Summary
If you’re looking to build a website for your business, a proven approach is to work with an agency and have them deliver the project for you. This could be a bespoke website design and development agency or solely a website or platform development agency.
Before you approach an agency, however, you’ll first need to reach a clear, detailed understanding of your requirements.
This article will provide an in-depth guide to help you through the briefing process and ensure your chosen agency delivers your project successfully, including a free template you can use to create your own brief. This template can also be used for other types of development projects as well, including anything from an online portal to an internal training platform.
Where to Start
Whether you need to design and develop a new website, or rebuild or migrate an existing site, a natural first step is to take your idea to an agency with a view to launching a web development project.
However, it’s a common mistake to go to an agency too early with just a raw, under-developed concept. Rather than meeting with an agency prematurely, we strongly suggest going through the process of defining your specific requirements and creating a project brief first.
The first thing to do is hold a discussion with the relevant people internally. Talk through the idea, and try to define what it is you need and what you want to achieve with it. Get a clear picture of what that idea or a concept will turn into, but also think carefully about what it should do from the perspective of your end-users.
Once you have a more tangible understanding of what you’re looking to build, you should begin creating a brief.
This is a document outlining the key details and requirements for the project. It’s something you’ll need to take with you to your introductory meetings with the agencies you’re considering, as it will be a very useful tool in helping you explain your idea clearly.
A brief doesn’t have to be complicated. It’s just a simple written document that lists everything you want at this early stage. However, while a brief can be simple, it’s important that it’s as specific as possible too. The more detail you provide for your agency, the more chance you’ll have the project delivered on time, within your budget, and meeting your expectations.
Why Having a Brief is Crucial
There are some potential pitfalls to be aware of that could create challenges for you if you don’t create a thorough brief.
Unfortunately, some agencies will be willing to work with you without a detailed brief, glossing over important details and keeping the expectations and requirements vague. This is a red flag to look out for, as it will likely result in one of several outcomes:
- You risk going through a long, expensive discovery and definition exercise that you could’ve done yourself internally for no cost.
- You risk being given a quote that’s too expensive, or a project timeline that’s longer than necessary.
- You risk receiving a service from the agency that doesn’t align with your request or meet your expectations. In turn, you’ll then have to spend even more time and money on a new project to get your original idea developed.
A brief is what gives you and the agency a mutual understanding of the work that needs to be done to successfully deliver the project. Without that specificity, you might end up disappointed. That’s why it’s always wise to put some time and effort in up front before taking your idea to an agency.
Once you submit your brief, you may be invited to participate in a follow-up session to further explore the requirements you’ve listed. This is perfectly normal, and actually a good sign. Experienced agencies will want to talk through each of the elements of your brief with you to help determine the best possible way to deliver those in the project.
How to Create Your Brief
When you begin to discuss and plan the requirements of your project between your team, we recommend thinking carefully about the following points.
Please note: There are a lot of things that could go into a project brief, depending on how complex your requirements are, so we won’t include everything here in this article.
The Project’s Purpose and Goals
Start by thinking about what the purpose of the project is. There’s no use speaking to an agency until you have a clear, specific understanding of exactly what you’re trying to achieve with this project. This should relate to your strategic business objectives, but it should also be designed to meet the needs of your end-users.
Ask yourself how this will allow you to improve your end-users’ experience or solve a problem for them. Answering this might involve working on user personas or developing user stories, or potentially even working directly with some members of your target audience to gather their input.
Project Timelines and Deadlines
Timing is another important point to think about, particularly how much time you have to deliver the project. Deadlines can sometimes relate to certain dates that are out of your control, so it’s better to start as early as possible in those cases. If there’s any flexibility with the timeline for delivery, make a note of that as well.
Project Stakeholders
Make a list of all the stakeholders involved. This is a good thing for the agency to be aware of early on, because the project becomes more complex with a higher number of stakeholders.
Depending on the size of your business, and the nature of your site, your project team will usually be some combination of: A marketing director or marketing manager, someone from your operations department, and someone from IT.
However, if you also have people like someone from your IT team responsible for security, a content writer to provide all the written text, or any external consultants, that should be made clear in advance. If your site will need to integrate with other platforms, such as your CRM system, you may have an integration manager specifically in charge of overseeing that as well.
It’s useful to designate roles to certain stakeholders, such as project sponsors, product owners, administrators, and so on. This will help you understand who’s responsible for different aspects of the project internally.
If you plan to work with external agencies for things like SEO or branding, it’s important to note that in your brief. This is necessary for the development agency to be aware of as early as possible, because collaborating with other third-parties at different stages of the project requires a lot of coordination.
Certain processes may also have to run differently if other third-party agencies want to be more hands-on or handle some parts of the site themselves. The earlier this is made clear, the more smoothly the project will run.
Technology Preferences
If you have any preference of technology platform or any requirements related to your existing tech stack, that will be something you’ll need to decide early on. For example, would you prefer to use WordPress due to its scalability, or do you have any existing investment in any other platforms?
Think about any preference you have for the various technology choices available, why they’re important to you, and whether your agency will have to tailor their approach to accommodate that.
If you need help understanding and evaluating your options for technology platforms, check out our helpful guide here.
Budget
Try to determine a minimum and maximum budget for your project, even if it’s just a loose range for now. It will help you evaluate agencies, and will also help you prioritise the various aspects of the project as “must have” or “nice to have” in many cases.
Design Look and Feel
This is where your company’s brand comes into play. You’ll want your site to reflect your brand and that will come through in the design. Bring any brand guidelines to the table, and think about what sort of tone or experience you want to convey to your end-users.
If you don’t have any recent brand guidelines and want help updating them, or need to go through a rebranding process, mention that in your brief as well. Design and development agencies will often be able to help you in these areas too, or at least refer you to a trusted partner who can.
User Interface (UI)
How your end-users will interact with your site, and what kind of experience they’ll have, is largely determined by the user interface. When it comes to design and UI, simplicity is usually the best approach. However, depending on the function you’re providing, you might have some specific or bespoke UI requirements.
Consider your target audience carefully here as well. For example, if most of your users will be accessing your site from a mobile device, it’s probably wise to opt for a mobile-first design.
Some other important things to think about here include how you’d like your sitemap to be structured, especially if you have an existing site that you’re already happy with.
If your project will involve rebuilding or migrating an existing site or platform, it will be helpful to gather any existing data sources, such as Google Analytics, that will provide insight into your current site.
Non-Functional Requirements
Non-functional requirements are all the aspects of your site that happen behind the scenes. These are things that allow your site to do its job properly for your end-users, but won’t be evident to those people while they’re using it.
There’s a lot of things to consider with non-functional requirements, so we won’t cover everything here.
Hosting
If you have any specific hosting requirements, such as a preference for a certain cloud-based platform, or a particularly secure data centre, those will be important to identify as early as possible.
Say, for instance, that sustainability is a core value for your business, this could also have an influence on how and where your hosting is managed.
If you have an internal IT team that will be contributing towards the hosting decision, make sure you involve them in the discussion.
Security and Compliance
Security is a growing concern for all businesses today. It’s crucial to think about security as a core component of any web development project, to minimise any potential risks for your business.
If you have someone in your team responsible for security, they should begin to think about issues such as:
- How will you be backing up the site’s data?
- What level of data encryption do you need?
- How will users’ personal details be stored and protected?
- Will you have two-factor authentication?
- What password recovery process will there be for users?
Robust security also involves keeping compliant with any specific security or industry regulations that may affect your business. Of course, compliance with things like GDPR should be planned for at this stage too.
Some other common non-functional requirements include things like session management capabilities to track and things like log-in time, session length, pages visited, and so on. Search engine optimisation (SEO) tools, analytics, or other capabilities might need to be built into your site as well.
Accessibility, Usability, and Responsive Design
When it comes to aspects that will make your users’ experience as seamless as possible, such as accessibility, a good agency will ensure all these things are taken care of for you. This is also the case for ensuring all major web browsers, operating systems, and devices are fully supported and compatible. Development should always be compliant with industry standards, taking into account optimum accessibility and usability.
However, if you have any additional or bespoke requirements for any of these things, those will be useful to note early on.
Functional Requirements
The term ‘functional requirements’ refers to everything that your site will be able to do for its users, in terms of its features, functionality, and capabilities.
As mentioned earlier, one of the first things you discussed was what the site will help your end-users achieve. From the perspective of building something your target audience can use, you should start to get a feel for what functionality is required to ensure they can achieve that.
Features
Your features are the things your site will allow your users to do. These can be very simple, or very sophisticated, depending on what you’re aiming to provide for them.
When putting your brief together, think of any and all features and functionality that might benefit your users. Your agency will then work with you to explore these and find the best way to turn that into intuitive, user-friendly features for you.
What to Do Next
Once your team has been through the process of talking through all the points listed above, you should have a very thorough, useful brief to work with. The next step is to take that brief to any introductory meetings you have with agencies and ask them what they think of the project initially.
It’s normal for an agency to ask lots of questions at that stage and really dive into the ‘WHY’ behind all the things you’ve put into your brief. A good agency will even challenge you on certain decisions, to help you determine the best possible way to build what you need.
Once you’ve discussed your brief with an agency, determine which one feels like the best fit. Choosing the right agency is crucial, as it will have a huge influence on whether or not your project is successful.
As mentioned earlier, some agencies will agree to launch into a project without a brief, and that can be extremely problematic. While the main purpose of a brief is to help you and your agency understand exactly what you need, it should also be used as a way to spot partners who may not be sufficiently thorough or conscientious.
Whichever agency you choose, a detailed brief will help you ensure you’re given a fair quote, realistic timelines for completion, and a finished product that meets your requirements and expectations.
More Helpful Resources
If you’re considering a bespoke development project, our related article provides useful guidance to help you choose the right technology platform for your specific needs:
Understanding and Evaluating Enterprise Options for Bespoke Web Development
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- A fully-managed service with 24/7 support
- Automated monitoring and alerts
- Back-up and disaster recovery
- 99.99% up-time
- 100% pass-rate for data centre audits.
- 24/7 support
- Back-up and disaster recovery
- Fully-managed service
- Automated monitoring and alerts
- 99.99% up-time
- 100% pass-rate for data centre audits.
- WordPress by itself, out-of-the-box, is secure enough for most businesses to use.
- WordPress in the hands of an inexperienced or negligent agency will create significant security risks.
- WordPress is the hands of a dedicated, specialist partner is a platform you can trust and rely on without any concerns.
Company Milestone
3 December, 2018
SoBold selected to work with Transport for London
SoBold Limited (SoBold), a leading digital and web marketing consultancy, is delighted to announce that SoBold has been selected to work with Transport for London (TfL) to build, manage and support a bespoke Cookie Consent Management Tool for use across TfL’s portfolio of websites.
SoBold’s rapid growth over the previous 12 months has seen them become a leading player in the digital and web marketing space. SoBold’s core offerings are now used by over 200 customers worldwide and we anticipate this customer base to continue to grow considerably over the next 12 months and beyond.
SoBold has been an authorised Reseller of Cookiebot since the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into place on 24 May 2018. Cookiebot’s tool consists of three main features: cookie consent, cookie monitoring and cookie control and SoBold work with their clients helping them manage, build and integrate these solutions onto their websites. SoBold now manage Cookie Consent Management for clients across numerous different industries.
Transport for London has completed a formal tendering process to procure a new Cookie Consent Management Tool for their tfl.gov.uk website domains. By procuring the tool, Transport for London is best able to align their approach to cookie management with the requirements of data protection legislation. SoBold will work with Transport for London, for a minimum of 12 months with the option of extending the contract for a further 24 months.
SoBold Founder and Managing Director Will Newland, commented:
“We are absolutely delighted to work with Transport for London. This gives SoBold the opportunity to work with a large, well known, corporation and we have no doubt we can play a big part in ensuring Transport for London’s customers can feel safe and confident when sharing information about themselves on the TfL website. This further strengthens SoBold’s position as a leading player in the Cookie Consent Management space.”
SoBold Lead Developer Sam Phillips, commented:
“This is a fantastic opportunity for SoBold to showcase our experience in the delivery of bespoke Cookie Consent Management solutions across a portfolio of websites with millions of visitors per month. The contract with TfL cements our position as a leading CookieBot reseller in the United Kingdom.”
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Digital Business
9 February, 2023
10 Tips to Improve WordPress Security and Minimise Risks
Cyber security and data protection should be top priorities for your business right now. Of course, this is particularly important for large businesses, and those in strictly regulated industries like financial services, where the outcome of a cyber attack or data breach can be catastrophic.
As these security concerns continue to intensify, you must be increasingly careful and vigilant about the technology solutions you use. You should also take more proactive steps to ensure everything in your tech stack is built and managed in a way that minimises your risks.
When it comes to WordPress, there’s a common misconception that the platform isn’t secure enough for large businesses. This misunderstanding tends to come from the fact that it’s free-to-use, so it was originally more popular among smaller independent businesses and B2C blogs.
Today, however, WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system (CMS), and for good reason. Considering a significant percentage of that user base includes global enterprises, you’d think such popularity would be enough proof that it’s a secure platform.
On the contrary, large businesses still ask us on a regular basis, “Is WordPress secure enough for us?”
Is WordPress Secure?
The answer to that question is, yes, WordPress is a secure, stable platform, even in its “out-of-the-box” state. WordPress’s core code is thoroughly tested and quality-checked by a team of security experts continuously. Not only that, but the same team regularly releases security updates and reinforces any potential weaknesses before they can be capitalised on by cyber criminals.
In fact, the speed at which security updates are implemented in WordPress is arguably the fastest in the world today when compared with other CMSs.
Additionally, WordPress is open-source software, meaning all its code is available to the public. Users are constantly suggesting changes and updates, often to fix bugs in the code and minimise opportunities for cyber criminals. This keeps the platform safe and secure for everyone else.
But while WordPress does have the ongoing support of some of the most talented and devoted developers in the world, it’s not immune to security vulnerabilities. No software is, unfortunately.
That’s why it’s important to be aware of, and work with, some fundamental best practices for security. Listed below are some steps you can take to further strengthen the security of the WordPress CMS.
Best Practices to Strengthen WordPress Security
1 – Secure Hosting
The hosting service you choose for your platform will determine how secure and well protected your data will be.
It goes without saying that WordPress should be hosted in a secure environment, overseen by an experienced provider who prioritises security within their services.
Some things you should consider essential for a hosting provider include:
Before choosing your hosting provider, do plenty of research to ensure they’re able to provide these measures. Most businesses will work with a development agency partner for WordPress, and that agency should be able to help you with this process.
2 – Back-Up and Disaster Recovery
Following on from the previous point, any good hosting provider should also offer back-up and disaster recovery services. These are like safety nets that will allow you to protect, save, and recover all your data in the event of any losses.
3 – Be Careful with Plugins
Plugins are a great way to enhance the WordPress platform with new capabilities and features. But you should only ever use plugins from reputable, credible sources, otherwise you could experience security problems.
It’s also important to keep all your plugins regularly tested, maintained, and updated. Again, this is an area where a WordPress agency partner will help you.
4 – Always Keep Your Platform Updated
When you’ve built a website with WordPress, you’ll often receive software updates from the platform. Any time this happens, it’s because a bug has been fixed or some improvements have been made to the software.
Keeping up with these updates is so important from a security perspective, because they’re designed to keep your site secure. By letting your site run on an outdated version of the platform, you leave yourself at risk of a known issue being exploited by a cyber criminal or some malware.
This is another thing that a good agency partner should take care of for you, so you don’t need to worry about keeping your platform up-to-date.
5 – Never Auto-Update Your Plugins
You have the option to enable auto-updates within your WordPress platform. While this may seem like an easy way to keep your CMS up-to-date, doing so can create technical issues and security risks that simply aren’t worth the convenience.
Each plugin you use will have its own button for you to turn auto-updates on or off. Any good agency will advise you to turn those auto-updates off and instead opt for a more secure approach to your updates, to maintain the resilience of your platform.
6 – Use Security-Specific Plugins
Another way to reinforce the security of WordPress is by implementing security-specific plugins like WordFence, Sucuri, or Defender Pro.
These handy tools will do a lot of the hard work for you, monitoring your platform and spotting potential vulnerabilities so you can fix them before they’re allowed to have any negative impact.
7 – Enable SSL
A secure sockets layer (SSL) is a protocol which encrypts the transfer of data between your website and your users’ browsers. Enabling SSL makes it more difficult for cyber criminals to steal or compromise data online. Don’t worry, though, as this will be taken care of by your hosting provider as a standard practice.
8 – Avoid Tools that Open Direct Access to Your Site Database from the Dashboard
Some tools and plugins will enable direct access to your site’s database from within your CMS dashboard. While this can make certain aspects of website management easier for you, it also creates security vulnerabilities. This is something you should always avoid, because these additions are often severe security risks.
9 – Encourage Your Users to be Mindful of Security
The biggest security risks, and many opportunities for cyber criminals, come from unsafe user behaviour, poor platform maintenance, and badly built sites.
Your behaviour, and the behaviour of your end-users – and your agency – should always be mindful of security. If it’s not, sooner or later you’ll encounter problems. Some security best practices you can introduce include making strong passwords compulsory for all users and implementing measures like two-factor authentication.
10 – Find a Trustworthy Agency Partner to Support You
We understand that following all these steps sounds like a lot of work. Of course, when you’ve got your own job to focus on, the last thing you need is to be spending time struggling through complex website security processes.
That’s why it’s so valuable to find a reliable, trustworthy agency partner when using WordPress to build and manage websites. A good agency will ensure everything is secure and up-to-date for you, so you can spend more time providing outstanding services and experiences to your customers.
It’s always worth taking time to find an experienced agency with a strong track record of building robust, secure sites, to give you the peace of mind you deserve. That means they should handle your secure architecture, testing, monitoring, updates, and ongoing support for you as part of their services.
Being Truly Secure is an Ongoing Process
When you’re selecting a content management system (CMS) to build critical digital assets like your website, security must be a top priority. It’s for that very reason more and more large businesses are looking to WordPress as their platform of choice.
However, it’s equally important to choose an agency you can trust, and one that has these security best practices incorporated into their approach. This doesn’t just stop at the delivery of your website, either. True security is a constant ongoing process, and your agency partner should help you through that.
Following the tips listed here will give you everything you need to build a resilient, secure website on WordPress, suitable for the enterprise.
Interested in learning more about WordPress? Discover how a global enterprise achieved game-changing results by using WordPress to build a secure, innovative, bespoke solution. Check out the story of RedeWire from Rede Partners LLP here.
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Industry News
31 March, 2023
The Top Five Business Benefits of WordPress’s Scalability
In a recent article, we explored the topic of scalability, specifically how much scalability the WordPress platform offers. In this case, scalability refers to how WordPress allows you to expand and grow your website with more content, capabilities, features, and functionality.
Scalability is a key influence on whether your investment in your content management system (CMS) of choice will be successful, whether that’s WordPress, Drupal, Sitecore, or any other platform.
When long-term, sustainable business growth is a top priority for your business, you need total confidence that your website can scale to support that growth as your requirements evolve.
WordPress is renowned for its scalability, as it allows you to easily create new features and functionality at will, without the need to invest further time and resources into more development work.
If you do select WordPress as the CMS to build your website, and are able to leverage its industry-leading scalability, this will provide you with a range of benefits and advantages.
1 – Efficiency and Ease-of-Use
With WordPress, it’s extremely quick and efficient to build your website and subsequently add a high volume of new content whenever you need to, without losing any accuracy or quality.
Whether it’s your team or your agency partner managing your site, WordPress is convenient and easy-to-use.
This ease-of-use also applies when it comes to building bespoke features and functionality, so you can keep adding new capabilities as your requirements become more advanced.
2 – Flexibility and Creativity
The WordPress platform is built on the most popular development language in the world, PHP. This language is currently used by more than three quarters (77.5%) of all websites with a known server-side programming language.
This provides tremendous opportunity for creativity, as you and your agency partner can build virtually anything your site needs and integrate it with the platform. That gives WordPress a significant advantage over CMSs built on other less popular development languages.
WordPress also comes with a vast range of plugins which add new functionality, or enhance existing functionality, for your site. Plugins are an essential aspect of WordPress development, because it’s simply not practical or cost-effective to build absolutely everything bespoke.
However, it’s important to note there are some potential drawbacks with plugins that we’ve detailed in a related article, which you can read here.
Ultimately, the support of a trusted agency partner will help you ensure your use of plugins is well advised and risk-free..
3 – Low TCO
This dynamic scalability and great ease-of-use mean that you can use WordPress with a much lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than most other CMS options.
Working with a platform as intuitive and agile as WordPress will prevent you from having to pay for costly extra work to build out new features and functionality for your site.
When you have a new requirement, you can simply use a quality plugin or ask your agency partner to create something bespoke. Both approaches will be quick and cost-effective.
Either way, when compared to other platforms, WordPress delivers unprecedented value for money. This provides you with more budget available to reinvest in improving your site with further innovations.
4 – Fast Time-to-Market
Similar to the above point, WordPress allows you to achieve a much faster time-to-market with your site than most other platforms when developing new sites, features, or capabilities.
From a long-term perspective, as your business grows and new requirements emerge, WordPress can continue to quickly expand and grow easily with useful new features.
This allows you to execute on tactical and strategic requirements as quickly as possible, keeping up with user demands and market trends.
5 – Competitive Differentiation
The aforementioned advantages WordPress has over other CMSs allow you to create innovative bespoke features for your site at scale, at speed, and within a reasonable budget.
This naturally begins to help you gain a competitive edge over your competitors. A high-performance web presence that is dynamic enough to scale with speed and efficiency is a point of differentiation in today’s fast-moving digital business landscape.
Platform Selection is a Key Decision
Scalability should always be an important part of your criteria when selecting a CMS to build your website. WordPress’s scalability, and the resulting advantages discussed in this article, make it one of the best platforms available today.
When you also consider that some of the world’s biggest businesses have websites built on WordPress, that argument becomes even more easy to get behind.
If you’d like to learn more about how some of the world’s leading businesses use the WordPress platform at scale, read our related article here. We also provide useful tips and advice to make creating sophisticated new features and functionality easy for you.
Of course, building, managing, and scaling a high-performance website is a complex challenge. As with any CMS, it’s crucial to find the support and guidance of an experienced agency partner to ensure you’re leveraging the platform to its full potential.
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Digital Business
25 January, 2023
Is WordPress Secure Enough for Large Businesses?
Summary
Despite being the most popular content management system in the world, many large businesses and organisations in strictly regulated industries are still asking, “Is WordPress secure enough for us?”
This article will give you a detailed explanation of how WordPress can provide enterprise-grade security, to help you make your own decision about whether it’s secure enough for your own business. We’ll also share some helpful tips to enhance the platform’s security and reduce its risks even further.
As technology has become more pervasive in our daily lives, cyber security concerns have intensified, especially in the workplace. Each year, we read about more high-profile cases of global brands becoming victims of malicious cyber attacks, most often with sensitive data being the real target.
As a business, you should be increasingly careful and vigilant about the technology solutions you deploy today. This is even more important for large businesses and organisations in industries with strict regulations, where the consequences of security issues can be catastrophic.
When you’re choosing a content management system (CMS) to build critical digital assets like your website, security must therefore be a top priority.
Despite being the most popular CMSs in the world today – powering almost 45% of the world’s websites – WordPress is still seen by some as the platform for smaller organisations. You’d think its popularity alone would be sufficient evidence that WordPress is secure, especially as a large fraction of that user base includes enterprises across both the public and private sectors. However, when it comes to WordPress security, there are still some question marks.
So, is WordPress secure?
Yes, absolutely.
But there are certain factors and potential pitfalls you should be aware of if you’re considering WordPress as your CMS of choice.
Understanding Security in a CMS
As business challenges with cyber security and data protection continue to grow, selecting a platform that offers robust security is crucial. But how does that work, exactly?
Ultimately, a CMS like WordPress is just a piece of software, and all software can be vulnerable to security issues in a variety of ways.
The most obvious of these is a cyber security attack, either by hackers, a virus, or malicious software (malware). Any CMS used in a business environment needs to be built to withstand these attacks on a daily basis, and WordPress is definitely capable of doing so.
Another significant risk is when software has accidental weaknesses, issues, or vulnerabilities – known as bugs – built into its code. Bugs are common in software, and they can manifest as anything from a box appearing in the wrong place on your website to a platform vulnerability that leaks mission-critical data to cyber criminals.
Bugs aren’t difficult to fix, and we’ll explain later in this article why WordPress users can be confident that these kinds of risks are minimal with the platform.
However, when it comes to a CMS’s security, it’s important to understand the following point:
The biggest security risks, and the greatest opportunities for cyber criminals, are unsafe user behaviour, lack of best practices, insufficient maintenance, and poorly built sites. Not the platform itself.
Your behaviour, and the behaviour of your end-users, is an area that can be exploited or cause problems if you don’t prioritise security. That’s why it’s necessary to take a proactive, rather than reactive, approach to protecting your data. The rest of this article will help you do that, and remove any concerns you still have about WordPress security.
Is WordPress Secure?
The misconception that WordPress isn’t secure enough for large businesses still lingers, but why? Well, the main reason is because the platform is free-to-use, and so it was initially most popular among B2C blogs and smaller independent businesses.
Today, however, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Industry-leading enterprises such as private equity advisory firm Rede Partners LLP, global investment firm Coller Capital, and global research and advisory leader Forrester use WordPress for their CMS, just to name a few. This goes a long way to proving the apprehension towards WordPress security is unnecessary.
So, let’s explore the WordPress platform in more detail to understand why these global enterprises have full confidence in the security of their data, as well as the data of their clients and partners.
WordPress is already a secure, stable platform out-of-the-box.. You can rest assured its core code is highly secure, because it’s overseen by a team of security experts who thoroughly test and quality-check it on a continual basis. They regularly release updates and reinforce any potential weaknesses before they’re exploited to protect you against any new-found threats.
A team of security analysts study the ever-changing cyber security landscape and respond to it with speed and precision.
While WordPress may be seen by some as a CMS for small businesses, the speed at which security updates are implemented is arguably the best in the world when compared to other platforms.
WordPress is also open-source software, which means all the code it’s built on is available to the public. Anyone from outside the WordPress team can view it, download it, and make adjustments to it. Users often suggest their own changes and updates to the code by submitting them to the WordPress moderator team for approval. If improvements are made to the WordPress code, these updates will be released to the global user base.
These people are part of a global community of dedicated, passionate users who work hard to ensure the platform is always developing into the best version of itself possible. Anything WordPress’s own team misses, the developer community will catch. This means users are often fixing bugs and shutting down potential opportunities for cyber criminals, keeping the platform safe for everyone else.
WordPress Security Vulnerabilities
While WordPress does have the support of some of the brightest developers in the world, who keep it as secure as possible, they can’t take care of everything for you. As mentioned earlier, your biggest security risks will probably lie within your own business, regardless of what CMS you’re using.
Additional security vulnerabilities can arise in certain scenarios, often caused by ignoring best practices or failing to take responsibility for simple maintenance of the platform.
Web Hosting
Your hosting environment is an important factor that can influence how secure and protected your data will be. Your WordPress websites will be hosted in a server that stores your files and data in a data centre.
WordPress, like any platform, should be hosted in a secure environment, with an experienced provider who prioritises security as part of their services. This should include putting proactive security measures in place for scenarios like unplanned down-time or even natural disasters.
Secure hosting should also involve automated monitoring for malicious activity and vulnerabilities in your servers and software, as well as incident response.
Before choosing your hosting service, be sure to carry out some due diligence and look into the security best practices of your host. In many cases, it’s wise to work with an agency partner who will help you with this, but more on that later.
Plugins
While the WordPress community is one of the platform’s greatest strengths, interacting with unsafe additions to the software can also be its downfall for some businesses. It’s important to be cautious of the constant stream of new features, updates, and plugins being made available, because some of them could create issues for you.
To avoid these problems, you shouldn’t download plugins unless they come from recognised, credible sources. Furthermore, you should always ensure all your plugins are correctly tested, maintained, and updated.
We appreciate this may sound complicated. For that reason, you should entrust this responsibility to a partner. When using WordPress to build and manage websites, a good agency should help you ensure everything is secure and up-to-date.
Software Updates
When you’re running a website or application on WordPress, you’ll regularly receive software updates from the platform. Any time an update comes through, it’s because certain bugs have been fixed or some improvements have been made.
It’s crucial that you keep up with WordPress updates because they’re there to keep your site secure. By leaving your site running on outdated versions, you’re at risk of a known issue being exploited by cyber attacks. Again, this should be taken care of by your agency partner so you don’t need to worry about keeping your web platform up-to-date.
Tips to Strengthen WordPress Security
If you still have doubts, there are some simple steps you can take to further strengthen the security of the WordPress CMS. Some of these more general tips can also be applied to most website platforms and other software software products in general as well.
Use a managed hosting service that offers enterprise-grade security.
You wouldn’t rent an office in a building that leaves its doors unlocked at night. Why would you place your sensitive data in a data centre that isn’t fully secure?
Some things you should consider non-negotiable for a web hosting provider to offer include:
Put back-up and disaster recovery services in place to ensure you’re protected from all potential risks.
To build on the above point, ensure your hosting service has measures in place for back-up and disaster recovery. This fail-safe measure will give you a way to save and recover all your data in the event of any losses.
Do not use, or allow your agency to use, any plugins from unrecognised sources.
As mentioned earlier, only use plugins from sources you trust. You should also keep all plugins and additions to the platform up-to-date, and make sure they’re rigorously tested – or, rather, make sure you can rely on your agency partner to do this for you behind the scenes.
Use plugins alongside security-specific enhancements.
You can further bolster the security of the WordPress platform by leveraging security-specific plugins such as WordFence, Sucuri, and Defender Pro. These can inform you of potential vulnerabilities or incidents so you can respond quickly before they have an impact on your business.
Don’t use tools that enable direct access to your site database from within the dashboard.
Some digital tools or extensions give direct access to your site’s database or files from within the dashboard, to make managing your website easier. This is something to avoid, because they’re often a major security risk.
Enable SSL
Enabling SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) introduces a protocol which encrypts the transfer of data between your website and your users’ browsers. This makes it more difficult for cyber criminals to steal information and data online.
Encourage your users to follow security best practices.
You can put all the security measures and data protection possible in place, but they could all be for nothing if a weak password or bad behaviour compromises your website.
Some security best practices every business can easily implement include making strong passwords compulsory among all users and introducing additional measures like two-factor authentication.
Rely on an Expert to Minimise Your Security Risks
As touched on throughout this article, another factor which will determine how secure your WordPress platform is will be which agency you decide to work with.
While deciding whether to invest in WordPress is a big decision, don’t underestimate the importance of finding the right agency partner to support you with your CMS, especially when it comes to WordPress security.
Ultimately, you should understand that:
Your data will be fully protected if you work with an agency who takes security seriously and prioritises it at the core of every development task they deliver for you.
That means they should be capable of handling secure architecture, testing, monitoring, updates, and ongoing support for you as part of your service. You should always take the time and care to find a specialist agency partner who has a proven track record of building robust, reliable sites, to ensure you’re minimising your risk.
WordPress is a Suitable Platform for the Enterprise
Cyber security and data protection are critical for businesses of all sizes, across all industries. But it can’t be denied that large businesses often face more severe consequences by falling victim to a cyber attack or data breach.
Choosing a platform that you have total confidence in is a necessary factor in the process of evaluating your options for a CMS.
When you have your own role and responsibilities to focus on, the last thing you want is to be constantly worrying about the security of your site. Following the advice and best practices listed in this article will provide you with a highly resilient WordPress platform with enterprise-grade security. That will allow you to spend more of your time creating an outstanding website that differentiates you from your competitors and drives business growth.
If you need more help understanding and evaluating platforms to deliver a web design and development project, read our comprehensive guide to selecting the right solution here.
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Announcement
24 September, 2022
SoBold is an accredited Living Wage employer
SoBold has continued to be an accredited Living Wage Employer and has formally made a commitment to ensure all new and existing staff contracts are renewed at the Living Wage rate as a minimum.
SoBold has been a Living Wage Employer since 2019 and they are committed to ensuring that all staff are treated fairly and remunerated fairly in line with the Living Wage Foundation.
The new Living Wage rates were announced on Thursday 22nd September 2022 and SoBold ensured that all staff pay is in line with this.
SoBold hope to see more agencies within the technology sector follow suit and become accredited.
SoBold Managing Director, Will Newland said:
We are proud of the people that work at SoBold and we truly care about them. Our staff have always been the life blood of our organisation and it is an absolute no brainer for SoBold to be a Living Wage employer.
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