If you’re a WordPress user, you’ve probably heard by now about the attacks going on against WordPress blogs, for which the solution is the ever-alluring mantra of “Upgrade! Upgrade! Upgrade!”

Before rushing out to upgrade to patch your version of WordPress against the latest security vulnerability, you might need to consider whether you really need to continue to remain on the WordPress upgrade treadmill.

If you are using WordPress for a blog, you may have little other choice but to upgrade.

But, if you’re using WordPress as an “easy” way to get a website up and running, as many people seem prone to do these days, you may wish to reconsider, especially if you are running a small site with not a lot of content.

In the case of a small (or mini-) site, WordPress is probably overkill anyway. Using WordPress as a shortcut to starting a new website is only going to kill you over the long run, as you will be spending an undue amount of time upgrading the thing to keep it “secure” and then upgrading it again once the new vulnerabilities have popped up in the newest version.

For example, consider a very simple site I had done in WordPress. A small site. With WordPress, the website takes up about 4.4 MB of space. Without WordPress, it takes up 48 KB of space. Much, much smaller.

When I heard about the latest WordPress fiasco, this is how I handled that site:

1. Logged into the website through my control panel. (Could have done it through FTP too.)

2. Deleted all files.

3. Replaced with HTML and/or PHP pages.

That’s it. Done. And, guess what? I will never have to “upgrade” the site ever again. It will never be vulnerable to any WordPress security flaws because it is not using WordPress. The site doesn’t store content in a database, so there are no worries about that either. If it were to get hacked, there’s no clean-up. I just delete the whole thing and re-upload the pages and I’m back in business.

So, if you’re using WordPress on your blog, you probably ought to upgrade it now. But, if you’re using WordPress for something like a mini-site, it’s a good time to reconsider whether using WordPress is the best option. If not, rather than going through yet another upgrade, maybe you ought to look at switching your site to HTML or PHP and giving WordPress the ol’ heave-ho.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 5th, 2009 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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