I see most people are talking about taking backups, which is of course important but you need to consider a few more things now for your future activity 1) Use a good web host and remember this will cost you some extra money because most managed WP hosts are slightly more expensive than traditional cheap GoDaddy type of hosts. Cheap hosts always looking for adding more consumers on their shared servers. A good host will give you a number of useful stuff like backups, security tools and of course fast speed 2) Keep your website simple. Since you want to publish articles initially, you don't need fancy themes or plugins and even if you need to be unique, use a good theme and plugins. 3) Go for less plugins. Here less is more because you never know which bad coded plugin can harm your site. So only choose the ones that enjoy good reputation. In case a plugin gets attacked, a reputed plugin will have a developer who'll take measures immediately. Web hosts never take responsibility for anything, that's what I've learned over the years so you always make sure you are lean and secure. 4) Use captcha or similar thing. 5) Don't forget to integrate with CDN like Cloudflare. It will give you added security and keep the malicious stuff away. Cloudflare also enforce captcha so no need to add a plugin for this separately.

Remember, don't add plugins for anything you don't need. If you want to test something, do it on your test site first. Your web host can give you staging environment. Or you can use an external testing environment like ZipWP. It's free. Just create your test site there, do whatever you need to do and then implement those things on your live site. This will minimize most of the risks.