YoastCon: The State Of WordPress Security

Almost five years ago, Joost started the company Yoast, offering website reviews and free plugins. Yoast’s core business was, and is, sharing knowledge and making it easier to create usable websites. Five years later Yoast has turned into one of the biggest WordPress plugin providers with 21 employees (and counting)!

To celebrate reaching five years, awesome growth, and much success, Yoast celebrated with a conference: YoastCon!

The conference was held in de Lindenberg in Nijmegen, with myself, Chris Lema, Marcus Tandler, Karl Gilis, and Joost de Valk speaking, and Marieke van de Rakt, Thijs de Valk, and Taco Verdonschot giving workshops.

The State of WordPress Security

My talk was on the current state of WordPress security. There is no denying that WordPress, powering over 23.5% of the top websites in the world, has become the platform of choice for bloggers and businesses alike.

With this fame however, WordPress has become a target, making it the top targeted platform on the web by malicious actors with ill intent.

This has brought about a lot of fear and uncertainty about what is going on and how to effectively deploy the platform for your needs. In this presentation we’ll explore the past 24 months and the evolution of WordPress security; how it’s impacted the platforms image, but more importantly what it means to the everyday website owners that depend on the platform.

With popularity, comes a price. With ease of use and extensibility, comes a responsibility. In this talk I explored these points and shared what website owners should and could be doing to improve their overall online security posture.

Missed The Event? Here’s The Live Stream

Yep. I’m not kidding. You can watch the entire day (6+ hours) of presentations in the video below: