Clients come to us for our expertise in WordPress Web design. Some clients want us to handle everything while others want to have the ability to make any changes they desire. Even when we give clients the ability to make those changes, we try to give them advice that will help them to avoid problems.

Our thought is that it is truly their Web site so we have to allow them to make those changes. If the changes cause problems, they’ll rely on us to fix the problems. Fixing those problems will likely cost them more than simply asking us to make changes in the first place.

Recently just such an issue came up. A client contacted us because their shopping cart wasn’t functioning properly. Products weren’t staying in the cart and other products couldn’t be removed from the cart. At first glance, we also noticed that their pages were not being loaded securely. While this could be related to the problem, it was very concerning to us that the e-commerce data wasn’t properly secured.

We can only guess that the client had also noticed that the store wasn’t secured as there was a WordPress plugin installed related to SSL security. It wasn’t something that was installed by us so it was time to investigate this plugin. At the top of the plugin page was the warning below.

Each plugin included in the WordPress repository also includes some basic stats on updates, compatibility and popularity. As shown in the screenshot at right, this particular plugin hadn’t been updated in more than four years. In the WordPress world, that is ancient history!

As soon as this plugin was disabled, the shopping cart started functioning properly. There were still security issues with the site to be resolved, but the initial problem had been resolved. Unfortunately in trying to fix the security issues, the client had created more problems and yet the site still wasn’t secure.

We did find the root cause of the security issues and got them fixed. Now, the e-commerce functions on the site are working as designed and shoppers can enter their payment data with peace of mind on a secure site.