The internet is a wonderful place, but it can also be treacherous and very unforgiving. Every year millions of WordPress websites get hacked and hit by cyberattacks that cause them mild to irrecoverable losses, and this number is only going to increase. These cyberattacks are becoming more advanced, sophisticated, and penetrating further than before, causing more damage.
WordPress security is paramount for the well-being of your online business. You simply can’t do without. It is the first step towards a profitable and sustainable business. With the ever-increasing number of cyberattacks, it is crucial to understand the security challenges your website faces and the possible solutions to overcome them.
This article will walk you through common WordPress security issues and the steps to protect your site.
68% of business owners feel that their cybersecurity risks are increasing
Source: Accenture
Table of contents
Why Having a Secured WordPress Website is Crucial
WordPress security tops all other aspects of your online business. It is a risk that is difficult to measure, and it is even more difficult to recover from. Unfortunately, more than 70% of online businesses do not even have a cybersecurity incident response plan which means if their WordPress site get hacked and hit by a cyber attack, they have no safety net to fall back on.
There are several reasons for having a secure website, but I am listing down some of the most crucial ones that you need to consider for your online business.
Revenue loss
Businesses suffer from heavy financial losses directly or indirectly due to cyberattacks. More than 86% of the website hacks are financially motivated, which means hackers attack your website for one reason mostly, and that is to financially hurt your business.
These cyberattacks can crash your website or make your server too busy fighting off bad traffic to the point that it can’t handle the normal traffic generated through various marketing efforts. These attacks can also steal valuable data of your business and your customers and hold it against heavy ransom.
“Cybercrime is the greatest threat to every company in the world.”
Ginni Rometty, IBM’s chairman, President, and CEO
Data Security
The online business is based entirely on its database and the sensitive customer data it contains. This data is gathered over time through significant investments of both time and resources. Losing it—or having it exposed in a cyberattack—can set your business back years.
Data breaches caused by ransomware, malware, and phishing scams affect online businesses more than ever. And that’s just the business part. With the GDPR in place, you are legally bound to protect personal data. Any data loss can result in hefty fines.
The average cost of a data breach is $3.86 million as of 2020.
Source: IBM
Credibility
Your business loses its credibility when the website is unable to serve its customers or offers a bad user experience when the site crashes, loads slowly, or when client data is compromised. After every breach or cyberattack, your customers lose trust in your business and will look for a more credible and secure alternative.
Interrupted Operations
Interruption in operations is also bad for the business. It’s not just your customers that interact with the site. Your staff will need to perform admin and shop managing tasks, for instance. When your server is busy or unresponsive, the whole operation gets affected negatively.
In short, you can’t afford not to have security be an integral part of your online business. Let’s dive into what kind of WordPress security issues we’re looking at.
Secure Server
The most important building block in creating a secure website starts at the server level. A typical web server is running dozens of pieces of software all the time, and they all need to be updated to their latest and most secure versions. Server software like PHP, Linux, MariaDB, and Nginx needs continuous updates to have any chance of keeping a website secure.
What Are WordPress Security Vulnerabilities?
Over the years, WordPress core has become very secure and stable, but unfortunately, a typical WordPress site is not limited to just using WordPress core software. It also has plugins and themes installed either through the WordPress repository or somewhere else. Any of those third-party solutions can contain malicious scripts, or a vulnerability, that serves as a backdoor to your website.
WordPress sites are, because of their popularity, constantly probed for opportunities to hack any site by bad bots. This happens 24/7, and your site doesn’t have to be a very large site to see these kinds of bad bots constantly looking for ways into your site.
Let’s dive in at what specific elements make your WordPress site vulnerable to cyber attacks.
Outdated WordPress Installation
Every new release of WordPress core includes improved security fixes, but you will be surprised to know that only 35.9% of WordPress sites are running on the latest WordPress 5.7 version.
Outdated WordPress installations lack security patches, data validation, and code sanitization. Because WordPress publicly documents the fixes in each update, hackers can easily identify and exploit the vulnerabilities in older versions.
Another problem with the older WordPress versions is deprecated functions that are also still available to hackers. Certain malware leverages these deprecated functions to execute malicious activities. For that reason, we recommend to run a website on the most recent WordPress version.
Outdated Themes & Plugins
Themes and plugins from 3rd party developers make up the majority of the WordPress ecosystem. They play a major role in WordPress’s popularity, but they’re also one of the main sources of security issues.
If a theme or plugin is not updated for a long time, it can cause serious security issues. As a matter of fact, over 345 WordPress themes and 2500+ plugins out there contain security vulnerabilities. These numbers show the likelihood of your WordPress site getting hacked due to outdated infrastructure.
Outdated themes and plugins miss the latest security upgrades. It is vital to use only the most up-to-date theme and plugins for optimum performance and security benefits. If a theme or a plugin that you use has stopped getting updates, then look out for alternatives, or if you have paid for it, then contact the developers and ask them about the updates.
Brute-force Attacks
Brute-force attacks are quite common on WordPress sites. In this type of attack, the hacker attempts to guess the correct username and password to access your WordPress admin. Hackers use specialized bots to start hitting the URL using a dictionary that contains commonly used words and phrases to try out various combinations. One specific type of brute-force attack is targeting the XML-RPC functionality of WordPress to gain access.
This process is resource-intensive as thousands of attempts are made in minutes, which puts a strain on your server resources. Guessing the right username and password is not the motive behind such attacks. After getting access to WordPress admin, hackers deploy malicious scripts or steal your valuable data or simply shut it down.
DDoS Attacks
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is another type of cyberattack that paralyzes your website for some time and, in severe cases, can completely crash your server. In this type of attack, a network of computers known as botnets, which are already compromised and are now in control of a bad actor, start hitting a single website with so many simultaneous requests that it stops responding to new ones. This unwanted traffic prevents the legit traffic from bypass.
Unlike the Brute-force attack, DDoS is not carried out to gain access to your WordPress nor to inject any malicious script. It is simply there to deny service to your actual visitors by keeping your server jammed with illegal requests. The intent behind such attacks is mostly financial such as corporate espionage, where your competitor shuts you down to take over your client base.
The above WordPress security vulnerabilities damage thousands of online businesses every year. The good news is, protecting your site against these issues is not that difficult. All you need is a tested WordPress security plan in place that can protect your website from an array of cyber-attacks.
Solutions to WordPress Security Issues
Security problems are a great example of where a solution to the problems it presents should lie. We believe every problem should be addressed at its root. But in this case, we can’t solve the problem at the very root, as we can’t stop the people from actually performing the hacking, DDoS attempts, and brute-force attacks. What we can do, though, is stop the problems as early as we can detect them.
Many WordPress users try to solve WordPress security issues with plugins and do not focus on other more crucial factors, such as best site configuration practices. A prime example is to focus on keeping your site as minimal as possible with the least amount of plugins.
Let’s dive in on how to solve this.
What Does Secure Managed WordPress Hosting Solve?
Secure managed WordPress hosting provides the essential security layer that protects your WordPress site from potential cyberattacks. As a managed service, it also updates and patches the server when needed and proactively monitors it to detect any suspicious activity.
Let’s look at some of the highlighted features of secure managed WordPress hosting.
Managed Security
Server-level security, which is difficult to manage and needs expert help, is taken care of by the managed hosting provider. This includes frequent updates and patching of all the software layers present at the server level.
Secure Infrastructure
Physical security of the infrastructure is also crucial and is taken care of by the managed hosting provider.
Proactive Monitoring
Managed hosting provider like Servebolt offers 24/7/365 proactive monitoring for all the servers to take necessary actions to prevent malicious traffic from hitting your server.
Automated Backups
Backups in themselves are not a security measure, but they are imperative to be able to survive any kind of mishap with your site. At Servebolt, we take automatic backups of code, files, and databases that can be used to recover from disastrous incidents. These backups help you resume online services in no time if you would ever run into trouble.
What about WordPress Security plugins?
Site owners often use WordPress security plugins to protect their sites. While these plugins address some issues, they don’t cover all vulnerabilities. Here are the two main reasons why.
- There’s an inherent problem with having to load WordPress in its entirety before a plugin can do its job. This is even worse for security plugins as not only does it require WordPress to load fully, but the plugin itself also needs to be fully loaded, and only then can it start to process all traffic. Good and bad. This means it’s a very resource-heavy thing to do.
- Given the above, it should be clear that blocking malicious traffic of any kind should actually happen before it even hits your server. WordPress security should be solved mainly in the layer that’s actually in front of it.
Solving WordPress Security the right way
As we mentioned above, WordPress security issues should be solved as early in the timeline as possible as close to the root as you can get. To this end, we’ve built a service that does solve many of today’s website problems; security being a key component. It’s called Accelerated Domains.
Accelerated Domains is a fully managed service built to solve security issues without compromising performance. When added to any site hosted with Servebolt, it will enhance site’s performance and improve its scaling capabilities. Unlike any other solution out there, Accelerated Domains offers WordPress security that does not require any complex configuration or maintenance. It’s a service that works in front of your WordPress site, and it doesn’t require WordPress to be loaded in any shape or form for it to perform its magic.
How do Accelerated Domains solve WordPress security issues for me?
Managed Enterprise-Grade Security
Accelerated Domains Security Engine works in front of the server as a front-line defense through its firewall against any malicious activity. It smartly detects bad actors early in the timeline through smart heuristics powered by Cloudflare’s large traffic analysis data and Servebolt’s hands-on experience and traffic analysis.
The service also comes with a managed Web Application Firewall that is pre-configured to block potentially harmful requests. Additionally, it also hides the IP address of your origin server to protect it even further.
Bad Bot Protection
Bots are roaming the internet more than ever, and close to 40% of all the traffic that comes to your website is from bots. Some of these bots are essential for the well-being of your online business, but the rest are bad bots that need to be blocked.
Accelerated Domains has built-in bad bot protection that efficiently blocks bad bots from hitting your server and consuming its bandwidth. These bots are hard to detect, but thanks to Accelerated Domains smart Security Engine that is constantly fed with fresh HTTP traffic data allowing it to learn various patterns and create a strategy against these bad bots.
Auto DDoS Protection
Accelerated Domains proactively mitigates most DDoS attacks in under 3 seconds. It does this through smart traffic pattern recognition powered by machine learning that scores the threat level on each request. Accelerated Domains are equipped with 60 Tpbs network capability that is capable of withstanding even the largest DDoS attack on the internet.
What do you need to do yourself?
Even though managed WordPress hosting and Accelerated Domains solve the major part of WordPress security on auto for you, but there are a few things that require your attention and manual labor every now and then.
Updated Core, Themes, & Plugins
There is no excuse for not updating WordPress core, themes, and plugins if the update is available. However, it is quite possible that the update is available, but you are unable to update it because of the issues like:
- Theme updates might break the site due to compatibility issues.
- The current PHP version might not be compatible with the update.
- Operational issues and pending approval from the stakeholders.
You can easily solve the first two points by setting up a staging environment. We recommend to first try and test any new update on staging before rolling it out for the public. If your current host does not support the latest PHP version, then we encourage you to consider switching. WordPress is built with PHP, and running it on older versions can introduce your site to various WordPress security vulnerabilities.
The last point requires more convincing from you, or you can also share this article with the stakeholders so they can understand the seriousness of this matter and take action.
Last but not least, under no circumstances should you use a nulled theme or plugin. Nulled describes premium themes or plugins offered by someone other than the original author. Nulled themes and plugins are riddled with backdoor entries and other malicious code, hurting your sites in more than one way. They are a perfect recipe for potential cyberattacks. Just purchase the original version from the developer. Trust me; you don’t want those kinds of headaches.
While things like updates and strong passwords remain essential, you don’t need to do everything manually. With Servebolt Shield, many time-consuming security tasks — such as continuous scanning, vulnerability mitigation, malware detection, and threat blocking — are automated and managed through the Servebolt Admin Panel.
Final Thoughts
WordPress security should be the priority of online business owners, as any vulnerability can cause serious financial and reputational damage. To protect against cyberattacks, secure managed WordPress hosting is the stepping stone followed by more sophisticated services like Accelerated Domains that proactively mitigate malicious activities without putting any strain on your origin server.
