WordPress Security and WPEngine

What do Playstation, U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM), Target, Home Depot, Apple iCloud, Snapsave, and Evernote all have in common?

They each have been hacked within the past year resulting in a treasure trove of sensitive information being released.

Society now lives in two worlds; the physical world and a digital one.  The information we put online has given hackers the ability to cultivate information over time, chip-away at your digital-self, and execute an attack that spans into both.  New viruses combined with new technologies have changed how we must protect our businesses and online investments.  DDoS attacks, otherwise known as Distributed Denial of Service attacks, Trojan Horses, BadUSB, as well as malicious codes like SoakSoak and ShellShock (Bash), all effect WordPress websites.

“74,652,825 sites out there are depending on good ol’ WordPress. That’s one site per person in Turkey. Around 50% of this figure (close to 37 million) is hosted on the free WordPress.com. In the realm of self-hosted sites, WordPress accounts for 18.9% of all websites,” as of last year according to an article by ManageWP.

Hosting

While keeping your website secure may start with a strong password, it does not by any means end there.  To ensure that your site is adequately protected you must look at the ground in which you have laid your foundation: where is my site being hosted?

If you have a WordPress site and have concerns about who’s hosting all of your files and information, a good place to start would be WPEngine.  Most importantly, WPEngine guarantees that if your site is hacked, they will fix it – for free.  But by updating their system everyday, and monitoring for unusual activity, they are able to block thousands of known attacks and new attacks.

Support

Having a good support team allows businesses to continue working without having to worry about their digital presence.  WPEngine offers a robust support system through online chat, phone, forum and community engagement, as well as a simple help ticketing system.  We have had tremendous success with their online chat feature and can not speak highly enough about it.

If one already has a website, moving their hosting to WPEngine is simple with online documentation and support.  If one is building a new site from scratch or perhaps making radical changes, WPEngine makes this easy with site copying and a staging site environment.  All with the push of few keys and buttons.  But lets say you don’t feel comfortable doing a lot of the technical work on the website.  WPEngine makes it easy to add partial users with varying access levels allowing you to protect sensitive information.

Plugins

WPEngine does not support all plugins as some of these may cause malfunctions to your site.  However, here is a list of plugins one can use for added security:

Bulletproof

All in One WP Security & Firewall

Sucuri Security

Wordfence (not permitted on WPEngine sites)

Backups

Always have a backup. (Pretty simple.)

To learn more WordPress Security and how WPEngine can secure your online presence, contact us.