cPanel Mission Critical, Required WordPress Plugins

Some plugins for WordPress are required on cPanel Hosting for Mission Critical sites to improve security and auditability. These plugins will be installed by the Web Enablement team before your site is deployed on the service and must remain enabled for the duration of your hosting.

Shibboleth

The shibboleth plugin allows your users to log in with their Illinois.Edu NetID and password. Once the configuration has been tested and confirmed to work, we further recommend choosing the option to “Disable local WordPress logins.” This will prevent attackers from gaining access to your site by brute force password guessing.

Password Policy Manager

Password Policy Manager ensures any local passwords within a WordPress site conform to minimum password strength requirements. Even if your site uses Shibboleth, each account has a local password that could be vulnerable to attack under some configurations. By enforcing strong passwords for all accounts, the risk is reduced.

Simple History

Simple History logs changes made to your site (adding a plugin, deleting a plugin, creating a user, etc) along with the date/time and user who made the changes. This can be useful in troubleshooting problems with a site, as well as for tracking down how malicious actors gained access to a site and what actions they took in the case of a compromise.


Keywords:
mission-critical, mission critical, WordPress, plugins, security 
Doc ID:
165107
Owned by:
Julieanne C. in University of Illinois Technology Services
Created:
2026-10-26
Updated:
2026-10-27
Sites:
University of Illinois Technology Services