If you seek a simple yet profound understanding of SSL certificates, then you've come to the right place. In this post, we'll explain HTTPS and SSL/TLS certificates in language that you can easily understand. That’s why we have “HTTPS and SSL certificates explained” in the title. But before we dive deep into SSL certificates and how they work, let's first have a look at how the world looked before SSL certificates.
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What We Learned About WordPress Security From Crawling 24,000 Websites
Half of websites use outdated WordPress versions; Only 1/4 of small websites use HTTPS
Concerned about protecting the security of your WordPress website? You should be! Thousands of websites are hacked every day, and because WordPress is used by about 30% of the web it’s a favorite target for hackers. Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this was the 2017 vulnerability that led to over 1.5 million websites being hacked, but less dramatic (but no less harmful) hacks occur constantly.
That’s not to say that WordPress can’t be a secure, reliable platform for your website to run on. It definitely can, if proper security measures are taken. As this study shows, though, far too many site owners are not taking even the most basic security steps.
WordPress isn’t inherently less secure than any other platform, but with the volume of WP sites out there, coupled with far too many site owners neglecting their WP sites, well…there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit out there for hackers to exploit. –Ken Dawes @ The Web Mechanic
Why Are WordPress Updates So Important?
One of the simplest ways to avoid becoming a victim of hacking is installing the latest updates for WordPress, plugins, and themes. These updates often contain patches for security vulnerabilities found by hackers or researchers. (One popular vulnerability database lists over 11,000 known vulnerabilities that have been found in older versions of WordPress and its themes and plugins.) The quicker you install the updates, the more likely you’ll protect your site before a hacker gets around to targeting you.
About 1/2 Of Websites Use An Outdated Version Of WordPress
We analyzed the Quantcast top 10,000 WordPress sites on April 5, 2018 to determine which version of WordPress the sites were running. (The latest version (4.9.5) had been released 2 days earlier on April 3rd.) We found that 49% of the sites were running an outdated version of WordPress:
- 51% were using the latest version (4.9.5)
- 15% were using the previous version (4.9.4)
- 34% were using older versions (4.9.3 or before)
