Why should you regularly update your out-of-date WordPress plugins?
The most common way for hackers to gain access to a WordPress site is by exploiting vulnerabilities in out-of-date WordPress plugins. That means that the most important thing you can do to keep your site safe is to keep your plugins up to date.
WordPress and plugin developers are constantly searching for and fixing security vulnerabilities in their plugins. When they fix a security vulnerability or a bug in their code, they will mention it in their plugin’s changelog. This tells hackers that previous out-of-date WordPress plugins are vulnerable to exploitation.
Now, this next piece may alarm you, but keep reading.
WordPress has extremely wide reach which makes it a prime target for exploiting vulnerabilities. According to Sucuri, one of the largest and most-respected internet security firms, WordPress is the most attacked Content Management System (CMS) by a large percentage.
There were three leading CMS platforms in 2018: WordPress, Magento, and Joomla!; however, this does not imply these platforms are more or less secure than others. This data represents the most common platforms seen in our environment and reflects the overall popularity of CMS.
Sucuri Website Hack Trend Report 2018
Why are out-of-date WordPress plugins the big target?
Well, the simple reason for these alarming numbers is that WordPress accounts for more than a third (34%) of all websites on the web, this makes it a more popular target for hackers.
According to W3Techs, WordPress powers 34% of all the websites on the Internet, including those without a content management system (CMS) or with a custom-coded CMS. Or, to put it another way, WordPress powers over one-third of the web! And if you limit the data set to only websites with a known CMS, WordPress’ market share gets even more dominant.
In that case, WordPress holds a 60% market share for content management systems on websites with a known CMS. How does that compare to the market share of other popular content management systems?
What makes WordPress so popular?
- WordPress is free
- WordPress is easy to customise with themes and plugins
- WordPress is SEO friendly
- WordPress is easy to manage
- WordPress is safe and secure
- WordPress can handle different media types
Why use WordPress?
If WordPress and its plugins are kept up-to-date it is actually very safe and secure, and because it is so popular there are lots of developers constantly finding and fixing vulnerabilities that they find.
It is extremely important to keep all of those out-of-date WordPress plugins up to date, please take a look at our WordPress website care packages, where we handle all these updates for you and back up your website so that if ever there is a problem, we can restore your site to a time it was working fine.
