WordPress Vulnerabilities—How Safe is Your Website?

Keeping Your Site Visitors Safe 

Many local business owners who manage their own websites are in a precarious situation, relying heavily on their sites to attract new customers but having neither the budget nor the desire to hire a team of cyber experts to ensure their website stays safe. 

If you’re working with a web design team or marketing firm, they're surely already taking steps to ensure your site is safe and well-maintained. But the harsh truth is, some platforms are simply more at risk than others.  

Here at Locallogy, we favor the Duda site builder platform. It allows us to create extremely responsive, well-performing sites, without exposing our clients (and their customers) to the inherent risks of the other CMS platforms, like WordPress. 

WordPress for the Uninitiated 

To really grasp the vulnerabilities associated with WordPress, it’s important you understand how WordPress itself actually works. 

WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that allows users to build and manage websites. Ans WordPress is an open-source platform, which means anyone can contribute to the platform’s development and create tools or plug-ins that others can use. 

Being open-source essentially means the development possibilities are endless. With the right skillset, you can customize your WordPress site in just about any way imaginable. And if you’re thinking of a unique tool you’d like to add to your site, there’s a good chance someone has already created it on the WordPress platform. 

But the incredible amount of freedom associated with WordPress’s open-source platform is exactly why it’s a higher risk. You can never be 100% certain the themes and plug-ins you’re running on your site are immune from attacks—even if you think you’re keeping them maintained and up-to-date. Case in point, the recent backdoor Trojan. 

Website Builders 

Many local business owners who manage their own websites are in a precarious situation, relying heavily on their sites to attract new customers but In contrast to WordPress, platforms like Duda, Wix, and Squarespace, are not open-source. These platforms are considered website builders. Their interfaces are very user-friendly and include a wide range of tools that allow users to build and manage websites. 

But because these platforms are not open-source, there are certain inherent limitations. If there’s a downside to using a website builder, as opposed to WordPress, most people would agree it’s the inability to customize your site to the Nth degree. 

However, there’s a major advantage—the structured platform of website builders closes many of the gaps left open by WordPress. Website builders are, by nature, more secure than open-source CMS platforms. In fact, to date there has never been a mass attack on any website builder platform. 

Building Safe Websites 

The Duda site builder platform is perfect for our clients here at Locallogy—local business owners who want a robust, well-performing website but don't have the skillset or time to build it themselves.

Duda's powerful site building tools allow us to build a beautiful, high-performing website, while the user-friendly interface makes it easy for our clients to make minor changes and updates once the site is built.

And Duda's secure platform means wide-spread website attacks aren’t even on the radar. 

If you’re currently using a WordPress site, are you confident in its security? Do you know how to make your WordPress site safer? Would you know what to do if you if your site does suffer an attack? If you'd like to learn more about the secure Duda platform, give us a ring at Locallogy!