Protecting Your WordPress Website Security Hardening
Professional WordPress Security Hardening
WordPress security hardening is something that must take place after your site is set up. There are certain things that need to be done to a WordPress website after it’s initial installation and this is something that is often overlooked by novices and web professionals alike.
Don’t let hackers find your business websites vulnerabilities before you do.
WordPress is by far the most common CMS (content management system) used to build websites.
Alone WordPress is estimated to account for over 1 out of every 3 websites on the internet.
While the CMS itself is very secure when set up correctly. The biggest problem is that being the most popular CMS on the internet makes it a huge target for those looking to exploit website vulnerabilities.
The ease of use in actually getting a site up and running also creates another problem.
With WordPress websites, it is actually a pretty easy process to get a website up and running. Unfortunately this easy to setup process actually causes many people to falsely assume all is well with their website.
But there is a big difference between quickly and easily setting a site up and setting it up correctly. This often leads to a lot of novice mistakes when you begin to look at the common vulnerabilities found in most WordPress sites.
What Makes WordPress So Vulnerable
- Poorly Managed – It’s easy to use and even easy to set up so often you end up with many sites being managed by inexperienced individuals (and even some “agencies”).
- Security Updates – Whenever a potential security vulnerability is found WordPress is usually good about providing security updates to fix them, but since many sites are not updated regularly this can make a site an easy target to known preventable security issues. Basically, automated bots will scan the internet looking for sites that have neglected their security updates.
- Plugins & Theme – Anyone can create a theme or plugins that can easily be installed from WordPress. For obvious reasons, this can be very dangerous. Basically, anyone can create anything and add it to WordPress’ shared community. This is one of the things that makes WordPress so popular (not much computer programming skills required). While the WP community tries it’s best to monitor these themes and plugins (and does a fairly decent job at it), as you can imagine there are always going to be bad apples with bad intentions who can create major security issues. The other problem is that since many of these WordPress Themes & Plugins are FREE they are often not updated as often as they should be. Now the real problem is that it is NOT uncommon for us to see websites built by other “agencies with 30 to 50 of these said plugins. (This is why we take the extra time to create our own themes from scratch and build most all of our own plugins)
- Misconfigured File System – Files and folders set with the wrong permissions is a very common problem in WordPress as most developers and agencies managing WP sites have little security experience if any. If the file system within WP is not configured correctly it doesn’t matter how secure other aspects of your site is, it will still be susceptible to the most common vulnerabilities.
The Easy Security Hardening Solution
We have packages available specifically for locking down the security of WordPress websites.
It not uncommon even the most well-meaning developers miss something.
Our WordPress security hardening packages start at $149 (depending on the current condition of the site and how out of date it is).
If your WordPress website is somewhat up to date and maintained this should be a pretty straightforward process.
However, if a website has been neglected for years and is way out of date with both the WordPress core itself and or any themes or plugins. As you can imagine some of these updates may cause some site errors that can severely affect your site.
We would never go in and update your site and leave it in worse shape than we found it. So our pricing will reflect fixing any such issues and keeping your site in working order.
Our WordPress Hardening Process
We avoid making changes to your live site first as sometimes updates to plugins and themes can cause conflicts in the code which may crash your site.
For this reason, we duplicate a mock version of your site in what we call a “staging” area and apply the needed changes there. Once changes are made we work out any issues that may have resulted from updates or other changes and then add those changes to your live site.
Our process looks something like this:
- Assess the site
- Backup the site and move to a copy of the site for “staging” (So if something goes wrong it doesn’t affect your live site)
- Make necessary changes, test site and resolve any potential conflicts on the “staged” site
- Apply changes to your live site
If you want to learn more about our professional WordPress security hardening service and how we can help make your website more secure, contact us below.