In the legal industry across North America, WordPress is the most popular Content Management System (CMS) and powers more than 30% of all law firm websites.
However hackers have taken note. Even though WordPress has robust security measures in place, persistent and greedy hackers are beginning to specifically target these sites. Why? If the hackers run a successful ransomware scheme against a law firm, they know the law firm will have money to pay them.
No matter what types of content your site provides, you are not an exception. If you don’t take certain precautions, you could get hacked. Like everything technology-related, you need to check your tech security.
As a lawyer who deals with confidential information, if you are serious about your website and your law practice, then you need to pay attention to the WordPress security best practices.
While WordPress core software is very secure, and it’s audited regularly by hundreds of developers, there is a lot that can still be done to keep your site secure.
“Fundamentally, security is not about perfectly secure systems. Such a thing might well be impractical, or impossible to find and/or maintain. What security is though is risk reduction, not risk elimination.
It’s about employing all the appropriate controls available to you, within reason, that allow you to improve your overall posture, reducing the odds of making yourself a target, and subsequently getting hacked.” – WordPress Security Codex
WordPress wrongly gets a bad rap for being prone to security vulnerabilities and inherently not being a safe platform to use for a business. This is due to the fact that these WordPress website owners keep following industry-proven security worst-practices.
Using outdated WordPress software, nulled plugins, poor system administration, credentials management, and lack of necessary Web and security knowledge among non-techie WordPress users keep hackers quite happy and fat in their cyber-crime game.
Even industry leaders don’t always use the best practices. Reuters was hacked because they were using an outdated version of WordPress. A simple update would have prevented this.
WordPress Site Maintenance:
As a lawyer, information security is one of the main values at the very core of what you do. The confidentiality entrusted upon a lawyer by their client is nearly a sacred pact in our society.
So it has become ever more important in the tech-connected, data-rich world we all live in today to protect the sacred pact of confidentiality between yourself and your client.
Client-lawyer confidentiality starts with your WordPress website for your law practice, most likely the first place a potential client will make contact with your law firm and share possibly confidential information through a contact form submission or concierge chatbot on your law firm website.
As a central component to your law business marketing strategy, your law practice website is a very important asset that should not be underestimated or ignored. WordPress security is a topic of huge importance for every law firm website owner. Google blacklists around 10,000+ websites every day for malware and around 50,000 for phishing every week.
As WordPress as a website development platform grows, hackers have taken note and are beginning to specifically target WordPress sites. No matter what types of content your site provides, you are not an exception. If you don’t take certain precautions, you could get hacked. Like everything technology-related, you need to check your website security.
Routine WordPress maintenance tasks take very little time, but they ensure that your site is secure, safe, and running at peak performance.
