After the excitement of launching a new website, it is easy to forget the critically important ongoing maintenance tasks often necessary to keep your website secure. Sophos Labs believes over 10,000 websites per day are compromised, and automated scanning and attack tools make it easy for bad actors to find and compromise your site if it is not updated regularly.
Legacy Content Management Systems like WordPress and Drupal are developed on top of an assembly of open-source software, databases, and plug-ins, sometimes even dozens of different software components. These components are modified and glued together with custom programming from your web developer. This is why web developers love WordPress, most of the underlying components are free, but it takes many hours of billable work to generate the custom code to turn them into a website, and you are basically locked to your website developer once they do this.
Because websites are directly accessible from the Internet, they are easy to attack -- the bad actors don’t even need to get an employee to click on an email to launch the attack. When a vulnerability is found in any one of the many WordPress components, attackers immediately start scanning the internet for unpatched websites to compromise. To protect yourself, it is critical to update your website with the latest security updates for every component as soon as they are released. Unfortunately, this needs to be done by your web developer because often the new components cause compatibility issues with the rest of your site.
The best longer-term solution is to rebuild your website on an integrated and managed web environment such as Wix, Webflow, or Squarespace. With a service such as Wix, you do not need to use third party plugins, databases, or pay for a separate web host; everything is integrated, managed, and secured as an all-in-one platform. Additionally, designing and deploying websites on these integrated platforms is much quicker and cheaper than WordPress development, and you will not be locked into a single web developer to maintain the site.
If you are currently using WordPress and are interested in upgrade to an integrated web platform Hybridge can help! Please give us a call at 888-353-1763, or email us at info (at) hybridge.com.
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