WordPress is one of the most popular web-publishing tools used today, with one out of every four new sites using it. From its origins as a blogging site, WordPress has turned into one of the best content management systems on the market. Davis Advertising uses WordPress as a go-to resource when designing and maintaining websites. The integral features WordPress offers, such as themes and plugins, plus the ability to create and modify any aspect of the coding, makes it seemingly limitless. Add in the capacity for user interactions, and the site can be an extremely engaging platform.
All of this flexibility is great but requires regular maintenance. Keeping the website shielded from crashes, hacks and various compatibility issues requires a watchful eye and a precautious effort when adding content to the site.
Davis Advertising uses multiple strategies to stay ahead of internal errors such as website crashes and compatibility errors. Davis is constantly updating WordPress itself, the theme used on the website, plugins running behind the scenes and server configurations.
Whenever new content is being prepared for the site, beta versions of the website are created and scanned for errors before anything goes live. Here at Davis we also keep a sentry-like eye on those who visit the published site, especially with the ever-increasing presence of hackers roaming the web.
Keeping your website safe from external visitors is paramount in the digital age, where even some of the biggest websites are susceptible to hacking. Here are some of the trusted tools with which we arm ourselves in order to keep hackers out:
- Sucuri, the WordPress security program, sets up notification alerts that monitor specific details about the people logging in. Sucuri also battles malware by performing frequent scans of the entire website backend. More details can be found at https://sucuri.net.
- Secure passwords are key in a world of programs designed to guess passwords at rates of 100,000 per second. Learning how these sneaky programs operate can be useful in protecting against them (read about it at WPengine). It is recommended to create a strong password like “F-6’pTt2{9M?cDd%”–which can not be easily guessed–from a site like passwordsgenerator, and then verify password security at howsecureismypassword.
- Two-step authentication such as Google Authenticator, along with security settings that limit the number of password attempts.
- HTTPS on the admin site. HTTPS is the secure internet protocol used to protect the privacy and integrity of information exchanged over the web. Non-HTTPS connections are unencrypted, meaning anyone snooping on the connection can read the data, and that includes passwords.
- WordPress security scanners, such as that found at http://wpscan.org/, are used to search for vulnerabilties that can then be handled and fixed.
- Staying up-to-date on the latest news and technologies in internet security. We recommend reading blogs such as Sucuri’s, as well as staying on top of emerging WordPress updates and information, which can help you adjust quickly to the changing world of internet security.
You should then address testing for SQL injection vulnerabilities, managing the hosting environment for server updates, and a bunch of other technical processes with crazy jargon that falls outside the WordPress installation capabilities.
The aforementioned measures will do a great job at preventing attacks on your website, but 100 percent security is not guaranteed. We like to have a solid system in place to restore settings in the worst case scenario. Having a downloaded backup on a separate system can quickly restore everything back to a previous stable state.
Here at Davis, we are in the business of helping keep your site safe from internal errors such as compatibility errors and external errors such as hackers and malware, while also maintaining great backup systems in case something should go awry. Do not hesitate to contact us for more information on our website maintenance service here.
