How secure is your website? If this is something you have never thought about, I suggest you read on.

Not keeping your website updated and secured can leave the door open to hackers and other malicious entities, not to mention jeopardising the website’s speed and performance. Some of the most serious data breaches have occurred due to programs not being kept up to date.

One of the ways we support clients at Identity Agency is through managed WordPress hosting. WordPress websites (unless you are using WordPress.com) have to be hosted somewhere, and we provide our clients with automatic updates, general monitoring, and troubleshooting when errors occur. Great hosting is fairly hands-on, and clients often struggle to understand its value and what they’re actually paying for. In this blog, I’m hoping to break these benefits down for you.

When we first transfer and audit a site, we set up a variety of measures that keep the website (in theory – in reality, sites can often try to self-destruct) ticking away nicely without constant human intervention. We make sure that all plugins, themes, and the WordPress core are up to date to prevent vulnerabilities. There are different levels to this – WordPress natively comes with a few features designed to assist this, but when they fail (and they often do), we have another two layers of defence on top of this.

The first is our WordPress management software, which is a centralised dashboard that helps us identify anything that hasn’t been updated automatically. The second is our security software, which emails all of the account administrators when a critical update has been missed. By having your site monitored and kept up to date, we are consistently patching any known security holes in any of the software you are using on your website. No site is completely secure, but this helps keep it as safe as possible.

When it comes to managed hosting and site speed, there are a couple of things a hosting provider (if there’s a human looking after your website) can do to help increase the speed of your website; general optimisations, and correct server allocation.

When I say general optimisations, these could be absolutely anything – from removing plugins on your website that aren’t actually doing a whole lot of anything (except sapping resources) to installing a new way of caching your website to make it load quicker. The second way we could help you speed up your website is by changing the server (where your website is physically placed) if we notice that your website is using too many resources for the plan you are on – this is typically only a problem on very large websites or sites that have a lot of eCommerce activity.

Whether or not you need hosting really depends on your circumstances and technical know-how. Great hosting isn’t cheap (ours starts at £45pcm), and if you think you can figure out how to keep your site up to date, and more importantly, troubleshoot it quickly when it goes wrong, then do it yourself.

However, if you find that your website is slower than you’d like, often has out-of-date plugins or themes nagging you to update them, or you’d just benefit from support when issues arise, then it’s worth speaking to us or another provider about getting some managed hosting.

Your website must stay up to date – if not, you’re essentially sending an invite out to hackers and if you have any kind of personal data on your site (e.g. the names or email addresses on a contact form), you’re then opening yourself up to a data breach. Whether you opt for fully managed hosting, or you just pay a little more attention to your website after reading this, you’re moving one step closer to a safer and faster website.