Biden White House Sticks with WordPress for Website Relaunch
President Joe Biden took office today and unveiled a new whitehouse.gov that has been relaunched on WordPress. The previous administration switched from Drupal to WordPress in 2017, and technologists working with the Biden administration decided to stick with the same CMS.
In keeping with the multilingual and accessibility features implemented on the Biden-Harris transition team website, whitehouse.gov launched with toggles for contrast and font size, along with a Spanish language switcher. The relaunched site also includes an accessibility statement with a commitment from the administration to work towards conforming to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.1, level AA criteria.
Much of the content and design from the transition website has been preserved. The transition site now forwards to whitehouse.gov, while links to the previous administration’s pages land on a 404 page with a link to archived presidential websites.
Savvy observers might notice that the typography has been updated from the transition site, flipping the Mercury and Decimal typefaces. Hoefler&Co, the typeface design firm that created these typefaces for Biden’s 2020 campaign, tweeted about how “the serif Mercury felt more like the voice of the institution.” The sans-serif Decimal functions more in a supporting role on the site.
Web professionals kicked the tires a bit and noticed the site is putting up fairly decent Lighthouse scores.
Under the hood, code snoopers noticed an advertisement for the U.S. Digital Service (USDS), the group of technologists who maintain many of the federal government’s public-facing digital services.
In addition to the message from USDS, the site’s source code includes a link to the US government’s analytics program at analytics.usa.gov. Tim Lowden, who manages the federal government’s aggregated web analytics initiative, said this data has been made available for the first time since late 2017.
The analytics service records more than 2.5 billion pageviews across federal government websites each month. The data is available to the public, but it does not track individuals, and anonymizes the IP addresses of visitors. It shows information for visitors’ devices, browsers, operating systems, and location broken down into cities and countries. Many of those visiting the site today are from countries other than the U.S.
13 Comments
I can’t imagine how tough it is to secure the WordPress site.
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It’s not tough at all, if you know what you’re doing. It’s the same as securing any other CMS out there.
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If you are super security focused I have a foolproof method:
ssh into your server as root, and runchattr -R +i public_html/
This changes all file and directory file attributes to immutable, meaning the files cannot be changed, added to, or deleted. Since pretty much all exploits rely on the ability to add or modify files on your server its pretty effective. When you want to run plugin or core updates you just have to shell in and remove the attribute.
chattr -R -i public_html/
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Boom 💥
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I’m a bit surprised they go with decoupling WordPress. That would have created a layer of separation with the CMS (can be more secure) and would help with the server loads with the 2.5 billions views. Just a thought.
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Not actually that hard to secure a WordPress site, just gotta have some basic competence. The corker is taking away write access to the fs, though keeping themes and plugins current, and keeping to good plugins and themes, helps a lot.
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WordPress is crazy good platform, I don’t know why people raise these issues.
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I truly love WordPress and I give it a (five stars) rate because it is simpler and good to use.
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I am very dependant on many plugins. Almost all my WordPress site that use many plugins experience being attacked by url injection, adding lots of index paged written in korean, chinese, etc.
My other wordpress sites that are just for blogging, without any additional plugins, stay healthy.
I think Ciprian and Brian are right.
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People, stop running Lighthouse tests locally or throw powerful VMs from GTMetrix. Use web.dev or PageSpeed insights and get lab data that is closer to the real world. Performance scores aren’t that high, people don’t use dev desktop machines and wired internet like the place from which you run your benchmarks!
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Awesome post! Stay well, everyone. This is interesting: https://www.fastcompany.com/90596638/under-trump-whitehouse-gov-was-a-disaster-bidens-team-revamped-it-in-6-weeks
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WordPress still remains the best CMS on the market. SEO-friendly, flexible, and quite performant compared with its competitors.
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