All WordPress developers know that you need to tend WordPress sites and keep the themes a, plugins and WordPress itself updated.

WordPress websites, for better or worse, are NOT set it and forget it.  Especially in this day and age with hackers and spambots seemingly running amok and not a day goes by without hearing about how some major company or government agency was hacked.  But smaller business sites are usually prone to more annoying and automated attacks that are really more crimes of opportunity.  If a spambot, that is mindlessly crawling the Internet and finds a vulnerability on your site, they essentially let themselves in and use your suite to blast out spam or just take over your site essentially for kicks.  Sort of like kids spraying graffiti.  Only this is more than just defacing your site because it costs you downtime and money to fix it.  Annoying and expensive.

FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE –  GOOD HOSTING

As I’ve come to learn, the first line of defense to keeping your website safe is via good hosting.

Cheap hosting gets you exactly what you pay for — not much.

In fact, some hosting companies like Host Gator will not help you at all if your site gets hacked on THEIR SERVERS but will push you off to a company called SiteLock, which they have a partnership with, that charges a minimum of $300 to fix the site and remove whatever crap that’s found it’s way into your website.

After building websites and being a hosting reseller for over 12 years, thankfully we finally found the gold standard in WordPress hosting, a company called FlyWheel (affiliate link).  I don’t consider them a hosting company so much as a partner for my agency and now host over 35 websites with them.  So anyway, as you can see in the Infographic below, good hosting is your number one defense for keeping your website humming along.

Here’s additional steps you can take to protect your WordPress website and keep things running smoothly: