With the recent news that Newfold Digital (the company that owns multiple web services providers including Network Solutions and Bluehost) has purchased Yoast SEO, the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress, the often asked question of whether or not it is important to know who owns the plugins you use on your WordPress site was raised once again in the context of Search Engine Optimization.

In the ‘wild and wooly’ world of open source and the WordPress.org universe, it is an important question, and while the issue some may be concerned about in the instance of Yoast may be focused on who may have access to your site traffic data, it’s an important question in general.

There have been cases of companies buying established plugins and then inserting malware, as discussed in this BleepingComputer article from 2017, and that is a very serious issue indeed. But regardless the severity of the risk, it is important to keep tabs on the plugins you use on your WordPress site.

The people who run the WordPress Plugin Repository do an excellent job of keeping tabs on the status of the thousands of plugins it offers, and removes those with security risks, along with providing information on both who the plugin’s developer is and how current the latest version of the plugin is. But by the very nature of curation, its activity is more reactive than proactive, so it is not enough to rely on their work to help ensure your plugins are safe and up to date.

So, it’s a good idea to have the ‘big three’ of WordPress administration in place: Backups, Updates, and Security.

That’s a big topic in itself, and we’ll share the tools we use and recommend in future posts.