Hackers don’t care that you have a business to run. They’re just looking to exploit your site for their own gains. One day, you have a nice beautiful site. The next, it’s littered with links to shady pharmaceutical websites.
While you probably don’t need to be worrying about your site getting hacked every minute of everyday, it is a real and serious threat to your online presence. But, if you take the right steps, it’s something you’ll never have to worry about.
1. Use the latest version of your website platform
Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress and Joomla are used by millions of website owners around the world. They a great way to manage your web presence, but if you’re not using the latest version of their platform, your website is at risk.
Hackers can easily exploit known vulnerabilities in older versions to gain access to the backend of your site. In fact, a couple of years ago Reuters was hacked because they weren’t using the latest version of WordPress.
2. Use the latest versions of your plugins
As with CMS’s, older versions of website plugins have vulnerabilities too. Make sure your site is running the latest versions of all the plugins you have installed.
Equally important, is installing the right plugins in the first place. Just because a plugin promises to make managing things easier or improve your SEO doesn’t mean it’s a good fit for your site. If the developer is inactive and doesn’t provide updates or did a poor job writing the plugin in the first place, it will one day break or become vulnerable to attacks. Do your research and vet each plugin before installing.
These might seem easy enough to do, but the truth is that hackers are out there and they know how to find vulnerable sites. 70% of WordPress sites are running an outdated version of the platform with known security flaws and a good hacker will have tools to find these automatically.
At Pronto, our team of experts updates our WordPress platform and plugins immediately at after each release. With a host of other security controls placed on our servers, you’ll never have to worry about being hacked again.
