Last year, over 13,000 WordPress vulnerabilities were disclosed — more than double the year before. Security researchers found critical flaws in plugins used by millions of sites. Ransomware groups specifically target WordPress sites because of their predictable architecture and plugin attack surface.
If you run a WordPress site for your business, this is not a distant IT problem. It's a business risk sitting on your homepage.
Why WordPress Is a Hacker's Favorite Target
WordPress powers about 40% of all websites. That concentration makes it uniquely attractive to attackers — one exploit can be automated against millions of sites simultaneously.
Plugins are the #1 attack vector. There are 60,000+ plugins in the WordPress repository. A popular plugin with an unpatched vulnerability can compromise tens of thousands of sites overnight.
Themes carry similar risks. Premium themes from sketchy marketplaces often contain backdoors or vulnerable code.
WordPress core itself gets regular security patches, but updates break sites. So owners delay updating. 42% of hacked WordPress sites were running an outdated version at the time of compromise.
Shared hosting puts your site on a server with hundreds of others. When a neighboring site gets hacked, attackers sometimes pivot to others on the same server.
What a WordPress Hack Actually Looks Like
SEO spam injection
Hackers inject thousands of hidden links to pharmaceutical, gambling, or adult sites into your pages. Your Google rankings tank. Your customers see spam. Google blacklists your domain.
Redirect hacks
Visitors to your site are silently redirected to malicious sites. You don't see it because the redirect only fires for certain traffic patterns. Your organic traffic disappears mysteriously.
Phishing pages
Attackers create fake login pages on your domain and use them to harvest credentials from your visitors. You're now hosting a crime scene.
Crypto mining
Malicious JavaScript runs in your visitors' browsers, mining cryptocurrency using their CPU.
Ransomware
Rare for small sites, but it happens. Your entire site is encrypted and you're asked for payment.
Recovery from any of these: €200–€2,000+, plus days of downtime, plus the reputational damage.
The Plugin Treadmill
To secure WordPress, you need security plugins. But security plugins are also plugins — they expand your attack surface while trying to protect it.
- Annual subscriptions (€100–€300/yr each)
- Regular updates (which can break other plugins)
- Ongoing monitoring and configuration
- Firewall rules that sometimes block legitimate traffic
The Architectural Difference
No database exposed to the internet. WordPress has a database (MySQL) that plugins and themes talk to constantly. A static Next.js site has no database to inject into.
No PHP execution. WordPress runs PHP on every request. Next.js serves pre-built HTML files — a much smaller surface.
No plugin ecosystem. Dependencies are JavaScript packages managed explicitly by developers, not a marketplace of 60,000 options with varying quality.
Vercel's infrastructure handles security. DDoS protection, SSL, edge caching — all managed by Vercel's platform team.
No WordPress admin panel. Attackers love `/wp-admin` — it's a known URL, easy to brute-force. A Next.js site has no equivalent single point of failure.
What This Means for Your Business
The question isn't whether your WordPress site will be attacked. It will. The question is whether you want to spend time and money defending an architecture that was built for blogging, or move to something built for the modern web.
We migrate WordPress sites to Next.js at webvise.io. Fixed price, AI-assisted, fast turnaround. Your new site will have better performance, lower running costs, and a dramatically reduced attack surface.
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We migrate WordPress sites to Next.js — AI-assisted, fixed price, fast turnaround. Free audit included.