I was passing a few conversations back and forth with my team in the past week about the growth of WordPress in light of the challenges of security and the ever-increasing target painted on the back of our collective ecosystem and it hit me that the WordPress security industry might just be one of the best points of entry if you’re looking to build a business in a growing niche market.
Makes sense, right? With the recent global scare related to the super botnet that we’ve all talked about (and tons of blog posts) there is no surprise that I’m seeing more and more security-related products and plugins pop into our inbox every single day.
In fact, even within the last week we’ve seen a huge uptick in our Submit News inbox about X, Y, and Z service that boasts a solution that we must cover.
The problem is that I’m not a WordPress security expert – I know just as much as the next developer who’s been working in WordPress for a while, but it’s not my speciality, unlike companies like Sucuri Software who apparently eat, sleep, and drink this stuff.
As a result, we’ve been very hesitant to showcase many of the new companies and plugins and we feel we have the right and responsibility to do that because we simply don’t know if we’re advertising a bunch of bull or a legit business.
For example, let’s take one submission that came in within the last 24 hours, shall we? Wordfence, which says that it’s the “best security plugin in the business” – I have no clue whether that’s true or not and I don’t have the expertise to check their claim.
Is it legit, or not? (Perhaps Sucuri could offer some ideas here).
Even I would love some idea as to how best to qualify and clarify the value propositions outside of the marketing verbiage as it’s hard for me to make a decision to try it out, especially with the anxiety of “trying it out” which might actually further compromise my site.
You simply do not know whether or not the software or solution is up to snuff. In fact, let me be honest, I’ve never “tested” or even qualified Sucuri’s solution either but have based my entire confidence on the fact that I’m buddies with Dre and their team and they’ve been endorsed by people that I also trust (some big name players within the WordPress community too). And as a result, as we move forward with even this blog they would be the leader for providing those solutions for us.
So, to loop this all back around, the point is that the security industry (already a multi-billion dollar industry at large) is going to be going through a tremendous growth period for the WordPress market in the next few years and we’re only going to see more and more competitors and solutions come into play.
It’s a good day to be in the WordPress security market but that doesn’t mean that all solutions are the same in quality nor affordability. How do you go about choosing which services and solutions to use?
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