WordPress Security Getting More Attention

Posted by Marty Dickinson on Sep 19, 2012

Whenever I bring up the idea of WordPress security in my workshops, I can just see the audience start to drift their thinking to whatever they have planned for after the workshop. People in general are just not worried about their websites being hacked…until it gets hacked of course; and then of course we get the frantic call.

The problem is that hackers are getting much more creative as to how they break in to WordPress websites and the numbers of websites they can break into…at the same time, thanks to their ever-growing sophisticated hacker scripts.

One thing’s for sure. More and more website hosting companies are finally starting to take WordPress security more seriously.

Here’s a very interesting article by a website hosting company that seems to focus on WordPress hosting like we do at HereNextYear.

What particularly stood out with me in that article were three things you might not know:

1. Your WordPress website has many more attempted unauthorized logins than you might realize. The author of the blog post I pointed you to above claims his hosting company gets 50,000-180,000 unauthorized login attempts every single day.

2. WordPress plugin updates are being released faster than ever before because there is so much competition between plugin developers. Keeping all of your versions current is even more pressing than before because with every outdated update lies an opportunity for security breaches.

3. Security itself is constantly changing. So, any website hosting company you use had better have constantly evolving security for their servers and, in particular, WordPress hosting clients.

I just had a long-time client move their hosting from our dedicated, WordPress-secured, constantly evolving security hosting platform….to GoDaddy. NOOO! Anything but GoDaddy! Why did he move? Because the client is looking for any and every way to cut costs right now.

Why shouldn’t he have moved? Because big website hosting companies are failing to evolve their security standards.

This is a rising problem I see across the board how people are choosing to save as little as $50-$75 up front and run the risk of losing thousands of dollars down the road. Restrain the urge to downgrade. Question your website hosting company to see if they have all of the author’s security measures in place.

For those of you reading this in the HereNextYear member’s area, I will be posting our 30-step WordPress security process by the end of the month so stay tuned.