part of code. You need to enter that link in your browser, copy the contents that you return, and replace the keys you have with the unique, pseudo-random keys offered by the website. This makes it harder for attackers to automatically create a"logged-in" cookie for your website.
Note that you should try this step for new installations. You will also have to change all the table names within the database if you would like to get it done for existing installations.
Using a plugin for WordPress security just makes great sense. WordPress backups need see it here to be performed on a regular basis. Don't become a victim of not being proactive about your 16, because!