Why you should keep WordPress up to date
If you don’t know what it is, WordPress is a freely available open source website content management system. It was originally used to power blogs but has grown in to a CMS capable of powering a full website. As of right now it is believed that 23% of the websites on the internet are powered by WordPress, that’s in excess of 60 million sites.
Unfortunately WordPress, its plugins and themes are all vulnerable to hackers and attacks who take advantage of weaknesses in the WordPress installation (core) or plugin/theme code. One such weakness, the ‘XSS Vulnerability’, was identified very recently and affected a number of incredibly popular WordPress plugins.
The good news is that whenever a vulnerability such as this is identified the WordPress community work quickly to fix the problem in an attempt to stop hackers ‘breaking in’ to your website. In order to take advantage of these fixes you should make sure your WordPress installation, all plugins used and WordPress theme are kept up to date. When you log in to your WordPress CMS you will be notified of any pending updates.
To reduce the overall threat risk there are some things you can do, as well as maintaining an up-to-date WordPress site, such as:
- remove any unnecessary plugins and themes,
- maintain a backup of your WordPress site and database,
- install a plugin to help prevent attacks and notify you of potential intrusions/problems such as Wordfence. Wordfence also notifies you by email if you have updates pending.
We offer website backup solutions and website uptime monitoring as part of our IT Support solution, we can even maintain your WordPress installation for you. If you would like to know more, please feel free to contact us.
If you’re interested in seeing some more live WordPress stats, click here.
