Two tools protect WordPress sites from vulnerabilities. xCloud's free scanner flags insecure plugins and lets you update them directly. Patchstack Site Security Pro costs $2 per month per site and patches vulnerabilities before official releases, catching issues xCloud misses.
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If you have a website, security is something you should be thinking about all the time. But if you're like me, security isn't something you want to think about all the time. Fortunately, we have computers to help us with that. And in this video, I'm going to show you what tools xCloud makes available to look for vulnerabilities in your website and how to fix them. Let's get started. We're here at the xCloud dashboard and you can see I have 2 servers with 6 sites and 1 vulnerable site. So I'm going to click right there and you'll see that it takes me to the All Teams page and then the vulnerable sites. And here it is listed. So I'm going to click one issue here and it takes me to the vulnerability scan page under the WordPress menu. For this site. Now you can see that it was last checked, uh, 20 hours ago. So I'm going to hit refresh real quick, and now it says 1 second ago. Uh, you can see core is up to date, and down below themes are all up to date, but we have this insecure plugin. Uh, it says right here it's insecure. You can click to get details, and it tells you about what what's going on with it. And then on the right, you can choose to update or ignore. I don't recommend ignoring, but if you can, if you click update here, you don't even have to go into WordPress. I'm going to because I want to show you that it's right here. Now, I want to be clear that I went and found an insecure version of this plugin just for this video. There is not currently a problem out in the wild. You can see the version is 6.7.7, where here it's 7.1.0.2. So don't panic if you're running All-in-One WP Migration. But I want to point out, before I update that, I want to point out that you have another option as well. What I've just described is the free offering from xCloud, and it's pretty good. When this was found, I got an email and it let me know, and I was able to log in and do something about it. But I want to point out that you also have available Site Security Pro from Patchstack. I want to talk to you a little bit about Patchstack before I go into it too far. Patchstack keeps an eye on all the plugins in the world and the themes and WordPress core and can let you know when there's a problem with anything you want, really. Which doesn't sound a lot different from what xCloud does, but they have a secret superpower. And that is mitigation. Patchstack has the ability to hotfix a plugin and install it for you before there's even a release of the actual plugin with the problem resolved. So you don't have to wait for however many days or weeks it takes for the plugin to, to make a fix. Patchstack takes care of that for you and you are immediately secured. So let me show you how that works. So let's take a look at setting it up. Uh, it's $2 per month per website, which is not very much. So I'm going to click that. You can turn off this banner if you decide not to do it by clicking this. So I'm going to pay $2 a month. Tab, and it says there are 9 vulnerabilities. Now before, what we were told is that there was one plugin with a vulnerability, and you can see that most of the vulnerabilities are all in that one plugin, but PatchTag found an additional problem that the other scanner did not find. At the top here, we can show how many, we can sort them. We can sort by priority. We can choose to see only the exploited ones. And so while there's a security problem in the migration plugin, the other one, it has not been exploited in the wild. This one has been. And then also we can see which ones have a fix available. And in this case, it's all of them. But back up at the top, you can see if you search by software, you can see all everything that's going on here and see that these two are the ones with problems. But interestingly, you can find out if there is a security problem in either your database software or PHP, which was not listed on the other page. And then there's protection and there's some information about what's available. I just turned this on, so I haven't blocked any threats yet. Go back to software. You can enable updates or auto-updates for vulnerable only core plugins or themes. I'm going to turn that on. There we go. Auto-update settings have been received, have been saved. So we need to update these two plugins, and there's two different ways we could do it. We can just go right into WordPress and do it there, but if you don't have it already up, you can just go to Updates here under the WordPress menu, and here they are, and you can see which ones need updating. So I'm gonna click this one and this one and click Update. And there we are. Additionally, there's now a new one. It's a must-use plugin for Patchstack, which makes sense. I'm going to reload over here just to see. And yep, they're updated. So let's go back to Vulnerability Scan now. 9 vulnerabilities resolved. Excellent. No known vulnerabilities detected. So there we are. Because this is a, a shorter video, I can't let it run for days and days and have it automatically fix things and show you that. But PatchStack is running now all the time and can, uh, auto-update plugins that need it and patch it themselves. So, uh, we've shown you two options here. There's the free xCloud version, which works very well. Uh, but then there's also the Site Security Pro. Which does a few more things. So here's hoping that, uh, you don't need these actually, because it would be really great if you never had vulnerabilities at all.
