Renaming wp-login isn't the same as making wp-admin disappear

"How do I hide wp-admin" is one of the most-searched WordPress security questions, and most answers give the same advice: install a plugin that renames your login URL. That advice isn't wrong. It's just answering a smaller question than the one being asked. Renaming /wp-login.php to /my-login moves the login form. It does not change what answers at the old path, what your plugin folders advertise, or what your home page tells a scanner about the stack underneath. If your only problem is the password-guessing bot hammering the default form, a renamer solves it. If your problem is "stop my site from being identified and targeted as WordPress," you've solved maybe a third of it. Here are the three leaks a login rename leaves open. Leak 1: the old path still costs a full WordPress boot When a login-URL renamer "blocks" the default path, the request to /wp-login.php still loads WordPress. PHP starts, the plugin stack initializes, and only then does the plugin decide to return a 404 to the logged-out visitor. The visitor sees a 404. Your server still did the work of booting WordPress to produce it. On a quiet site, nobody notices. On a site taking tens of thousands of probes a day, that's tens of thousands of full WordPress boots spent generating 404s. Your security dashboard's "attempts blocked" counter looks great. Your CPU graph disagrees. The architectural alternative is to reject the request at the rewrite layer, before PHP runs: # Apache .htaccess — reject the default login path at the server level < IfModule mod_rewrite.c > RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(wp-login\.php|wp-admin) [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !wordpress_logged_in [NC] RewriteRule .* - [R=404,L] </ IfModule > # nginx — same idea, requires a config reload after change location ~ * ^/(wp-login \ .php|wp-admin) { if ( $http_cookie !~* "wordpress_logged_in") { return 404 ; } } The probe to the old path returns 404 from the server, WordPress never loads, and the request costs almost nothi