WordPress might be the world’s most popular web development platform, and used by more web agencies than all the other CMS platforms combined but that does have drawbacks. It’s popularity draws the evil in people, it’s almost universal use means attacks can spread very quickly indeed.
Vulnerabilities in WordPress
They do appear, and quite frequently. Not always in the core of the web development platform, they sometime occur in the plugin-type functionality that makes WordPress so appealing as a development framework. Usefully, the community fix the core issues very quickly and roll-out new versions so all is not lost.
Except that to take advantage of the fix you have to either a) know about the issue or b) have you web framework automatically updated. This is one of the cornerstones of WordPress Support at Connected, we keep every installation up to date, and this is done automatically for every contract client.
When it goes very wrong
The best case is a simple outage or slowdown, the worst case is the site being compromised, data stolen and even malware installed to infect visitors.
Imagine the NHS, who run nearly 500 WordPress installations yet only 10% are running the latest version. In September 2013, security experts estimated that 70 per cent of all websites running WordPress were vulnerable to direct attack via insecure logins and poorly constructed and out of date plugins.
It’s simply not good enough to carefully choose your WordPress agency based on how they look and who their clients are – you now need to understand how they protect against attack and what their security protocols are. You’re also likely to have to pay a little extra to get the assurance and the skills required to keep your WordPress installation stable and secure.
WordPress Support : Managed properly and for a fixed cost
Connected provide high-grade, off-the-shelf, WordPress support that includes commercial-grade hosting with a CDN on Amazon AWS and includes security management and automated updates 24 x 7 for £495 per instance (Multi-site by separate agreement, plus VAT). Also included is automated backups and generic WordPress platform support – this base support package is for sites that receive up to 50k visits per month.
More than 50k visitors per month?
The costs scales in a linear fashion to approximately 250k visitors where the hardware/services platform plays a larger part on the cost calculation. At this scale, pricing will be provided on request.
