Credit-reporting agency Equifax learned the hard way that keeping your website up-to-date is the number one way to ensure your site remains safe and secure. After losing the personal and financial information of over 145 million people, Equifax made things worse by using an out-of-date WordPress plugin on the website they built to inform consumers about the massive data breach.
Even though the WordPress plugin was discontinued in 2016, Equifax continued to use the plugin Fireclick to provide website analytics services. Unfortunately Fireclick had been taken over by scammers since it was discontinued and anyone visiting Equifax’s website was instead presented with a pop-up window to install a malware laced version of Adobe Flash Player software.
There is an incredibly simple solution to prevent this type of problem – ensuring that your version of WordPress, your WordPress theme and all of your WordPress plugins are all up-to-date. There is literally nothing else that has as much bearing on the security of your site as up-to-date software.
That’s why Local Propeller offers a number of services that ensures all of your website’s plugins are up-to-date.
Our WordPress Up-To-Date service is exactly that, a service designed to ensure your website is always up-to-date. We also offer Superhero WP, a fully-featured website maintenance service that keeps your website secure, performing as quickly as possible and ensuring that your content is always up-to-date.
Regardless of which package you choose, we follow the same process when we run software updates on your website.
- Run a back-up of your website data just in case an update causes unforseen problems
- Run all available plugin updates
- Run an update for your WordPress theme (if available)
- Update WordPress software to the latest stable release
- Ensure outdated WordPress plugins are replaced with modern versions
Unfortunately, if your WordPress theme has been discontinued and can no longer be updated there isn’t much we can do. In this case we recommend rebuilding your website using a modern WordPress theme instead.
The same goes for WordPress plugins, if your website uses plugins that have been discontinued, or are incompatible with the latest version of WordPress, we recommend replacing them with a new WordPress plugin.
In both cases there is an additional charge for the work as replacing a WordPress theme or plugin can be a labour intensive process. You will always receive a detailed analysis of why we are recommending the upgrades and an estimate for the work.
