Website
designs can be premade and used for a site with minimal effort. This does mean
that the site’s appearance will mirror others on the web as it is not a unique,
custom design, but that’s part and parcel of picking a pre-made theme.
Themes are
often made for the content management system, WordPress, and can be free or
premium themes. In this article, we examine whether there are any risks with
using a free theme for your site and what to do about it if there are.
Security Considerations
with Free Themes
Some
WordPress themes for a website are free. They’re developed for anyone to use.
This is usually just a hobby for a designer who’s starting out or is passionate
about producing better themes than those available presently.
The main
issue is how recently the theme was updated. If the theme wasn’t updated when WordPress was changed, then a WordPress update may well
have created new security holes that a website hacker can exploit. Also, if the
free theme doesn’t get updated over time, it becomes at greater risk of a
hacker finding a way through the site to gain access to customer records.
Can You Make WordPress
More Secure?
It’s
possible to make WordPress more secure regardless of the inherent security
concerns present with free themes. With that said, while they make WordPress
itself safer, it still doesn’t remove any present vulnerabilities with the
underlying theme code itself.
However,
it’s still worth securing the site to reduce the risks across the board. You
never know – a hacker might try other attempts first, find them blocked in a
sophisticated manner, and give up at that point without trying to hack the
theme.
One of the
best WordPress plugins to address security issues is WordFence. They provide an excellent, highly configurable security plugin even in
their free version. They also have a very active team that investigates themes
and plugins for security holes, alerts the developers to get them fixed when
they find something of concern, and once fixed, email their subscribers about
it.
How to Handle a Website
Hack?
If your
website has been taken over by a hacker, it’s sometimes possible to get the
website to reset by taking it offline and manually replacing it with a backup.
This may remove any malicious code added to the site, such as with a SQL
injection attack, but depending on when the site was hacked, it may not prevent
further attacks.
In which
case, what should you do? At this point, it’s useful to use a security firm
like SecureForensics.com, who have experts in looking at
websites and security logs to determine where an attack originated, how to stop
it, and removing the threat for the future too.
It’s also
worth pointing out that you should not rely just on the backups that a web host
performs. Take your own WordPress backups (UpdraftPlus is an effective plugins)
that let you create archives containing your entire website installation and
save them to the cloud. That way, you have more than one backup option to
recover from.
