The 2015 WordPress Security Survey Results are out

To bring a close to 2015 we conducted a WordPress security survey. We sent a broadcast to our community and 7,375 members responded by completing what was a long and comprehensive survey.

Firstly, a big thanks to the thousands of WordPress community members who took the time out of their busy schedules to complete this survey. We appreciate it and we hope you find the results useful in your daily work with WordPress and in your decision making.

We are very excited today to officially announce the results. You can find the full results of our security survey in our WordPress Security Learning Center.

Methodology

To conduct the survey we formed a team of internal staff combined with external consultants who have experience with industry surveys.

We put together what started off as a very long list of questions. We gradually whittled that down to what we thought were the most important questions that would give us a true picture of the state of WordPress security and would provide some surprising industry insights.

When one conducts a survey, the data isn’t truly meaningful unless you get enough responses. For example, if we only received 10 responses to a question about whether you’ve been hacked, the respondents might have all been hacked through coincidence. To make the survey useful, we needed to get enough responses to achieve statistical significance. That is, we needed a large enough sample size to give us a true picture of the state of WordPress security.

We received 7,375 responses. With the high number of respondents we received, we have achieved statistical significance. This makes the data valuable for bloggers, journalists and others looking for an authoritative source of data on WordPress security. It provides a true snapshot into the state of WordPress security and the community’s views on security issues affecting WordPress.

The survey was conducted using Survey Monkey. Their platform gave us the ability to analyze the results in various ways and they include the ability to tell us whether the results to a particular question are statistically significant.

We encourage you to republish the data and incorporate it into your own works. We simply ask that you mention Wordfence as the source and provide a link to the original security survey for your reader’s reference.

Thanks again to all who participated. You have helped create a valuable resource for the WordPress community.

Once again, you can find the full results of the 2015 WordPress Security Survey here…

This project is part of our ongoing WordPress Security Learning Center project to help the WordPress community learn about security.