Previously we discussed our top ten recommended plugins for WordPress – Top Ten Recommended WordPress Plugins for your website. Recently we have chosen to revise our advice slightly due to the exploit that occurred from the GDPR plugin a few months ago.
We still recommend:
- Firewall for your website
- CDN front-end for speed and security
- Regular updates on all plugins
- Monthly or Quarterly checks and scans for Malware
- A dedicated team (internal or developers) that monitors everything
A badly written but widely used plugin allowed remote access to WordPress sites that had the plugin installed. Thankfully there were two varieties of exploits that were in the wild at the time. One was a simple proof of concept that redirected visitors to a Romanian political website to protest conditions in the country. Another was much worse, with the exploit uploading code and malware into the website in multiple locations as well as adding administrators to the website for future exploits.
We found that WordFence (wordfence.com) worked wonderfully and prevented the exploit from hitting websites that had the bad plugin installed. Overall, WordFence is now our top recommended FREE WordPress security plugin. That being said we still highly recommend Cloudflare for Free, or $20 a month subscription for a third party front end firewall and CDN combination.
WordPress security is important. WordPress stands as the largest open-source, free website platform, widely adapted in all sectors of industry. We currently recommend WordPress as a great launching platform for many projects and websites, since it is getting better to work with all the time.
If your company has an existing website that needs to be transferred to WordPress, or your company is looking for a new developer to support your existing website (On any platform), we can help! Contact us today to see how we can assist your company with WordPress security issues, to boost SEO, fix website problems, host your website or build you a new one from scratch.
