Website Security

The advice I have just received from my hosting company suggests that for a WordPress site I would need to:

1) Run regular malware checks with the offer of a 3-month promo on the malware checker

2) Keep all your software up to date. They even update the core WordPress modules automatically. Well, thats all very well and good but if someone is running a WordPress plugin that is out of sync with the latest core module, I bet that could cause some issues.

3) Shield against common WordPress exploits. For this, they offer a special security plugin which does a whole host of things too technical to list here but which would require a great deal of work for a developer to handle and this cost would need to be passed on to the client somehow. 

I look at all this and I think I'm so glad I didn't go down this road. I would have to spend so much time on every site I built checking this stuff out on behalf of my clients and then trying to justify why I was having to charge them so much extra every month to keep their site safe.

It's no wonder to me that I regularly get contacted by clients who have had a previous  WordPress developer who now has either given up web design or has gone missing and cannot be contacted.

I can see that WordPress has its place for some businesses but the business has to be able to fund a lot of a developer's time to create, and then support and update the business website.

Hacking into Rapidweaver sites

Can someone hack into one of my sites? I can't be 100% sure of course. If someone managed to gain access to your hosting account then, of course, they could do what they want, so if there is one thing I would say it is to use a good password for your hosting account and keep it safe. However, with 2-factor authentication requiring a code to be sent to an email address and that code being entered correctly it becomes far more difficult for a hacker to gain entry. 

As for the website code that I produce, it is as close to handwritten code as you can get so I believe that it is very difficult to hack that.

I only know of one occasion that someone used an Admin page on a test site that I was building and left a cryptic message in one of the maintainable text areas. That was because I hadn't protected the page with a PIN/Password but I always protect my live sites with a PIN/Password login.

Conclusion

So think about this before choosing to opt for a WordPress site. If you are going to build it yourself, be prepared to spend a lot of time keeping it maintained. Either that or you risk it being hacked, or it becoming unusable due to modules getting out of sync with each other.

If you are employing someone to build a WordPress site for you check out the ongoing costs that you might be signing up for and how much they charge you for keeping your site safe from attacks.