74.jpg)
Some of you may have read last week that some WordPress sites have been hacked. WordPress works hard to ensure that it’s blogging platform is secure from hackers, but there will always be people with nothing better to do than find ways to hack into people’s websites, whether they’re small businesses or major organizations. If you have a blog on a WordPress hosted site, e.g wordpress.com, then WordPress will be ensuring your blog is kept secure as they’re hosting the blog for you. However, if you self-host your WordPress blog, then it’s up to you to ensure your blog is secure.
So, what do you need to do to ensure your WordPress blog is kept secure?
Firstly, WordPress regularly updates the back end to remove security flaws, so make sure you always upgrade to the latest version. Since WordPress launched version 2.7 they’ve made it much easier to update your blog, and you can do it automatically in your dashboard. Each time WordPress is updated, you’ll see a message in your dashboard. Click on the link and use the automatic update. It’s very fast and in a few moments your blog will be updated to the latest version.
Secondly, ensure your blog site is hosted with a reliable web hosting company. It can be tempting to go with free hosting, or the cheapest hosting you can lay your hands on, but it doesn’t mean that they’re going to keep their servers up to date from hackers, and if your web hosting company has problems then you could lose your blog and all the posts you’ve spent ages writing.
Thirdly, back up your blog database on a regular basis. There’s a backup plugin which I use and it will either email me the latest back up, or you can have it saved to your computer hard drive. Either way, you need to do this, particularly if your blog site is updated very regularly. The plugin I use is WP-DB-Backup, which you can download from the WordPress website.
If your web developer hosts your site for you, or has built and maintains your WordPress site, then you need to make sure that they’re doing the above for you and that they’re aware of what could happen if your site isn’t upgraded to the latest version of WordPress.
You can read more about this problem on the Lorelle on WordPress site:
Old WordPress Versions Under Attack
