As we explained in our Website Security series, a website is only as strong as its weakest link.  So if you have a weak password such as “1234567”, your site can easily be a target for hackers even if you have the best set of security features in place.  WordPress can be very secure or it can be very insecure.  We’ll spare you all the details of why this is because you can read it all for yourself in our Website Security series.  The key to keep in mind is how much care and what preventive measures YOU put in place – yes, you.  That might scare you a bit and frankly, that’s why we offer Managed WordPress Hosting so we can ensure our client’s websites are as safe as possible.

The bottomline is that WordPress is an easy target for hackers when people who are not well-versed in good security procedures are tasked with maintaining a WordPress website.  The good news, however, is there are a lot of hosting companies (including us) who are security experts when it comes to WordPress and we can take this monumental job off your hands.

Summary

WordPress can be very secure with the right safe guards in place.  However, most of these safe guards are extremely technical in nature and without a proper understanding of what to do and how to do it, the hosting environment can be compromised.  However, there is a plethora of hosting solutions specific for WordPress including our own Managed WordPress Hosting solution that focus on providing a secure hosting environment for WordPress.  That is why we give WordPress a 7 out of 10 for security.

Because Website Builders require you to host with them, they have all the security measures in place already and nothing more needs to be done by you.  However, if you choose a weak password for your admin account, you can still be vulnerable to attack.  Recently, there was a vulnerability in the code that runs Wix that allowed easy access for a hacker to gain control over Wix websites.  It didn’t take long for Wix to respond and patch this vulnerability.  Companies like Wix and SquareSpace have a large staff with people quality testing and fixing vulnerabilities.  For the most part, we believe Website Builders to be very secure because their code is proprietary meaning it’s not open to the public.  This means that attackers can’t gain access to the code to find vulnerabilities to exploit.  Also, companies with Website Builders push updates to all the websites on their platforms when they have fixed an issue so they don’t leave it up to the individual website owner to do this which is a great security practice.

Summary

Website Builders offer a secure hosting solution because everything is turnkey.  The code behind these builders is also closed to public view so attackers can’t easily find vulnerabilities by searching the code.  However, if there is a vulnerability in the code, websites could be sitting ducks until the team of developers at these companies fix the issue and patch the vulnerability on all websites.  That is why Website Builders get a 9 out of 10 for hosting.