Trend Update: Banks Adopting WordPress?

• May 4, 2015
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This month’s influx of WordPress security issues spanning from the CMS itself to the plugins that run it render it relatively counterintuitive that such a platform would be ideal for banking.

WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, however, has released a statement on his blog that presents the issue in a different way,

“There’s probably not a ton of benefit to having the online banking / billpay / etc portion of a bank’s website on WordPress, however there is no reason you couldn’t run the front-end and marketing side of the site on WordPress, and in fact you’d be leveraging WordPress’ strength as a content management platform that is flexible, customizable, and easy to update and maintain.”

Food for thought, right?

What’s interesting, though, is that he also cited the names of 10 banks that are indeed running on WordPress. They join the ranks of a multitude of other high-profile, high-powered institutions that are. Facebook, for example, runs on WordPress. NASA runs on WordPress. Reuters runs on WordPress.

You get the idea.

If they can do it, we can do it

Mullenweg acknowledged this month’s security chaos and the obvious importance of a bank’s security. He pressed how vital it was to stay consistent with your system updates, as well as plugins, and suggested maintaining robust passwords for all administrative accounts.

“The issue isn’t whether WordPress is a appropriate platform for building a banking site — it is — but whether or not the person asking the question can muster the expertise and resources to do it successfully,” Mullenweg added.

The statement brings about a relevant point, which is that if banks, possessing more valuable information than perhaps any other public institution and thus most probably targeted at the highest level by those with ill intent, are able to utilize WordPress to safeguard said information, what valid excuse do we have as bloggers, business owners and site administrators as a whole for not properly protecting our own?