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The WP Minute brings you news about WordPress in under 5 minutes -- every week! Follow The WP Minute for the WordPress headlines before you get lost in the headlines. Hosted by Matt Medeiros, host of The Matt Report podcast.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovac. Today's episode features a segment from my discussion with MeliPress founder and CEO Robert Abella. Robert stopped by to discuss the results of the annual Melipress Security Survey and offered tips for keeping your WordPress website safe. Now you can catch the entire interview over on our WP Minute Plus channel. Visit the WPMinute.com for all the details.
Eric Karkovack (00:29)
so
What can you tell us about your annual survey? When did you start it, and what are you hoping to learn from it?
Robert Abela (00:36)
I'm not sure if it started in 2022 or 2023. We started honestly just for fun, as in not for fun, but it was a good idea to get an idea of what people are using, what plugins are they using, how they are keeping their website secure, especially with WordPress being a bit, unfortunately, always a bit in the limelight as an insecure platform, which is not, but it's portrayed so in the news.
So we started the survey and the idea behind it was for us to learn like why are our WordPress is portrayed So but also we realized that by knowing or understanding what people are using right now and what's working, what is not working hopefully and by publishing those results we and everyone else can learn from it, you know, so in fact originally it was for us to learn but now it's since we started it's basically also published as a blog post.
and people can see for themselves what's typical, what people are using, what's not, what works for some people, what's not. In fact, it goes almost hand in hand with this one. This year we started what we call the security stories or security wall where we published a number of use cases of people who were hacked and how they were hacked, et cetera. And I really believe that by publishing this type of information, people get a better understanding of
really secure WordPress is, how secure it can be, what can go wrong, what you should know, etc. Because from these numbers you start automatically, hopefully, instigate some curiosity in the users, in the readers, and then hopefully they'll do what they need to do to keep the website secure and learn as well. In fact, a common problem is that people usually feel overwhelmed, don't know what they need to do, and hopefully this server kind of like points them a bit into the right direction.
Eric Karkovack (02:15)
Now who would you say the audience is for that survey? Like who is the typical respondent? Is it is it more of a a professional or an end user?
Robert Abela (02:25)
It's a mix. fact, so first of all, we collected the results. This year we had 219 confirmed responses. Actually we had more, but we removed any duplicate ones. Also, since this is run by us as a commercial company, there are some questions which might obviously be a bit more like asking about activity logs, because we do logs of course. So we also...
took into consideration who is client or not and remove them to make sure this is as organic as possible. It's not biased. We've got the answers from in-person events like WordPress Europe, WordCamp Europe. We've got also through a number of online summits, third-party online summits, our own newsletter, also partners newsletter. In fact, more than half of the answers are not even our customers or our leads, which is good. So definitely.
It's a organic. Now in terms of user based, after seeing the results, it's a mix we have from agencies, developers, designers, but also business owners
Eric Karkovack (03:23)
Okay.
Robert Abela (03:24)
or representatives. And in general, they work across these type of websites, either a brand or corporate website, service websites, which are websites which provide the service, blogs and content sites such as news or something similar, membership.
sites, e-commerce and of course the rest.
Eric Karkovack (03:40)
So it sounds like you got a pretty good picture of the overall WordPress landscape. I did want to ask you about a c a few of the numbers that that came out, because there's some interesting stuff. so on average it seems like participants ranked security a seven point eight five out of ten on their on their concern scale. what does that mean to you and like how does it not a ten out of ten for everybody?
Robert Abela (04:02)
Yeah, there is a bit of nuance to that as well. In fact, because we're talking, it's a vast... the respondents, they come from different walks of life, different... they have different technical expertise. In fact, in the next coming weeks, we will be releasing more kind of like different types of survey answers based just for the technical people, for the non-technical. And you see, actually the concern, you see it's changing a lot. It's funny because...
Non-technical people. like I was so for example, if you compare designers developers So the global was seven point something concern but designers have seven point zero three concern but developers eight point two three, which is a bit higher and I don't know if it's I would have expected it the other way around because usually technical people Know what they need to do to to secure a website. So maybe they have a bit
less concern, a bit more confidence, where a designer who can design things but maybe they are not technical would have more concern because they don't know what they need to do. However, it's the other way around. So I would say maybe designers or the non-technical people, maybe they don't know what can go wrong or maybe it's also there is this idea, many people have this idea, unfortunately, that security is like a checkbox thing, you install a plugin once and I'm done. Maybe that could also be the
Eric Karkovack (05:21)
Yeah.
Robert Abela (05:21)
case. So it's...
You need to split it a bit more, as I said, technical people, non-technical, but it's very hard to read because I said I would expect the non-technical people to have a higher concert level. However, it's actually lower.