Vulnerable plugins and themes are the #1 reason WordPress websites get hacked.
Often times we get excited and caught up in the design and functionality of our website, and once launched we forget we have to maintain it. Keeping your site maintenance ensures that your business and customers that access your website are able to access it with no problems so they can have the best user experience.
So what is web maintenance?
Website maintenance is the practice of monitoring your website’s overall health and performance. Keeping a website up-to-date is crucial to ensuring it’s working at full capacity, engaging and retaining site visitors.
There are a number of tasks required to properly check and maintain a website, including updating security software and plugins, adding fresh content, increasing new and returning traffic, and meeting the satisfaction of your site users. While some of these points are more time-sensitive than others, each one will be addressed extensively further in the post.
Not maintaining your website can impact the performance of your website, and hence impact your overall SEO ranking with Google and other search engines. If you go too long with no maintenance you may noticed things like your site slowing down, not converting on leads, malware may take over and infect your WordPress themes and or plugins, or it can stop working, and you may get the WordPress white screen of death.
With that being said, you want to keep things like your WordPress, your themes, and your plugins updated often, and back up your site anytime you make updates and changes to it.
The weekly WordPress Vulnerability Report from iThemes is powered by WPScan covers recent WordPress plugin, theme, and core vulnerabilities, and what to do if you run one of the vulnerable plugins or themes on your website.
Each vulnerability will have a severity rating of low, medium, high, or critical. Responsible disclosure and reporting of vulnerabilities is an integral part of keeping the WordPress community safe.
