Weekly round-up of WordPress news – Vol 7

Security posts seem to be prominent this week in our latest roundup of WordPress news.

Avada Theme Version 5.1.5 Patches Stored XSS and CSRF Vulnerabilities – WP Tavern
Now, hopefully, you have the sense to be not using premium themes for your website. If not and your site is using Avada then you need to update it urgently as it has some security vulnerabilities. Avada is by far the most popular premium theme and it has sales of over 325k so this is major news.

Announcing Gravityscan – WordFence
If you want to check if your site is safe and secure then here is a great new scanner from the WordFence security team. Gravity Scan is a completely free vulnerability and malware scanner and it will provide you with a report of if your website has been hacked and if you might also have any security problems that may lead to a hack in future. Really useful tool.

How to secure your WordPress site from hackers – Torque
There are some things you can do to make your site less likely to be hacked and this article from Torque gives some straightforward advice on what steps you take to harden your WordPress website to hacking. Hackers will typically go for the easy targets so if your site has additional security features it may make them think twice about trying to hack your site.

Why it’s worth investing in premium WordPress plugins! – WP Rocket
We have licences for a lot of quality, premium plugins and think that they are awesome additions to WordPress. This plugin is like a testimonial for WP Rocket (which we use a lot), but it can also be applied to other premium plugins like Gravity Forms, WPML and MemberPress.

Agile WordPress Development: How To Maximise The ROI Of Your MVP Website – Codeable
Despite the long title, this is an excellent post about how you can get a return on investment through building a minimum viable product rather that going full out to build the perfect website. Sometimes we get carried away with having to have everything perfect when just getting something out there and testing it and improving it over time is often the best strategy.

LOL at this avocado toast advice from a millionaire – Ramit Sethi
This isn’t WordPress news, I just thought it was awesome advice.