Keep your WordPress web hosting up to date so it stays secure

It is important to keep your WordPress website up-to-date to prevent it from being hacked. According to business magazine Forbes, 30,000 websites were hacked every day in 2013. Your website is the business card of your company or blog, after all, it is often the first thing anyone sees. Therefore it is important that your WordPress website gives a good impression of what you want to tell. Protection of this business card is an important part of this.

Keeping your website up-to-date

Think of updating your website as maintenance for your house. The longer you wait to perform maintenance, the more likely it is that something will break down and end up costing you more time and money. This also applies to WordPress web hosting, themes and plugins. If these are not updated regularly , they become outdated, no longer work properly and can then become targets for hackers. Hackers find these vulnerabilities on websites through scripts that allow them to automatically search the Internet. In this way, they automate the search process for targets and facilitate attacks. Simply put: without the necessary updates, sooner or later your website will be hacked.

Why are websites hacked?

The reason why many hackers attack websites is usually a financial one. They make money by promoting commercial websites that are usually linked to sex, gambling and drugs. For example, hackers place links on hacked websites that make the websites they want to promote rank higher in Google or send thousands of spam emails. It is a myth that only websites with a lot of traffic are hacked. Smaller websites can also be targeted.

What can you do to prevent the worst attacks?

Make sure you keep WordPress, your theme and plugins up-to-date and that your hosting is protected with write permissions on your hosting space. WordPress actually provides you with plugins to protect your files and website. What it just doesn't do is tell you if you are downloading a plugin that is vulnerable. And that can be a problem. So always download plugins and themes from reputable parties. Before you download something always check the reviews and comments from other users, whether support is available and whether you have to pay for it and whether the person offering the plugin responds to users.

The great thing about WordPress is that newer versions of plugins and themes are almost always available, making it easier to keep hackers out. Some updates happen automatically, while others need to be updated manually. Keep an eye on this and update with regularity. And if you are going to update: always update WordPress itself first and then your plugins and theme.

We also have a number of other tips to improve the security of your website:

Secure website

Choose the right hosting

When it comes to securing your website, it is always recommended to start with the basics: the web hosting options. It's important to choose a hosting company that makes security a priority and therefore has a well-trained team on board that is experienced in WordPress security like MijnHostingPartner.nl.

Change your username

This is in case 'Admin' is still your username. This is because it is the most common username used and therefore easier to hack.

Make backups!

To ensure that your business can continue its operations in any situation, it is smart to make regular backups of your website. This way, in case your website gets hacked, you will make sure you can fix everything without losing a lot of time or data. The hosting company you are affiliated with can offer you options to easily set up backups through its control panel. In addition, always make a backup before updating, because if updating goes wrong, at least nothing has been lost. There are several plugins for WordPress website hosting that can help you with this.