WordPress hack attempts on the rise – make sure you’re up to date!

We’ve seen an increase in WordPress based sites getting hacked and compromised this month. The most common causes of this are the site software or plugins being out of date or admin users having weak passwords.

Software updates

WordPress has a built in updater, so you can do updates yourself. However this can sometimes go wrong and break your site, so we recommend doing a file & database backup first and then testing everything after the updates. There’s nothing more deflating than realising your contact form or shopping cart hasn’t been working since the last update! If you run a shop plugin like WooCommerce this is especially important to make sure orders are still being processed.

We recommend updates are done at least quarterly to keep your site running smoothly. We can take care of that for you and it usually only takes half an hour to take a backup, update everything and test things are still working OK.

Secure passwords

If you are using a weak admin password such as a word found in the dictionary, your name or anything else easy to guess please update it to be 12 or more characters including numbers, letters and special characters!

Random passwords are best and there are online tools to help you generate them. Random passwords are hard to remember so we use an app called 1password to store them.

Need help?

If you’d like us to backup your site, upgrade the software and test it out please contact us or call 01636 812 551.