WordPress sites have taken lots of hits over the past few months, in terms of security. One big issue was with the W3 Super Cache and the other with W3 Total Cache, which most SEOs like for speeding up their sites and keeping them running well.
The stats were like 1 in 4 blogs on the Internet, running those plugins and using WordPress were hit. That’s terrible! Imagine how many WP sites that includes. One of my friends was hit and her site wasn’t a huge traffic magnet. The hackers didn’t seem to care about authority at all. They just wanted to wreak havoc.
Here are more tips about securing your site, in this article that I wrote for SEMRush: http://www.semrush.com/blog/publications/locking-down-the-internet-tips-to-keep-your-wordpress-site-safe-from-hacking/
One HUGE thing you can do is to keep your WordPress plugins updated. It’s not hard. Just click the automatic update and you’re done. But what happens when a plugin goes rogue? Read my article for more information on how to keep your site safe and running the way it should.
The funny part is that one of my clients had security so tight that his site squeaked. We were blocked when trying to do any work on his site. Everything had an alert!
There is a happy medium. You can have security that doesn’t drive you mad. But if you don’t want to heed these warnings, OK… At least keep your plugins up to date. Sometimes, these updates are cosmetic, but other times, they’re security holes being plugged. Don’t take a chance.
Cleaning up after a hack is a mess. I know it happened to me twice in the past almost 10 years now. Once, my site was blocked at the trunk line! Who knows who did that or why? They could and they did. Another time, they hacked into my hosting account and deleted ALL of my databases — a blog I’d been writing in for two years, a redirect and tracking program, and my affiliate software. I wasn’t a happy camper. It took weeks to straighten both of those issues out.
Don’t let it happen to you! Read the article, and if you want to be really nice, share it with your friends!
