WordPress, the world’s most popular content management system (CMS), is fundamentally secure, provided website owners and administrators take necessary precautions.
WordPress security isn’t just about protecting your site from attacks—it’s about building and maintaining trust with your audience and ensuring the ongoing success of your business.
A secure WordPress site guarantees a smooth user experience, safeguards sensitive user data, and protects your website’s reputation.
How secure is WordPress against common threats?
WordPress faces various security threats due to its popularity and open-source nature but that development heritage is also one of its strengths.
Its ubiquity means there is a large ecosystem of developers who can examine and improve its code, addressing and helping patch known vulnerabilities in plugins, themes, and core software, which can be exploited by hackers to gain unauthorized access or inject malicious code.
Improving WordPress security and major risk mitigation strategies
Proactive, responsible mitigation plays a pivotal role in the health of any WordPress environment.
This involves identifying potential vulnerabilities and taking proactive steps to reduce the risk from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, brute force attacks, malware and SQL injections, and other serious threats.
Major risk mitigation strategies for WordPress
Here is a summary of steps to strengthen your WordPress security:
- Regular updates: Keep your WordPress core, themes, and plugins up to date. Audit and review code for custom plugins and themes, or opt for those with a strong reputation for security.
- Strong passwords: Use complex and unique passwords for all your accounts.
- Two-factor authentication: Add an extra layer of security to your login process.
- SSL certificates: Use SSL to encrypt data between your website and users.
- User management: Restricting user access can prevent unauthorized changes, while limiting login attempts can prevent brute force attacks.
- Regular backups: Regularly back up your website to recover quickly from potential attacks.
- Firewalls: Add network and host-based firewalls to prevent unauthorized access attempts.
The importance of WordPress security scans
Regular security scans are also crucial to maintain a secure WordPress environment. These scans help identify vulnerabilities and take corrective actions before an attacker can exploit them.
Scanning tools can detect malware, check for out-of-date software, and identify other potential security issues.
Learn more about WordPress security best practices.
WordPress security for the enterprise
For larger businesses, WordPress security is critical to avoid business disruption and worse. Enterprise organizations, as well as public agencies, often incorporate vast amounts of sensitive data on their websites, making them prime targets for cyber attacks by nation states, terrorists, and rogue hackers.
These companies must prioritize WordPress security to protect their reputation, maintain customer trust, and avoid potential financial losses.
Secure WordPress hosting
A key component of WordPress security, especially at the enterprise level, is a secure host for WordPress, one that provides robust security measures and protection against cyber threats. Here, site downtime or data breaches can have substantial financial and reputational repercussions.
As part of its fully managed hosting platform and infrastructure, WordPress VIP can handle all technical aspects of security including regular maintenance updates, proactive monitoring, threat defense, regular code reviews, backups, and scalability, allowing businesses to focus on their core operations.
WordPress VIP is also the only WordPress platform to achieve FedRAMP Authority to Operate (ATO), a key requirement for doing business with the U.S. Federal government.