Awesome Motive Is Claiming That Sucuri Is the Best WordPress Security in 2024 Based on Features It Doesn’t Contain
While doing research for a post, we found that the much maligned Awesome Motive was giving out, no surprise, highly misleading advice to make money for themselves. On one of their websites, they claimed that the Sucuri plugin is the best WordPress security plugin in 2024. In justifying that, they started this way:
Many small businesses consider Sucuri to be the best WordPress plugin for improving your site’s security in 2024, and for good reasons. The Sucuri WordPress plugin has all the security features you need to audit and keep your site protected against malware, brute force login attacks, DDoS, and any other security threats.
The problem with that is that the plugin doesn’t offer protection against malware, DDoS, and “any other security threats”. Brute force attacks are not even happening, so protection against that doesn’t matter. They went on to write this:
The Sucuri security plugin also boosts WordPress sites by reducing page loading time and server load, making it easier for visitors to navigate your website. This can go a long way in reducing time-related bounce rates and also improving your SEO.
What they are describing there is a feature of an unrelated service that Sucuri offers, which doesn’t require their WordPress plugin. The same is true for the other features mentioned that the plugin doesn’t offer. The reason for claiming it is the best is explained by the link they included to Sucuri, which is an affiliate link. So this is really an ad. Amazingly, Awesome Motive doesn’t even disclose their affiliate marketing despite being legally required to do so. They also linked to a page with a list of the best WordPress plugins, which started with Awesome Motive’s own plugins and then listed plugins with affiliate links.
Sucuri barely supports the plugin anymore, with them even failing to update the plugin to list it as being compatible with WordPress 6.3 during its time as the current version of WordPress.
That Awesome Motive are giving advice based on affiliate revenue is further confirmed by the second choice for best security plugin. While their page claimed they were listing the best plugins in 2024, you can tell that isn’t true since the second plugin is listed as iThemes Security, despite that being rebranded to Solid Security last year (another plugin is listed with a name last used in 2022). They start their explanation of why that is number two with this:
iThemes Security is a WordPress security plugin from the same people who’ve brought us the popular BackupBuddy plugin. It includes a simple and clean user interface as well as tons of options.
Citing BackupBuddy there is stunning, as that plugin had a zero-day vulnerability in it not that long ago. More stunning when you consider that iThemes Security didn’t protect against the vulnerability despite claiming to protect against zero-days. No surprise the link for that plugin is also an affiliate link.
The plugin listed as the sixth best was last updated four years ago and doesn’t even work anymore.
What is missing from the list are two of the best plugins. In our testing, the best free firewall plugin for WordPress is NinjaFirewall. And our own Plugin Vulnerabilities Firewall provides even more protection than that.