WordPress is the most well-known open-source content management system (CMS). It’s a common question asked to us as website developer. If WordPress websites are not secure and prone to hacking, why do people use them for their business?

When we say people use them, we’re not talking about a small amount of people. It’s actually 28.4% of all websites around the internet used WordPress as their content management system based on W3Techs statistics. 

There’s lot of theories around the internet about what makes WordPress hackable. But there are 3 main theories we agreed on:

Because WordPress is Famous

Referring to our statistics before, WordPress is the most popular CMS used for personal and business matters, it makes them a bigger target of hackers attacks. Same goes for Windows viruses.

Because It’s Free and Open Source

WordPress is an open source script which more vulnerable to all sorts of attacks. There’s three main elements in WordPress: the core code, themes and plugins. Themes determines how your sites will look and behave. Plugins is used to extend WordPress in interesting ways.

Themes and plugins are built by developers. Some of them are extremely skilled, but some of them are not so much. WordPress actually tested themes and plugins before they’re allowed to be posted. But themes and plugins also available from many other sources, including hackers who embed malware in commercial themes and give them away freely.

Because Our Laziness

It’s a cliche to blame on the human and not the system. It’s because some people are lazy to keep their sites up to date. By staying up to date is the most obvious tip on security. WordPress updates regularly because the developers are willing to patch the code soon as any vulnerabilities are found.

Conclusion

We have to agree that no system in the world is 100% safe. Sometimes it’s not WordPress security you need to worry about. Even if WordPress became super secure that doesn’t mean your website’s safe. Maybe your hosting provider forget to update their security or your third-party scripts are outdated.

It’s a myth saying that WordPress is not safe - It’s a safe CMS. But it is an easy target for hackers.

But remember WordPress was made for blogging. To make them powerful enough, they use plugins and more plugins to manage your content. Which make us depends on lots of plugins. We would not suggest WordPress as your CMS to be honest - because performance and lack of basic features as a CMS, but it’s a different story.

We will post some tips and tricks about how to keep your WordPress website safe. Or if you hate the hassle, we can help you secure and maintain your websites!