We’ve been building and maintaining Wordpress websites for over a decade and as the platform has evolved and grown, the question ‘how secure is WordPress anyway?’ is one that keeps coming up. There are over 75 million websites around the world running on WordPress including many sites of prominent organisations like Best Buy, Xerox, Ford and Marks and Spencer. With so many sites running on this environment of course there will be hacks and security concerns – we hear about more issues because it’s such a widely used platform.

Several years ago the Out-Smarts site was hacked and since then we’ve put a process in place that mitigates the risk – our site has not been hacked since. We’ve also put in place an action list for clients to follow to maintain the security of their sites and for those clients following this they haven’t had their sites hacked either.

How Secure is WordPress?

The answer is that it is as secure any other development environment. It’s not the vulnerability of WordPress that is an issue, it’s the processes that are put in place (or lack of) that make a site attractive to hackers.

Make your WordPress Website more Secure

Here’s the process and recommendations that we use to make our website and our client’s websites safe from hackers. If you use these too, you will be able to sleep better at night without worrying about your site being hacked!

1. Never use ‘admin’ as a username.
2. Always use a convoluted password with upper and lower case, symbols, number et al (WordPress makes it easy for you to generate this).
3. Change your password often.
4. Install Sucuri or SiteLock to monitor your site and to help you get it back up and running really quickly should anything untoward happen.
5. Keep your theme up to date.
6. Ensure you are using the latest version of WordPress
7. Make sure your site is running the most up to date plugins
8. Limit login attempts – there a re several great plugins for this.
9. Run regular external backups.

There are other more technical actions you can take to make sure your WordPress site stays safe but these are things you can easily do yourself. WordPress is a great platform, it’s versatile and robust. It’s our platform of choice when designing and building new sites for clients and if you follow these processes the likelihood that your site gets hacked is very small.

This post answers the question how secure is WordPress. If you would like to learn more, here are some related articles:

Protect Yourself & Your Site With Strong Passwords
Change your WordPress Passwords
Dealing with Hackers and Spammers
How to Protect Yourself on Facebook
Think it’s a good idea to build your own website? Here’s why you should think again.

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