Friday RoundUp: Crusty Plugins and Site Security

Welcome to Friday Roundup. It is Friday, March 3rd, 2017. Hello, everyone. I’m John Peterson with Develare. Today’s topic is crusty plugins and site security. Now, according to Wordfence, over 50% of security issues are from plugins and the thing is with WordPress, it’s really easy to update plugins, so why the security risk? Well, with crusty plugins, there are two issues at play here. One, the plugins that you should have updated but didn't because maybe you were scared about breaking something. Well, at least you knew that there was a problem. You should definitely update those. Test things. Make sure everything runs right. You have to put the time in to make sure your site stays secure. As you just learned, Wordfence tells you that over half of these security issues with WordPress are not with WordPress itself but with the plugins.

Now, there’s the plugins that you know you should update but then, there’s these silent plugins that don’t tell you they needed to be updated because they’ve been abandoned. These abandoned plugins can also cause problems on your website and you may not even know it. What you need to do in order to see if you have any abandoned plugins on your WordPress website is log in as an administrator, go to the backend, click on plugins. From there, you'll see another link that lets you see all of the plugins.

Once you're looking at all of the plugins, each one of them, at least the ones that come from the free WordPress repository on WordPress.org, each one of those will have a little link that says view details. Click on view details for each one of those plugins and you'll see the date. See how old it is. Your plugin may be a few weeks old. It may be a few months old or it may be a few years old. If it’s a few years old, our rule is two years old or older, get rid of it. It’s not worth the security risk on your site. It’s not worth ruining all the work that you've put into it. It’s not worth getting hacked so if the plugin’s over two years old, we recommend that you remove it. I hope this tip’s been helpful for you. This has been the Friday Roundup and I am John Peterson with Develare.