What you need to know about your Wordpress website

Your Wordpress website needs constant attention

Wordpress is by far the most popular Content Management System (CMS)) in the world, accounting for about 35% of all websites globally.

Originally WordPress was a blog engine that became immensely popular because it offered users the ability to create a free website within minutes, simply by clicking a few buttons. 

Early global adoption of the WordPress open-source and its freemium model meant that when WordPress expanded to become a complete CMS, there was already a sizable community who were comfortable working with the software. 

This user ecosystem in turn provided support for a whole host of themes, free extensions or plugins for every conceivable feature, to a user group that didn't need to be tech-savvy to set up relatively complex websites.

The result is that most WordPress websites are not really designed or built at all. The 'website designer' uses a one-click setup, installs a theme from hundreds on the market and simply adds plugins to achieve the desired functionality. And with a liitle practice and experience it is possible for you to become a WordPress Superuser.

Wordpress strengths

You can create a fully fledged website extremely quickly, if you know what you are doing.

If you use premium themes and plugin modules from reliable sources, you can automate upgrades without any problems. 

Plugins are available for most standard functionality for free. And a lot of other software applications create compatibility plugins or APIs to work with WordPress. There is a lot of documentation available.

Customisation tools allow website editors to create solutions without having to depend on plugins.

WordPress vulnerabilities

WordPress security is a very big problem. Time and again vulberabilities show major flaws in the architecture and code stemming from the bolt-on CMS and the predictablity of the setup scripts.  

Although there are tools to harden the security of WordPress websites, some of these tools have been shown to be problematic themselves.
    
Wordpress websites provide a sizable target for hackers because of WordPress market share. There is a lot of automated hacking software, scanning software and scripts specifically designed to sniff out insecure Wordpress websites.

Because of the lack of security associated with Wordpress websites, WordPress itself is upgrading all the time to stay ahead of confirmed vulnerabilities. But if website owners do not upgrade their websites, and they don't, then their websites are not protected. 50% of all WordPress websites have not been updated in the last 2 years, and 10% have not been updated for the past 7 years!

Staggeringly, about 90% of all website hacks are of Wordpress websites, even those running updated versions. By far the majority of hacks occur via the application layer through an insecure or outdated extension plugins. 

Wordpress usability has become more and more of an issue. The proliferation of plugins and presentation features has meant that there is considerable complexity in the administration console, with overlapping functionality between plugin modules.

It is not always clear where certain data is being managed. Because content is managed via a backend area, you would firstly need to find out what plugin is involved. This creates problems for the end-user community. 
    
But it also creates problems for 'WordPress Designers' who are not developers. Should anything go wrong with a plugin, or it is not performing as expected, there may be no other recourse except to replace the affected plugin. You would first need to establish which plugin is affected though. Uninstalling all plugins, and then reinstalling plugins one-by-one to find the problem, is not uncommon.

Finding competent developers is a major challenge, firstly and then the cost will defeat the object of deploying an open-source, 'free' system.

Not all plugins are created equal. Although you may seem to have a wide choice, only a few are good, secure, well-maintained and supported. Choosing the wrong plugin could mean having to replace mission critical software down the line when it comes to upgrading, or worse, being hacked. 

This is more common than you may think, with only a small percentage of the 1000's of available plugins being regularly upgraded and maintained.

You already have a WordPress website - Now what?

We can help you if your site has been hacked or if you need to make sure your WordPress website security is hardened.

We also offer a monthly maintenance package for WordPress to keep your site updated and upgraded.

Contact Us or Get A Quote.