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Abandoned WordPress Plugins Can Cause Serious Security Problems

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One of the most compelling parts of the WordPress ecosystem is the huge number of high-quality plugins. If you want to add a feature to your WordPress site, there’s almost certainly a plugin that will do the job. Plugins allow WordPress to be flexible without becoming bloated and they allow the WordPress ecosystem to advance more quickly than a centralized development model ever could.

But plugins are software, and as with any software, WordPress hosting clients should be aware of potential security risks. The majority of plugin security issues can be avoided by updating plugins regularly. Updates bring fixes to security vulnerabilities; plugins that aren’t updated are quite likely to be vulnerable. Updating plugins is easy: all WordPress users need to do is press a button in the WordPress dashboard when they’re notified that a new version of a plugin is ready.

The update system works perfectly most of the time, but what happens when a developer never releases a new version of a plugin? The update system relies on developers to fix security vulnerabilities in their plugins. Sometimes that doesn’t happen. Developers may decide they no longer want to work on a plugin. Outwardly, there’s no obvious way for a site owner to tell if a developer has abandoned a plugin without investigating — the plugin is just never updated.

In some cases, a plugin is removed from the repository because it is discovered to contain a particularly bad security vulnerability, but that happens rarely. There are tens of thousands of plugins and the WordPress project doesn’t have the resources to check every one. The onus is on site owners to check that plugins are regularly updated and to investigate if they suspect a plugin might have been abandoned.

If a plugin hasn’t been updated for six months, investigate to see if it’s still being actively developed.
Investigate if a plugin isn’t promptly updated to make it compatible with the most recent version of WordPress.

In many cases the plugin won’t be abandoned and there’s no reason to stop using it. But I’m more than willing to spend the time checking — most of the information I need is available in the “more details” section of the “Plugins” pane of the WordPress dashboard.

Manually checking for abandoned plugins is workable if you have a small number of plugins on one site. But if you manage lots of sites or install a lot of plugins, you might want to think about an automated solution. WordFence recently added the ability to check for abandoned and removed plugins to their well-regarded WordPress security plugin. WordFence will let you know when a plugin may have been abandoned and any outstanding security issues.

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2 WordPress Plugins to Improve SEO for WooCommerce

01 November 2017
by: admin
in: Uncategorized,WooCommerce,Wordpress
note: no comments

Photo by Mike Kotsch on Unsplash

Supporting an ecommerce site with WooCommerce means you have to the full force of WordPress behind you as well. And because WordPress is consistently one of the best platforms for blogging, all those words give you a boost in SEO.

But more than giving you an online notepad, WordPress also offers additional SEO bonuses with their endless library of plugins. Aside from allowing you to customize your ecommerce site as you like, plugins can also help you optimize your SEO strategy for the best results.

In this article, we’re going to talk about the 2 best WordPress plugins for improving SEO on WooCommerce sites.

1. All in One SEO Pack for WooCommerce by Visser Labs

Free. Premium version: $57 for first year, single site.

Michael Torbert’s popular All in One SEO Pack plugin certainly lives up to its name, garnering over 20,000 users and an average 4.5 rating. It was so successful that Visser Labs decided to expand the original plugin to better accommodate WooCommerce. The result is the All in One SEO Pack for WooCommerce, which enables the original plugin’s features on WooCommerce pages.

The package provides an impressive list of features with usability fit for beginners and experts alike. This original SEO pack plugin offers:

Automatic meta tag generation (with manual override)
Automatic title optimization for search engines
XML Sitemap support
Integration with most other plugins
Google Analytics support
Automatic attachment page redirection to parent posts
Automatic notification of site changes for search engines
Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) support

The WooCommerce version simply enables all these features for the meta data on ecommerce pages, including product descriptions and title attributes.

The paid Premium version gives you further features like advanced support for WooCommerce, video SEO modules, and SEO aids for categories, tags, and custom taxonomies.

2. Yoast WooCommerce SEO Plugin by Yoast

$49 single site.

One of the most common reasons people choose WooCommerce is because they’re already familiar with the WordPress interface. These people are likely already familiar with the Yoast SEO plugin as well, a favorite of bloggers for keeping their SEO at the top of its game.

If you prefer the functionality of the Yoast SEO plugin, you’ll be happy to know the company released a special version just for WooCommerce. The Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin allows you to integrate the original SEO tool into your new ecommerce platform. It also enables you to use the breadcrumbs from Yoast SEO tool, rather than the more rigid WooCommerce breadcrumbs.

Even if you’ve never used Yoast before, you may want to consider this plugin just for its affinity with Pinterest. Yoast’s plugin allows social sharing with a “Product Rich Pin,” a card that appears on Pinterest with additional information. On top of the usual name and favicon displays, the plugin’s Rich Pin also showcases:

Price
Currency
Availability (“In Stock”)

This enhances every share on Pinterest, turning a normal mention into a more detailed product placement. Depending on how strongly you rely on Pinterest, this feature alone could make the plugin worth investing in.

How do you manage the SEO for your ecommerce site? We want to hear your thoughts, so tell us what you think below in the comments section now.

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Are WordPress Plugins Safe?

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Over the last couple of months, we’ve seen several incidents of previously trusted plugins being infected with malware by malicious developers. Plugin vulnerabilities are nothing new: developers make mistakes and those mistakes have consequences for security. But many of the recent attacks involved the deliberate introduction of malicious code.

Does that mean we can’t trust WordPress plugins? I’d advocate an approach of trust, but verify — and of making sure you keep yourself apprised of the potential risk.

Earlier this month, Wordfence reported that zero-day vulnerabilities in three popular plugins were being exploited to inject SEO spam into WordPress pages. The Display Widgets plugin was sold to a developer who added a backdoor that was also used to inject SEO spam.

Anyone who had installed these plugins from the official repository would have had their site infected. Attacks of this sort are known as supply-chain attacks. Rather than trying to compromise hundreds of thousands of sites, the attackers focus on software they know is installed on those sites. It’s easier to buy a plugin or compromise a download server than it is to attack the sites directly.

It’s worth emphasizing that this is a rare occurrence. Although a cluster of malicious plugins has been discovered in the last few weeks, it’s a problem that only affects a handful of the tens of thousands of free plugins available to WordPress users.

The WordPress Plugin Repository team has a challenging set of responsibilities: there are over 50,000 free WordPress plugins and it is next to impossible to monitor every one for malicious code. In spite of those obstacles, they do a fantastic job. Malicious plugins are quickly removed from the repository when vulnerabilities are discovered. Given the popularity of WordPress, it’s a testament to the team that this doesn’t happen more often.

But that’s not especially comforting to site owners whose WordPress sites start spewing spam. The sad truth is that any popular project will be targeted by criminals. There is always a risk and anyone running a website has to be aware of that risk.

What can site owners do to keep their sites safe? Regular updating is still the best protection against security risks. Without updates, nothing gets fixed. Beyond that, keep an eye on WordPress blogs that report on plugin security vulnerabilities. Among the best are:

Additionally, a Web Application Firewall (WAF) like those provided by the WordFence Security Plugin and the Sucuri Security Plugin can mitigate the risk even when a vulnerable plugin is installed.

The WordPress team is discussing solutions that integrate security warnings into the WordPress dashboard. There is currently no way to inform site owners when a plugin is removed from the repository for security reasons. Until that initiative yields a useful solution, WordPress site owners might want to take a look at Plugin Security Scanner, a plugin that scans for vulnerable plugins and emails the site owner.

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WordPress 4.9 Beta Is Ready For Testing

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The next release of WordPress has entered the beta phase, which means it’s ready for testing by WordPress hosting clients who want to check out the new features, test for plugin and customization compatibility, and give the developers a hand tracking down bugs.

WordPress 4.9 focuses on improvements to the Customizer, adding some nice features that will make life easier for WordPress professionals and users alike.

If you’d like to take WordPress 4.9 for a spin, you can download the beta code or use the Beta Tester Plugin to update an existing installation. As ever, keep in mind that WordPress 4.9 is not fully cooked and will almost certainly break your site. Installing beta software on your main production site is a very bad idea. If you want to try the beta, install WordPress on your local machine or on a dedicated testing account.

If you find any bugs, take a look at the project’s guidance page for bug reporting, which includes a link to the WordPress bug tracker.

Let’s have a look at some of the new features that need testing.

Customizer Enhancements

With WordPress 4.9, the Customizer gains a new button that allows site owners to save their customizations as a draft, publish them to the site immediately, or schedule them for publishing at a later date.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because customizations (referred to as changesets by the project), now behave a lot like WordPress posts. Those working on making changes to the appearance of their site can save their work and come back to it later or discard it. Most interesting is the scheduling of changes: many WordPress professionals don’t want to apply changes to a busy site, but nor do they want to have to be available to apply them when the site is quiet — WordPress pros like sleep too.

Scheduled customizations will also be useful when design changes associated with promotions and other time-sensitive customizations need to be applied as part of a broader promotional strategy. WordPress professionals can queue up their changes and have them go live at exactly the right time.

Perhaps most interesting is the ability to share links to Customizer previews. The links allow people who aren’t logged in to preview changes on the front-end. This will be hugely useful for designers and professionals who want to give clients and other interested parties a look at the changes, without having to replicate them on a live site or provide access to the site’s back-end.

Other Changes

Enhancements to the Customizer are only the headline feature. There are many smaller changes and improvements for both WordPress users and developers, including the addition of a new gallery widget, support for shortcodes and media in text widgets, and better video embedding support. Developers will be particularly pleased with the integration of the CodeMirror code editor to the theme and plugin editor, the CSS editor in Customizer, and the Custom HTML widget.

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WordPress.org, The WordPress Foundation, and Automattic: What’s The Difference?

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Most users of WordPress aren’t interested in how the sausage is made, and rightly so. But those who are interested in the history and management of WordPress often find the many organizations and sites involved confusing. The confusion is understandable: these organizations are usually mentioned with little explanation of who is involved and what they do.

I’m talking about three organizations in particular: WordPress.org, The WordPress Foundation, and Automattic, which are frequently written about in connection with another name, Matt Mullenweg. Let’s have a look at each of these in turn.

Matt Mullenweg

Matt Mullenweg is one of the founders of WordPress, which is now developed under the auspices of the WordPress.org community. Mullenweg is the CEO of Automattic. He’s the founder and principal officer of the WordPress Foundation. And he’s currently the lead developer of the WordPress project. As you might imagine from that list of positions, Mullenweg is the single most influential person in the WordPress world, which is natural since he created WordPress (along with co-founder Mike Little, who is less prominent in the community).

Automattic

Automattic is a web services company, founded by Mullenweg to exploit the commercial potential of WordPress and related projects. WordPress itself is free and open source, but Automattic provides a number of services based on WordPress (like WordPress.com) and that serve the WordPress community, like the VaultPress backup service and the Jetpack plugin collection.

WordPress.org

WordPress.org is the home of the open source WordPress project. It’s where the development of WordPress takes place, largely powered by volunteer contributors. It’s where WordPress users go to get free themes and plugins. It’s also the best source of WordPress support for self-hosted sites, because much of the WordPress community gathers around WordPress.org.

If you host WordPress with a web hosting company like Hostdedi, you’ll interact with WordPress.org often because it’s the center of the WordPress project and the wider community.

It’s important not to confuse WordPress.org and WordPress.com. The latter is a commercial service offered by Automattic.

The WordPress Foundation

Most users of WordPress will have little to do with the WordPress Foundation, but it’s useful to understand what it is and the role it plays in the WordPress ecosystem.

The WordPress Foundation is a non-profit organization designed to oversee the development of WordPress and to ensure that WordPress and a few other projects remain free and open source.

The WordPress Foundation has another significant role in the community: it holds the trademarks for WordPress and other related trademarks. These were originally owned by Automattic, but were donated to The WordPress Foundation because Mullenweg felt that the WordPress project shouldn’t be entirely dependent on one individual or company.

It’s worth mentioning the WordPress Foundation is protective of its trademarks, and doesn’t let any other organization use “WordPress” in its domains or name. Unless you want to end up on the wrong side of the WordPress Foundation, avoid using the name “WordPress”. The Foundation encourages publishers and developers to use “WP” instead.

The average WordPress user doesn’t need to know about any of this, except perhaps WordPress.org, but hopefully we’ve answered some of your questions about the organizations you’ll see frequently mentioned in articles about WordPress.

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What Is A Drive-By Download Attack?

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In previous articles we’ve talked about why criminals are interested in attacking WordPress sites and some of the methods they use. Today we’re going to look at drive-by downloads, a common category of attack used by criminals to infect site visitors with malware. Drive-by downloads are software downloads made to a device without the permission or knowledge of its owner.

Most such attacks are carried out using the compromised content managements systems of legitimate sites, infecting the site’s visitors with malware that serves the interest of the attacker.

This June, security researchers at Sucuri noticed that a large number of WordPress sites were being used by criminals to infect web users with ransomware, so it’s worth going into some detail about how attacks of this sort work.

When an attacker compromises a WordPress site – usually because the site hasn’t been updated — they’re not necessarily interested in the resources of the site. Instead, they’re interested in the site’s audience. They want to use the site’s popularity to their own advantage, infecting its audience with ransomware, botnet software, software that steals banking and credit card details, and so on.

The first stage in a drive-by download attack is to find a vulnerable WordPress site and to compromise it. When the attackers have control of the site they inject code into its pages and JavaScript files. The exact nature of the code varies, but its basic task is to cause a visitor’s browser to download and execute code installed on a domain the attacker controls. This can be done with a simple redirect to the malicious site, an iFrame, or even an innocuous-looking advert.

The code the attacker wants to load is usually part of an exploit kit. Exploit kits like Nuclear and Angler are complex applications that probe the software on a visitor’s device for vulnerabilities, often in PDF reader and Flash player software. If the exploit kit finds a vulnerability, it compromises the visitor’s device and uploads a small piece of malware, which will typically download the main malware payload. The entire process can take place in less than a second and most people never notice that their device is now controlled by criminals.

So what can WordPress site owners do to minimize the chances that their sites will be compromised and used to infect visitors with malware? Most importantly, keep WordPress (and any other internet-facing software) up-to-date. It’s hard to overstate how important this is. If your site is not updated regularly, it’s almost certainly vulnerable. Themes and plugins should also be updated regularly.

While most WordPress sites are exploited because web hosting clients don’t update, a good number are hacked via simple brute-force attacks. Brute-force attacks only work if a site has easily guessed passwords, so the second most important mitigation advice is to use long, random, complex passwords. For extra safety, think about implementing two-factor authentication on your site.

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Tailor Your WordPress Site Based On Location

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You don’t need me to point out that the web is a global phenomenon, and yet many WordPress site owners don’t consider that their visitors can come from anywhere in the world. For local businesses, it might make sense to disregard all but a small population, but many WordPress websites could provide a better experience by tailoring content based on their visitors’ location. We’ve covered translating and localizing WordPress in several articles, so today we’re going to look at another way WordPress sites can be enhanced for a global audience: geotargeting.

Geotargeting is the practice of serving different content to an audience based on their location. A simple example would be a weather widget that displays the correct weather for the visitor’s location. It wouldn’t make sense to show a visitor from Beijing the weather for Chicago. Geotargeting lets site owners set conditions for which visitors see which content depending on where they are in the world.

Geotargeting works because it’s possible to find out a visitor’s location from their IP address. Every computer or router connected to the internet has an IP address, and each IP address — or block of IP addresses — is associated with a location. Geotargeting with IP addresses is not as accurate as GPS or WIFI-based location detection, but it’s usually good enough to determine which country and city a visitor is in.

Why Geotarget?

There are many reasons a site owner might want to provide a different experience to users in different locations.

To tailor promotions based on location.
To provide location-specific content. A restaurant review site might want to foreground restaurants near the user. An eCommerce retailer might want to give directions to their local brick-and-mortar store.
Geotargeting is often used for website security. If your WordPress site gets a lot of spam from a particular area, it might make sense to use geotargeting to deny IPs from that area access to your site’s forms. Although, for obvious reasons, care should be taken not to throw the net too wide.

Geotargeting on WordPress

For simple location-based content targeting, take a look at the GeoTargeting Lite plugin. Geotargeting Lite provides a couple of shortcodes that WordPress site owners can use to tag content that should be shown (or not shown) to visitors from a particular location. This is a fairly clumsy approach to geotargeting, so if you have more extensive geotargeting in mind, I’d suggest the premium version of this plugin, which can do page- and post-level geotargeting, can geotarget visitors through the Cloudflare CDN, and geotarget WordPress menu items and widgets.

WordPress, Geotargeting, and SEO

When I’ve discussed geotargeting with WordPress users, a question that often comes up concerns Google’s rules about cloaking. Cloaking is a black-hat SEO technique that serves different content to ordinary users than is served to Google’s crawlers. Cloaking is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can result in a penalty.

When geotargeting content, a visitor from Montreal might see different content to a US-based Google crawler, which superficially resembles cloaking. In reality, geotargeting is not the same as cloaking. Sites with geotargeting serve different content to visitors depending on location, not whether they are a human visitor or Google’s web crawler. A web crawler with an IP associated with Montreal would see the same content as a human being browsing the web in Montreal, so geotargeting doesn’t cause SEO problems or breach Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

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WordPress Says No To React, Forcing Gutenberg Editor Delay

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Javascript has become increasingly important to WordPress developers over the last couple of years. Anyone working on the web front-end needs to know Javascript, but the introduction of the WordPress REST API has focused the cutting-edge of WordPress development on Javascript and frameworks like React. But, in what must be welcome news to React competitors like Vue, the WordPress project will no longer use React because its license is viewed as potentially harmful.

The move away from React will force a rewrite of key WordPress front-end apps and components, including the new Gutenberg editor, which will be delayed by several weeks at least. The decision doesn’t affect most WordPress theme and plugin developers, who are free to use any framework they like, but it highlights an issue with React that is worth considering.

The anti-React stance, which was announced by WordPress creator and lead developer Matt Mullenweg, is a response to Facebook’s refusal to modify React’s BSD+Patents license. The license has caused controversy in the open source community, and WordPress is only the most recent project to ban its use.

Developers have embraced React because it makes it easier to design, build, and maintain complex front-end interfaces for the web. React is distributed under a BSD+Patents license. The BSD license is a standard open source license which allows anyone to use the code. The “Patents” component of the React license is, however, is definitely non-standard.

In brief, it says that anyone can use React for any purpose, but that they lose the right to use any Facebook-patented technology — including in React — if they sue Facebook for patent infringement. The worry is that any company that makes a significant investment in React and similarly licensed software will face a dilemma if Facebook infringes their patents: they can sue and be forced to abandon that investment or let Facebook get away with it.

The patent issue was recently brought to a head when the Apache Foundation decided that no Apache project could directly depend on React — necessitating the rewriting of a lot of code.

Facebook says that the BSD+Patents license allows it to make React and other open source projects available to the community, while reducing the number of frivolous patent lawsuits it has to deal with.

But there’s a concern that using React will cause many companies and developers to avoid using WordPress and other projects using React. For the majority of developers and companies, the BSD+Patents licenses isn’t likely to cause problems directly — most of us don’t have patents to protect. For open source projects like WordPress, it’s more complicated.

Open source projects are often used by big companies with patents — or by smaller companies that might be bought by big companies with patents. Those companies will not want to give up their right to sue for patent infringement or buy a company with products that carry that risk. The concern is that using React in WordPress will discourage a large swath of its potential user base.

For WordPress users, the most obvious impact of the project moving to a different front-end framework will be the delayed release of Gutenberg, which is expected to be a headline feature in a future WordPress release. For developers, it might be worth considering whether React is the right choice for future WordPress-related projects.

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Translating Your WordPress Site Isn’t As Hard As You Think With Weglot

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English is the most common language on the web, but that doesn’t mean businesses can afford to ignore other languages, especially if they intend to sell products or provide services to international customers. The web is a global communication network, and although it’s easy for people who live in the US to assume everyone is happy with English, that’s not true even in the US, where many speak Spanish as a first or second language.

Further afield in Europe, Asia, and Africa, there’s no guarantee English is spoken. And, even if English is spoken by many people in a business’s target demographic — as is true in Western Europe — the evidence shows that most people prefer to do business with sites that provide content in their native language.

If you intend to sell in areas where English isn’t widely spoken as a first language, it makes sense to translate at least some of the content and interface text on your WordPress site.

Once upon a time, translating a site was a complex and expensive proposition, but with a combination of modern technology, a translation-friendly CMS like WordPress, and cloud translation platforms, translation is within the reach of most site owners.

Machine translation is an obvious option, but site owners should take care if they decide to rely exclusively on machine translation, especially if they can’t show the translation to a native speaker of the target language. In some cases, machine translation produces accurate results of a quality that can be used on a business site. But there is plenty of room for things to go wrong: ridiculous, offensive, or just plain bad translations are not unusual, especially for idiomatic language use and for languages that aren’t well covered by machine translation corpuses.

Fortunately, for WordPress users, there are several plugins that make it easier to translate content. I’d like to take a closer look at one of these, Weglot. Weglot is a translation service with a WordPress plugin that simplifies the building of multi-lingual websites.

Weglot provides widgets that can transform a monolingual site into a multi-lingual site, allowing a site’s users to choose their preferred language. It works across all parts of a WordPress site, including content, menus, widgets, and other site components. And, importantly, it creates SEO-friendly web pages in the target language with appropriate permalinks and HTML markup.

But the most impressive part of Weglot is its translation capabilities. By default, Weglot uses advanced machine translation to convert text between languages. Site owners can edit the translations before they go live. Using machine translation in Weglot, it only takes a few minutes to translate a site, but, as I’ve already mentioned, machine translation isn’t always reliable. For important web pages or for pages where machine translation doesn’t produce satisfactory results, Weglot allows site owners to order professional translations by native speakers in the same interface. With a combination of machine translation and professional translation, it’s possible to create a multi-lingual WordPress site in next to no time.

Creating a multi-lingual site used to be out of the reach of many businesses and publishers, but with a modern CMS like WordPress and translation service like Weglot, it can be fast, easy, and inexpensive.

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Revenue And Traffic Diversity Is Crucial For WordPress Publishers

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It’s no secret publishers are struggling to build sustainable content businesses. Advertising revenues were in decline before ad-blockers went mainstream, and since the advertising industry alienated a huge swathe of the online audience, it’s become even more difficult to make money from content.

But difficult doesn’t mean impossible — there are plenty of WordPress publishers, large and small, with thriving businesses. The secret to success is revenue and traffic diversity: not relying too much on any single platform to bring home the bacon.

It’s never a good idea to tie the fortunes of your business to someone else’s business, especially in an industry of rapid disruption where a sure thing can turn into a dud overnight. And yet, I often talk to publishers who have taken a massive hit to their bottom line because a platform they relied on for revenue or traffic has pivoted in an unhelpful direction. It happens time and again, and every time they’re surprised.

Medium has its upsides: not least the network effects associated with being on a platform with a huge audience. And so many publishers went all-in on Medium — a company that pivots faster than Excel. Soon after, Medium abandoned its planned monetization solutions and laid-off a third of its staff, leaving publishers in a pickle.

The same pattern can be seen with Facebook’s Instant Articles. Publishers have a love-hate relationship with Facebook. They’re loathe to give up the distribution of their content, but eager to get that content in front of Facebook’s billion-plus users. So everyone who is anyone started publishing Instant Articles. At the same time, Facebook was making plans that essentially rendered Instant Articles of no benefit to publishers.

Facebook thinks video is the future — and so videos get priority in the Newsfeed. Facebook thinks its users would rather see content from their family and friends, so news articles — including Instant Articles — are pushed out of the feed. Facebook thinks users want to see content they “interact” with, not content from publishers they’ve liked and followed, so publishers find it impossible to connect with their followers.

Earlier this year, Amazon announced cuts to its affiliate marketing program, decimating the revenue of publishers who had built a nice business sending customers Amazon’s way.

Any publisher that depended for a large chunk of its traffic or revenue on one of these platforms would find itself in trouble. Which is not to say that WordPress publishers shouldn’t use Facebook, Medium, and Amazon, in addition to as many other sources of traffic and revenue as possible. The point is not that these channels should be ignored, but that none of them is the savior of the publishing industry.

Smart publishers use all of these channels and more to hedge against the inevitable pivots and focus changes. People will always want high-quality content and there will always be viable publishing business models, but publishers have to move quickly and spread their bets.

WordPress hosting is a great solution for publishers who want to maintain platform and revenue independence. Control your site and content distribution, and take advantage of platforms without depending on them.

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