GDPR has been a hot topic here at Pingala Media. We’ve been working with our clients to assist them in becoming compliant over the last few weeks. We’ve been fixing forms as well as advising on future changes which may be needed.
We host numerous WP sites, and as the WP developer here it’s my job to keep on top of these things. I’ve been following development of the latest releases of WordPress for some time now and this is by far the most exciting one I’ve seen. WordPress, is now GDPR compliant out of the box. Yep, you heard it right.
Is it my site up to date?
If you’re a customer paying for a WordPress maintenance contracts, you will have received this update already and probably not even noticed! It’s a big update which added a number of GDPR related things to WordPress core, all of which can be seen here. The list is long, but should take about 10 minutes to see what they’ve done.
What about plugins?
This is a core update, meaning it’s still up to third party plugins such as WooCommerce to handle the GDPR compliance on their side of things. If you run custom plugins, you’d need to contact the developers to ensure they make them GDPR compliant.
How can I become GDPR compliant?
If you’re not on a maintenance contract, the chances are your site is out of date. In order to update WordPress core to the latest, GDPR compliant version, we’d need to update everything. WP core, plugins and themes (If themes need updating of course). We can’t just update core as it is likely to break with plugins not built for the newest version. We’d also need to factor in the time we’d need to fix anything should it all go Pete Tong.
We’ve recently made a deal with a developer of a GDPR compliance WordPress plugin, which handles a number of third party plugins. With this, your WooCommerce installation, contact forms, Google Analytics, and several more third party addons can all be GDPR compliant.
This is why we offer WordPress maintenance contracts. Maintenance contracts ensure your site is kept up to date, is always online and is secure. The maintenance contracts also cover bug fixes should anything break in the process.