How to find the best WordPress developers for you: Part 10 – Security

This is the final post in a series of posts about “How you can find the best WordPress developers for you“.

Here are links to the content we have covered so far:

Day 1: Experience
Day 2: Expertise
Day 3: Price
Day 4: Standards
Day 5: Communication Skills
Day 6: Timekeeping
Day 7: Location
Day 8: Size of Team
Day 9: Payment Terms

This post has been deliberately left to last as it must be in your mind when you speak to any developer.

10) Security

There have been some high profile attacks on WordPress sites in the last couple of years and potentially this might only increase considering that WordPress drives over 29% of the web. Having a well-built site from an experienced development team can make a big difference in how secure your client’s site is.

How will you make sure that the site you have got back from your developer is optimised for security and does not contain malicious code or security issues?

Again, this is a question of getting into a conversation with the prospective developer and finding out what their views are on security and what steps they take to ensure that the sites are secure. From renaming of the database prefix to the escaping of all content, there are steps that can be taken and you should ensure that you use someone who has a security conscious outtake on development.

Questions to ask:

• How do you ensure that the site is hardened against hacking attempts? – This is so important as if they say ‘nothing’ then please avoid them at all costs. The best WordPress developers know that security must be on every single line of code they produce and must never be forgotten about
• Have any of your sites ever been hacked and what have you done about it? – We have all made mistakes and how we recover from these mistakes will tell you a lot about the person. You would be looking at someone who says yes and then this is what I did to prevent it happening again. This is a great example of reactive learning.
• Do you install any security plugins to help with the site security? – This might not always be necessary when a site is well coded. However, a security plugin will help with some of the more simple issues like enforcing strong passwords etc

There we have it, a full guide to how you can find the best WordPress developers for you by asking the best questions possible. I hope you have enjoyed this series and please get in touch if you have any questions about this.