Practical Small Business wordpress website security precautions

WordPress is very popular, and small business love the flexibility and features.

Here is why wordpress is risky for small business

•  it takes years to gain the experience and skills required to actively defend a wordpress website. Now what small business owner wants to put the time and effort into learning wordpress ? blah
• small business don’t want to spend more money than they have to – so paying for website maintenance packages sound expensive
• Couple the lack of skills/experienced with availability of cheap websites plans
• The whole cocktail leads to cheap plans, unmanaged websites, low skills, and a lot of chaos

The cheap website plans go basically like this

• we’ll charge you monthly for hosting your website
• if anything goes wrong, you get hacked, the hosting company will just block your account
• they won’t offer to help
• they won’t offer you any services
• they won’t restore a backup
• It takes a few days, lots of phone calls, and a lot of frustration to find out all the above
• I am not talking about backyard operators – this is how the big boys do it – like netregistry and godaddy
• and you literally lose your website

Here is a few steps to reduce your risks. I’ve reduced this list to more practical things small business owners can do. If I tell you really good ideas, that you’ll be unlikely to do – then that won’t help you much. So here is my slimmed down list :

1. keep your wordpress updated, at a minimum every six months. Recent wordpress versions update themselves, put it isn’t guaranteed.
2. update your plugins , again at a minimum every six months
3. delete any unused plugins or themes, don’t just de-activate them. hackers can still hack deactivated plugins
4. remove ‘revolution slider’ – I don’t care what other’s say, its dangerous. Here is my post about it.
5. Use a security plugin – wordfence is popular, I like ‘wordpress security firewall’.
6. have a backup plan. Any long term wordpress user has this as their main security defence. If anything goes wrong, you use your backup. Here is a few ideas for backup
   1. use cpanel to do a manual backup, and download it your PC. Do this now and again, after major changes on your site. Cpanel backups are the best type of backup, they are easier to restore, you can change providers, you dont need to re-install wordpress to use them to recover.
   2. use a wordpress plugin. I suggest ‘backup to dropbox’. Even seasoned pro’s use this strategy.
7. consider enabling wordpress automatic updates. here is a plugin for automatic updates, but be warned it can break your site, so backups are important

 

 

 

By Scott Farrell on January 14th, 2016 , Follow @scott_WordPress Tweet to @scott_WordPress