Why update WordPress?

You might remember the Panama Papers scandal back in April 2016. There were calls for David Cameron’s resignation over his family’s tax affairs, and the Icelandic PM actually did resign over it. It all happened because of a security breach at a law firm called Mossack Fonseca. It transpired that one of the likely causes of the breach was the company’s WordPress website hadn’t been kept up to date and could have been hacked. Now I accept that it’s unlikely that your website holds such explosive data but the fact is, that with WordPress being one of the world’s most popular content management systems, it’s a target for hackers.

I look after quite a number of websites for clients and there are hacking attempts on about 80% of them every week. If you have a website there’s a good chance yours comes under attack too, if you don’t keep it patched and have security software on there, there’s a good chance that one day you’ll become one of the unlucky ones that loses their site because it’s been taken over by a hacker.

How do I keep my website safe?

Core and plugin updates

Keeping your WordPress website safe is fairly simple; you need to make sure that you regularly check for updates to the core WordPress files and any plugins that you have installed. Updates come out all of the time and there’s no pattern to them, sometimes they add new functionality, others fix security holes, many do both. If you’re not logging in to your site on a regular basis it’s likely that you won’t know that those fixes are available. That’s where my ‘Maintain’ service comes in; I monitor your website on a regular basis and perform the updates for you, making sure that you minimise your chance of being hacked by a security hole in your site.

Security software

Another way to keep your site safe from those pesky hackers is to install security software. It’s a bit like anti-virus software that you install on your computer. Amongst other things, it looks out for people trying to login that shouldn’t be and blocks them, it checks files on your web site to make sure that no malicious files have been added as well as many other vital checks.