Keep Your WordPress Dental Website Up-to-Date!

WordPress is very popular but still prone to hacking if you neglect maintenance

Over 40% of all websites are powered by WordPress which is undeniably the “go to” tool for professional websites these days. This is also the case in the dental sector with designers and website owners preferring the enhanced portability and technical capabilities of WordPress over hosted web builders such as Wix and Squarespace.

There’s no doubt that WordPress is an excellent website content management system (CMS) but it has a history of being compromised i.e. hacked. This is due to two main reasons – the first is that it is so popular and hence attracts a lot of attention from nefarious hacker groups. The second reason is primarily due to the “plugins” which WordPress uses to enhance core functionality. These are developed by a whole range of 3rd party coders and unfortunately the quality and maintenance varies considerably.

A typical WordPress website may use 6 or 7 plugins in addition to the core installation and it is these which are very often the root cause of hacking problems. Even reputable and popular plugins can be hacked as there is typically no overview regarding how secure or indeed how well coded they are in the first place.

How we select plugins to use with dentist’s websites

To be clear, there is no guarantee that a WordPress plugin will always be secure, even where you do your very best to make sure it is reputable and fully-supported. All we can do is be diligent to check the track record of the plugin, how widely it is used and its maintenance and security record before we consider using it for client’s websites.

Even after careful analysis and due diligence, things can still go wrong and unfortunately this has happened to most web companies, ourselves included. Whilst this is fortunately a very infrequent event here at Dental Media, just a few weeks ago a very popular and highly regarded website plugin we used on a few clients’ websites was hacked, even though we’d diligently kept it up-to-date. We spotted this very quickly and intervened to stop any permanent damage, but had we not had monitoring tools and mitigation processes in place, the effects could have been significantly worse.

We immediately reported the issue to WordPress and the developer who took fast corrective action; however, other than an apology and a retrospective fix, that’s all you get.

Outdated plugins – a huge risk

As we’ve noted, one of the big concerns with selecting WordPress for your website is the maintenance issue and the need for an experienced designer to assist you. Whilst a lot of the updating can be done automatically, periodically things go wrong and your website will break. So it’s much better to have the overview of a good web guy rather than just hit “update” and then keep your fingers crossed. Not only will a good web guy be able to spot any conflicts and issues before upgrading the site, but also keep comprehensive back-ups in case a site breaks and a roll-back is needed.

However, it’s very frequent to find WordPress websites that aren’t maintained at all! This is not just the case for self-managed websites but unfortunately, also for websites where the dentist has opted to pay a maintenance retainer to their original designer. That might sound odd and also potentially fraudulent; particularly where those monthly retainer fees can be large, but trust me it is widespread. What is happening there is that the designer knows that plugins and design templates become incompatible and rather than update a website and break it, they simply don’t bother. The upshot is that the website progressively becomes increasingly vulnerable but the client doesn’t even realise – until the hack occurs.

So if you are paying for monthly website maintenance, please ensure that it’s being done promptly and diligently!

The need for an experienced overview really becomes important where WordPress plugins become outdated and the developer stops maintaining them. Unfortunately this happens a lot and even plugins which have been popular and well-supported for years, can suddenly become defunct.

At this point you really need to make a decision about what to do. The plugin you or your designer chose when the website was developed may now be an intrinsic part of your site and invaluable. So do you keep using it but with regular security checks, or do you seek to replace it with an alternative? To be honest, those questions are best answered by an experienced web designer; so if you’re paying someone on a monthly basis to look after your website, please make sure those types of issues are being addressed.

Summary

WordPress is the go-to choice for professional dental websites which not only look great but perform well too. The platform has progressed in leaps and bounds over the last three or four years and it would be a brave choice to look anywhere else these days.

However, just like a high-performance machine of any type, WordPress does need regular maintenance if it is to remain fully functional and also secure. Fail to do this and sooner or later your website will break or worse, get hacked. If you’re paying fees for those services, please make sure that the work is actually being done. More often than not, it’s either not being done fully or even at all.

If you need assistance with the maintenance of your dental practice website or perhaps development of a complete new version using the latest tools, please get in touch with the team at Dental Media on 01332 672548 or use the website contact form.