Not all WordPress sites face the same risk — and not all industries secure them equally. Our industry security rankings track average scores by sector, and the pattern is revealing.
The data
Every industry page in our index is built from real scans of sites in that sector over a 90-day window, with a minimum sample size to avoid noise. Each sector gets an average score out of 100.
The spread between the best and worst industries is significant — and it doesn't always match the sensitivity of the data those sites handle.
What the rankings show
A few patterns stand out across our data:
1. Regulated industries aren't automatically safer. Sectors with obvious compliance drivers (healthcare, finance) tend to score above average — but the gap is smaller than you'd expect. Compliance checklists often stop at "HTTPS is on" and miss the deeper issues like CSP configuration and version disclosure.
2. Service businesses cluster in the middle. Agencies, consultants, and local service providers make up a huge share of WordPress installs, and their scores cluster tightly around the global average. They're not failing — but they're not differentiating on security either.
3. The bottom of the table is where the risk concentrates. The lowest-scoring industries tend to be ones where the site is a brochure rather than a business system. That's exactly the profile attackers target: low security, high uptime, no one watching the logs.
Why industry matters
Industry is a useful lens for two reasons:
- Benchmarking. If you run a dental practice, comparing yourself to "the average WordPress site" is less useful than comparing yourself to other dental practices. Our industry pages do exactly that.
- Prioritization. If your industry scores poorly, the cost of being above average is low — a few hours of hardening work puts you ahead of most competitors.
Check your industry
The full rankings are live on the WordPress Security Index. Find your sector, see the average score and sample size, then run a free scan to see where your site lands relative to your peers.
Methodology
Industry rankings are computed from scans in the trailing 90-day window, grouped by the site's declared industry. Only sectors with a minimum of 5 scanned sites are published. Scores are the same 0–100 scale used for the global index. All data is anonymized and aggregated.