Getting the most from your WordPress website
Your WordPress website is an investment that will work well for your business if you treat it as important and give it the attention it deserves. But once you’ve got yourself a WordPress website, you need to work on it and maintain it. Keep it fresh with new content so that potential and existing customers do not get bored with a stale website.
Make sure you post fresh content
Make sure you are putting in some effort to drive potential customers to your WordPress website; promoting it at every opportunity. And whatever you do, do not leave your WordPress website languishing on an old and insecure version of the WordPress software.
Updating WordPress
We’ve had a really busy few weeks here at Outerbridge; including updating WordPress for our support customers. Most of our website customers have WordPress websites. A new version of WordPress (version 4.2) was released on April 23rd. Just 4 days later, a security vulnerability was identified in the new WordPress software. Luckily, WordPress acted really quickly to issue an updated version (version 4.2.1) which fixed the issue. So we’ve been busy updating customer websites to make sure that they have the latest security in place.
With Outerbridge, it’s all done for you!
But many of our customers will not even be aware of all this activity – they have one of our WordPress website support packages. This service means that they don’t have the hassle of keeping up to date with current developments and updating their website with new versions of WordPress, plugins etc. We monitor these things and fix them so that our customers can rest assured that their website is really well looked after.
More about the WordPress bug
WordPress is one of the most-used web publishing platforms – it runs nearly 25 percent of all the sites on the Internet, including major companies like Time and CNN. The latest bug in WordPress was found by Jouko Pynnönen of Klikki Oy, a Finish software company. Pynnönen discovered that WordPress was vulnerable to a cross-site scripting flaw if an attacker inserted malicious JavaScript into a comments field. If a WordPress administrator was logged in when the malicious comment is viewed, the attacker can then execute malicious code on the server through the plugin and theme editors. It was also then possible to change your administrator’s password, create new administrator accounts or manipulate content on a site.
How to update WordPress
Updating a website to a new version of WordPress is something that needs to be done in a careful and considered way. To do it properly, you need to make sure you have a backup of the site content and the site structure before you start (in case anything goes wrong). New versions of WordPress plugins are often released in conjunction with new WordPress releases, so you also need to make sure all the relevant plugins on your website are updated at the same time. Once the new software and plugins have been installed, the site needs to be thoroughly tested to ensure that everything is still functioning properly, and any conflicts between plugins and software need to be corrected.
We look after your WordPress website like our own
All this has meant a lot of work for us, but this is all part of the personal service that we offer. Many web developers will build you a website and then leave you to it. With our fully managed hosting, customers can rest assured that issues of this nature will be dealt with in a prompt and professional manner by a team who care. Our customers have peace of mind in knowing that their websites are always being looked after, whatever happens in the world of technology.
Make sure you are running the latest version of WordPress
But if you don’t have a WordPress website support package, then please don’t leave these things to chance. If you want to protect your site from hackers, you must make sure that you are running the latest version of WordPress, and that all your plugins are up to date. We strongly advise all WordPress users to upgrade to the latest WordPress version as a matter of urgency. A good WordPress developer will be able to do this for you safely. Better still, get yourself a good WordPress website support package service that will do all these things for you automatically without you having to worry about it.
Contact us about how we can help you to capitalise on the investment you have made in your website by keeping it safe, keeping it current and driving customers to it.
