Using WordPress for your dental website or blog?

Keep your core files and plugins up-to-date – don’t get hacked!

WordPress is a popular, free content management system (CMS) you may see used for dentist website development.

However, with the upsides of WordPress, there also come some significant downsides, the most obvious of these being how frequently the system gets hacked.

You may know that Google is now identifying hacked websites with a warning in search results and more often than not, when you see these warnings, it’s a WordPress website which has been the subject of the hack.

Why does WordPress get hacked?

This is due to several reasons, the main ones are as follows:

• WordPress is popular, primarily because it is free and easy to set up. There are also numerous templates which can be purchased for less than £50 which allow you to get online with a reasonable looking website very cost-effectively. Whilst these websites are all pretty “samey” (frankly it’s easy to spot a WordPress template site) they are better than no site at all. This popularity has unfortunately attracted the hacking fraternity who spend their time looking for the weaknesses in WordPress. As a slight aside, the unwary also need to be cautious about dental marketing companies who purchase such templates, add images and text to make them “dental” and then sell them on for thousands of pounds – so an expensive, “samey” website and potentially vulnerable too.
• WordPress is regularly being updated with new “bells and whistles” many of which are unnecessary for average users. This leads to lots of outdated versions littering the web, often with unaddressed security flaws. In time, these sites get picked off by the hackers who search them out using automated scanning tools.
• WordPress can use lots of “plugins” which adds to its functionality – typically a WordPress site might use 10 or more of these plugins to perform all sorts of tasks which come as standard in other content management systems. However they are not all written by the WordPress core coding team as you might think, but typically by third parties and consequently the quality and robustness of some are highly questionable. Often is the case that complete WordPress websites have been hacked via outdated or low-quality plugins. What you also see is wide use of plugins which start out being well-managed but then get abandoned by the developer. So even if you are updating the WordPress core files, are you still vulnerable due to an outdated and unsupported plugin? For many sites, the answer is “yes”.

Recommendations

If you use WordPress for your website or dental practice blog, it must be updated regularly and unfortunately your developer/designer is going to expect to be paid for this. No doubt you will want to protect your website and your developer will also want to protect their servers. Fortunately, WordPress can now do some intermediate updates automatically which saves some time and money; however larger updates are best supervised by your developer to make sure all goes as expected – some updates periodically fail and can cause your website to go down.

So should I use WordPress for my dental practice website?

The answer is “possibly” and dependent on if you are prepared to balance the upsides with the obvious downsides of security and cost of frequent updates. WordPress is undoubtedly still excellent for blogging purposes but other, arguably more robust content management systems exist which may well be more appropriate for your main website. A good designer will be able to create a bespoke website using one of the alternative systems and without the “samey” style so often associated with WordPress templates – so alternatives are definitely worth considering and your overall maintenance costs will very likely be lower too.

Summary

If you decide to use WordPress for your dental website or blog, you must ensure that the core files and plugins are updated regularly or risk being hacked and having your site defaced. Chances are your web designer may try to tie you into onerous monthly maintenance contracts simply because WordPress requires quite a lot of input to keep secure. WordPress is free to use and cheap templates are also widely available to get you up and running quickly, but these advantages may be offset by the risk of hacking and cost of maintenance. Understand the pros and cons so you can make an informed choice.

If you’d like more information about content management systems, including WordPress and the alternatives, please call Dental Media on 01332 672548 for free advice.