There is something very exciting about the abundance of OpenAI-based tools and their like, which are born at a dizzying pace and can take our site and business in directions that until recently we could hardly have dreamed of. This includes creating smart bots at minimal cost, designing amazing images without knowing Photoshop, drafting marketing posts in an instant, and much more. And in general, it is fun to hold lunchtime discussions about DeepSeek – whether it was really developed by the Chinese without NVIDIA's chips, and whether the office know-it-all is right that Musk's Grok will teach everyone a lesson. Surely a lot more fun than dealing with tedious topics like site maintenance, updating plugins and versions, and handling the related security and operational issues. As if we don't have enough worries already, and as if running a business weren't challenging enough as it is.
But what can you do, all the magic that these AI models are able to perform is not worth much if your site gets hacked. And if you do not ensure that it goes through every now and then security scan, and will be dealt with accordingly; the chances are high that it will happen, and maybe it already has. Because WordPress sites, and sites in general, whether it's a small blog, a brochure site or a successful store, become an easy target for hackers exactly at the moment they stop being checked and maintained. And when that happens, and somehow it always happens at the worst possible time, the resources we thought we saved (and the stories we told ourselves along the lines of "better not to touch it so as not to accidentally break the site") look like the worst decision we ever made.
"Security scans" are definitely not magic, and they are far from exciting. But they are the basis of the basis. And they must be done from time to time as part of the ongoing maintenance of your site and business. With them you will detect hacked plugins, unsupported themes, suspicious files, old and dangerous versions, problematic permissions, suspicious changes in the source code, not to mention various updates that were left behind. Many words that are familiar and worn out from overuse, but that can turn into a business disaster in an instant. This treatment, by the way, will probably also greatly improve your site's performance and speed, but we will leave that for another time.
But my site is small, who would want to break into it?
A classic mistake. Most hackers are not looking for specific sites. They are looking for vulnerabilities. Their automated tools run around the clock, 24/7, from anywhere in the world, checking hundreds of thousands of sites per hour. When they identify a weakness, it makes no difference to them whether it is a side brochure site or a well-known business. It will be exploited! What they do with it, and when, varies from case to case – and the degree of damage and severity varies accordingly: taking the site down, defacing it, blocking it, ransomware and more. Some breaches are aimed at exploiting certain parts of the site (sometimes side pages whose existence has been forgotten) as a platform through which the attackers carry out various actions. All this, of course, assuming that your site or business is not targeted in the first place for various reasons.
How do you run security scans, and who can do it for me?
There is nothing like regular maintenance and updates for your site to make life much easier. Assuming this is not the case and you don't remember when someone last took care of the site, ask a professional to dive into your site, review and scan it, and deal with the findings accordingly. They will go over each of the plugins, examine the themes, scan the code, update versions and make sure to clean up whatever needs cleaning. A variety of dedicated tools help with this, but it is not "set it and forget it", and it is advisable for a professional human eye to be involved. After the site has gone through an "overhaul", make these scans routine and avoid accumulating gaps. Some hosting companies offer special packages that include security scans (for example Pagely, Kinsta). InuPress is quite uniquely entitled every site for security scans by a skilled professional team, at no additional charge, even in the most basic package.
But what matters more is not the type of tool or even the identity of the provider, but the decision to act and do something. As of now, March 2025, and apparently for the foreseeable future too, websites do not maintain themselves, and on the other hand – the pace of weaknesses, vulnerabilities and updates keeps growing.
Take some advice: this is the kind of thing it does not pay to suppress and forget. Don't let a small problem turn into a big disaster. Make sure your site is scanned and treated on an ongoing basis.
