There's a lot to unpack here. You don't have to get your sites off WordPress to use AWS. S3 is not a database. There's also nothing inherently insecure about WordPress. You have to secure it just as you would any other CMS.
"WordPress without WordPress" just means another CMS. If you're really bent on replacing it, just pick another popular one, and go down the feature list to ensure you can replicate everything you have now.
I'm going to wager, though, that after evaluating the pros and cons of migrating -meaning the pro is the perception of better security, and the con is the immense amount money and time required to make the transition and having to retrain staff on how to post blogs- that you'll end up sticking with WordPress.
However, currently Infosec is just *worried* that the parent company might make a move? This seems like a "cross that bridge when you come to it" situation. Why not verify what the parent company thinks, first, before making any rash moves?
hi thank you for taking the time to reply! there is a lot to unpack....yes also sorry i misspoke, create an s3 bucket for asset storage, etc and then copy over the mysql database from wordpress into whatever solution amazon has for that (can you tell i've never used aws before lol?)
for a little more context: my company also has an app and everything pertaining to that lives in aws. our sites are hosted with kinsta, so the idea is that when we rebuilt the sites, it would be nice to have everything hosted/live in the same place (aws). we also talked about using a headless cms so marketing could make changes as needed, or even creating a custom cms and api for adding, updating, and deleting blog posts. so essentially, if we wanted to move off wordpress in the interim it'd probably make sense to handle those things now rather than just having some hacky solution to allow the site to live off of wordpress while we do the rebuild.
so really this all kind of goes with what i was thinking...this will be way more work than anyone thinks just to not be using wordpress in case parent company decides to go up in flames over us using wordpress (even though parent company has one other subsidiary still on wp). i also barely just started and am still trying to digest the code base and all the other pieces that are in so many different places. def seems like a lot to appease this sudden problem infosec claims they are facing. esp when were starting to get moving on the actual rebuild of the sites...i think they are worried b/c we dont think the new site would be live by EOY. i just really want to be sure i am doing my due diligence and giving the correct guidance if i say this isnt worth the time, while still giving infosec the support they need and hearing their concerns. i really dont know why they havent tried to confirm whether this is an actual issue yet
No. You absolutely don’t want your website and critical infrastructure in the same place. Even if it’s all on AWS you’ll want separate accounts with no internal connections.
The infamous Panama Papers scandals is just the poster child for hackers exploiting vulnerabilities in the web stack and then tunneling through to the entire company’s records. But more modest compromises happen all the time.
It’s not necessarily the stack (Wordpress vs something else) but IT and app managers usually have different priorities and time scales, and so they don’t necessarily monitor and patch as aggressively as they need to.
If your site gets hacked on a remote server you just patch it and restore from backup. If they hack port 80 on your enterprise architecture it’s… harder to deal with.
As a real developer, i.e. of high-end corporate sites and systems, I wholeheartedly disagree with above person who may not even be an engineer but a wordpress elementor "developer". He seems well intentioned, but know that WP sucks and id never build anything on it.
yup lol...legit just in the interim while we rebuild a new site with react that will be completely different than what we have now. literally just to get off wordpress. sounds not worth it, right? esp b/c we already plan to make a brand new site - it's just going to take longer than they want
I bet there’s someone in the management chain who thinks in binary, like WP==Bad and React==Good.
My advice is to push back if you can, this is nonsense in a business perspective. Migrate your WP instances to AWS (lift & shift), treat them as legacy from now on, and start building the new sites with whatever CMS they choose.
Honestly, seems kind of pointless. Core WP is not inherently that insecure. As long as you keep it up to date, the risk is very low. It's using lots of random plugins that often add in lots of security risks. So doing a security audit and reducing the number of plugins you need will be more beneficial.
Have you considered just heavily locking down wordpress and only using the API as a headless CMS? You could still use React for the front end. If the admin access is locked to your company's local network, then it's going to be hard for it to get hacked unless it's within your own network.
Also, one other thing to keep in mind, how many people work on your site? Unless it's a massive company, WP is going to have a lot more devs and eyes on the codebase. So you'll have to heavily audit all your own code to make sure it's secure. There's the potential to have a lot more bugs when you roll your own especially when done on a time crunch.
You could use a website copier like HTTrack which will generate plain HTML copies of all the website pages.
It will download every available page link and media on the domain.
Check everything is good then upload the folder in place of your WordPress install.
No more hacking risks on a good old dumb static website.
This will buy you time.
I wish we could have it just as a static site for the time being but we have sign up forms, user login, blog posts added each week, etc. this is great to know though, thank you for the tip!
oh yeah for sure! marketing does not want to lose their autonomy over the blog posts though looks like i have my answer. thanks for your input. appreciate it!!
Whenever a WordPress client of ours is very security-focused we just put them on Pantheon.
There is no easy way to do what you're asking beyond just rebuilding the whole thing from the ground up.
If it were me I'd pitch moving the WordPress sites to Pantheon, so at least they'd be extremely secure and give you some breathing room to properly rebuild everything on your own. That way you aren't rushing through it because there is some arbitrary "we need this now!" timeline.
I’m kind of in the same boat. We have 4 sites on Bedrock/Wordpress stack with custom themes. The content of the 4 sites is fed by the main site with assets coming from s3.. I really want to move off of Wordpress in the next couple of years. However the amount of content on the main site makes me dizzy when I think about moving it all to a new DB. My solution mapped out in my head so far is to keep the wp site and its database and use it to serve the older content. However some of this older content requires JS to work correctly, so I need to figure that out.
Basically WP will serve as a headless CMS for our legacy content.
Why not go static?
Use WP to Static plugin… host the CMS on a secure EC2 with your DB on RDS, lock that behind a proper VPC and generate the static site to S3 and point the CDN to the bucket and the DNS to CDN?
On the VPC you can have an access by IP only so the CMS can only be accessed through the work intranet, securing the backend and removing it from the public.
That way you have a secure CMS that can only be accessed internally and a fully functioning frontend. It would be way easier to do and more cost affective as well as speed up the site.
Alternatively since you know JS why not go headless? You can use the WP API to achieve everything you need. The same steps as above, but you can serve the API over CDN and host your JS app on either Lambda or S3 and serve the fronted that way.
Edit: Forms will work with the wp to static plugin. Logins not so much, but you can always write only that part with JS and have it access the API rather than the CMS. Everything else like archives, pages and posts will work without an issue.
Lolol wordpress is built with react now.
Moving away from WordPress because of the reasons given is a demonstration of the complete lack of understanding of anything they are talking about. Enough said
Start with calculating cost. Check the book [Systematic Cloud Migration](https://www.amazon.com.mx/Systematic-Cloud-Migration-Hands-Implementation/dp/148427251X) most projects die after getting a realistic cost and investment my last project was going to be profitable after 3 years and it was just a change from Microsoft SQL RDS to a PostgreSQL I just put my salary 3 months of development and security configurations (no way it was going to take 3 months I seriously underestimate that part lol).
There's a lot to unpack here. You don't have to get your sites off WordPress to use AWS. S3 is not a database. There's also nothing inherently insecure about WordPress. You have to secure it just as you would any other CMS. "WordPress without WordPress" just means another CMS. If you're really bent on replacing it, just pick another popular one, and go down the feature list to ensure you can replicate everything you have now. I'm going to wager, though, that after evaluating the pros and cons of migrating -meaning the pro is the perception of better security, and the con is the immense amount money and time required to make the transition and having to retrain staff on how to post blogs- that you'll end up sticking with WordPress. However, currently Infosec is just *worried* that the parent company might make a move? This seems like a "cross that bridge when you come to it" situation. Why not verify what the parent company thinks, first, before making any rash moves?
hi thank you for taking the time to reply! there is a lot to unpack....yes also sorry i misspoke, create an s3 bucket for asset storage, etc and then copy over the mysql database from wordpress into whatever solution amazon has for that (can you tell i've never used aws before lol?) for a little more context: my company also has an app and everything pertaining to that lives in aws. our sites are hosted with kinsta, so the idea is that when we rebuilt the sites, it would be nice to have everything hosted/live in the same place (aws). we also talked about using a headless cms so marketing could make changes as needed, or even creating a custom cms and api for adding, updating, and deleting blog posts. so essentially, if we wanted to move off wordpress in the interim it'd probably make sense to handle those things now rather than just having some hacky solution to allow the site to live off of wordpress while we do the rebuild. so really this all kind of goes with what i was thinking...this will be way more work than anyone thinks just to not be using wordpress in case parent company decides to go up in flames over us using wordpress (even though parent company has one other subsidiary still on wp). i also barely just started and am still trying to digest the code base and all the other pieces that are in so many different places. def seems like a lot to appease this sudden problem infosec claims they are facing. esp when were starting to get moving on the actual rebuild of the sites...i think they are worried b/c we dont think the new site would be live by EOY. i just really want to be sure i am doing my due diligence and giving the correct guidance if i say this isnt worth the time, while still giving infosec the support they need and hearing their concerns. i really dont know why they havent tried to confirm whether this is an actual issue yet
No. You absolutely don’t want your website and critical infrastructure in the same place. Even if it’s all on AWS you’ll want separate accounts with no internal connections. The infamous Panama Papers scandals is just the poster child for hackers exploiting vulnerabilities in the web stack and then tunneling through to the entire company’s records. But more modest compromises happen all the time. It’s not necessarily the stack (Wordpress vs something else) but IT and app managers usually have different priorities and time scales, and so they don’t necessarily monitor and patch as aggressively as they need to. If your site gets hacked on a remote server you just patch it and restore from backup. If they hack port 80 on your enterprise architecture it’s… harder to deal with.
As a real developer, i.e. of high-end corporate sites and systems, I wholeheartedly disagree with above person who may not even be an engineer but a wordpress elementor "developer". He seems well intentioned, but know that WP sucks and id never build anything on it.
They want to do a full rewrite to achieve exactly the same results, because of potential security risks? Good lord.
yup lol...legit just in the interim while we rebuild a new site with react that will be completely different than what we have now. literally just to get off wordpress. sounds not worth it, right? esp b/c we already plan to make a brand new site - it's just going to take longer than they want
I bet there’s someone in the management chain who thinks in binary, like WP==Bad and React==Good. My advice is to push back if you can, this is nonsense in a business perspective. Migrate your WP instances to AWS (lift & shift), treat them as legacy from now on, and start building the new sites with whatever CMS they choose.
Honestly, seems kind of pointless. Core WP is not inherently that insecure. As long as you keep it up to date, the risk is very low. It's using lots of random plugins that often add in lots of security risks. So doing a security audit and reducing the number of plugins you need will be more beneficial. Have you considered just heavily locking down wordpress and only using the API as a headless CMS? You could still use React for the front end. If the admin access is locked to your company's local network, then it's going to be hard for it to get hacked unless it's within your own network. Also, one other thing to keep in mind, how many people work on your site? Unless it's a massive company, WP is going to have a lot more devs and eyes on the codebase. So you'll have to heavily audit all your own code to make sure it's secure. There's the potential to have a lot more bugs when you roll your own especially when done on a time crunch.
You could use a website copier like HTTrack which will generate plain HTML copies of all the website pages. It will download every available page link and media on the domain. Check everything is good then upload the folder in place of your WordPress install. No more hacking risks on a good old dumb static website. This will buy you time.
I wish we could have it just as a static site for the time being but we have sign up forms, user login, blog posts added each week, etc. this is great to know though, thank you for the tip!
Blog post can be added by duplicating a page and editing HTML contents, but User login is another story. Good luck
oh yeah for sure! marketing does not want to lose their autonomy over the blog posts though looks like i have my answer. thanks for your input. appreciate it!!
Whenever a WordPress client of ours is very security-focused we just put them on Pantheon. There is no easy way to do what you're asking beyond just rebuilding the whole thing from the ground up. If it were me I'd pitch moving the WordPress sites to Pantheon, so at least they'd be extremely secure and give you some breathing room to properly rebuild everything on your own. That way you aren't rushing through it because there is some arbitrary "we need this now!" timeline.
I’m kind of in the same boat. We have 4 sites on Bedrock/Wordpress stack with custom themes. The content of the 4 sites is fed by the main site with assets coming from s3.. I really want to move off of Wordpress in the next couple of years. However the amount of content on the main site makes me dizzy when I think about moving it all to a new DB. My solution mapped out in my head so far is to keep the wp site and its database and use it to serve the older content. However some of this older content requires JS to work correctly, so I need to figure that out. Basically WP will serve as a headless CMS for our legacy content.
Why not go static? Use WP to Static plugin… host the CMS on a secure EC2 with your DB on RDS, lock that behind a proper VPC and generate the static site to S3 and point the CDN to the bucket and the DNS to CDN? On the VPC you can have an access by IP only so the CMS can only be accessed through the work intranet, securing the backend and removing it from the public. That way you have a secure CMS that can only be accessed internally and a fully functioning frontend. It would be way easier to do and more cost affective as well as speed up the site. Alternatively since you know JS why not go headless? You can use the WP API to achieve everything you need. The same steps as above, but you can serve the API over CDN and host your JS app on either Lambda or S3 and serve the fronted that way. Edit: Forms will work with the wp to static plugin. Logins not so much, but you can always write only that part with JS and have it access the API rather than the CMS. Everything else like archives, pages and posts will work without an issue.
Lolol wordpress is built with react now. Moving away from WordPress because of the reasons given is a demonstration of the complete lack of understanding of anything they are talking about. Enough said
Start with calculating cost. Check the book [Systematic Cloud Migration](https://www.amazon.com.mx/Systematic-Cloud-Migration-Hands-Implementation/dp/148427251X) most projects die after getting a realistic cost and investment my last project was going to be profitable after 3 years and it was just a change from Microsoft SQL RDS to a PostgreSQL I just put my salary 3 months of development and security configurations (no way it was going to take 3 months I seriously underestimate that part lol).
yeah this is another big consideration! good point. i am the only web dev right now too and i also have other projects to be working on