Improving your WordPress plugin CRA compliance score doesn’t have to be overwhelming.
At CRA Compliance Suite, we help developers quickly identify and fix the most common compliance gaps with automated tools and actionable insights. These five quick wins can dramatically improve your compliance score in just a few hours.
1. Update Your Dependencies Immediately
Outdated dependencies are the number one compliance issue we see in WordPress plugins.
Security vulnerabilities can exist not only in the code you write but also in the libraries you import, making dependency management critical for CRA compliance. Every outdated dependency in your plugin represents a potential security vulnerability and a compliance violation, particularly if known CVEs exist for the outdated versions.
Run our automated dependency scanner to identify all outdated packages in your plugin, including both direct dependencies listed in your composer.json or package.json and transitive dependencies that your libraries depend on. The CRA requires using only supported, security-patched components, meaning you cannot ship with dependencies that have reached end-of-life or have known unpatched vulnerabilities. Update all dependencies to their latest stable versions, carefully testing functionality after each major update to ensure compatibility.
Set up automated alerts for new releases.
Use tools like Dependabot, Renovate, or our integrated monitoring system so you’re immediately notified when updates are available. This single action often improves compliance scores by 30-40% because dependency vulnerabilities typically represent the largest category of findings in security scans.
2. Generate Your SBOM in Under 5 Minutes
A Software Bill of Materials is mandatory under the CRA and demonstrates transparency in your software supply chain.
Many developers skip this step because they assume it’s complex or time-consuming, but modern tooling makes SBOM generation nearly automatic. Use our one-click SBOM generator to create compliant documentation instantly. The tool automatically analyzes your plugin’s file structure, parses dependency manifests, and even detects bundled libraries that aren’t managed through package managers.
It identifies all components including transitive dependencies—the libraries that your libraries depend on.
Complex plugins often have hundreds of transitive dependencies. The tool exports in both CycloneDX and SPDX formats. CycloneDX is OWASP’s lightweight SBOM standard emphasizing security and supply chain risk identification, designed specifically for continuous vulnerability monitoring and DevSecOps workflows. It works with XML, JSON, and protocol buffer data formats, making it easy to integrate with modern security tooling.
SPDX is the Linux Foundation’s internationally recognized format (ISO/IEC 5962:2021) that excels at license management alongside vulnerability tracking.
Large organizations prefer SPDX when they need to manage compliance across legal, security, and procurement teams. Both formats provide machine-readable inventories that enable automated vulnerability correlation, license compliance checking, and supply chain risk analysis. This single action dramatically improves your compliance score by establishing the foundation for all other security practices.
3. Enable Automated Vulnerability Scanning
Continuous vulnerability monitoring is essential for CRA compliance.
Integrate our scanning tools into your CI/CD pipeline where your plugin’s artifacts are created, ensuring every build is automatically checked for vulnerabilities before deployment. Our system analyzes your CycloneDX or SPDX SBOMs using multiple best-in-class vulnerability databases including Trivy (Aqua Security’s comprehensive scanner), Grype (Anchore’s vulnerability scanner), and OSV (Google’s Open Source Vulnerabilities database), providing redundant coverage that catches vulnerabilities that might be missed by a single source.
The scanning occurs at multiple points in your workflow.
Pre-commit hooks catch obvious issues before code is committed, pull request checks identify vulnerabilities introduced by new code, build-time scans validate every artifact, and continuous monitoring detects newly-discovered vulnerabilities in already-deployed code. You receive immediate notifications about vulnerabilities with CVSS severity scoring (Critical, High, Medium, Low), detailed descriptions of the vulnerability and its potential impact, affected versions and components, available patches or workarounds, and clear remediation steps with specific version numbers to upgrade to.
Security findings are identified even for code deployed months ago.
Continuous scanning ensures you’re notified within hours of vulnerability disclosure. This proactive approach keeps your compliance score high and protects your users from emerging threats.
4. Document Your Security Features
Proper documentation significantly boosts compliance scores and demonstrates your commitment to security and transparency.
Missing or inadequate security documentation is one of the fastest ways to fail a compliance audit.
Use our automated documentation templates to quickly create required security documentation that meets CRA standards. Include comprehensive information about authentication methods (how users prove their identity, password requirements, multi-factor authentication support), authorization mechanisms (how you control access to different features and data), data protection measures (encryption at rest and in transit, data retention policies, GDPR compliance), encryption standards (specific algorithms and key lengths used, such as AES-256 for data encryption and TLS 1.3 for transport), input validation (how you sanitize user input to prevent injection attacks, which APIs you use like WordPress’s built-in sanitization functions), output escaping (how you prevent XSS attacks when displaying data), and update mechanisms (how updates are delivered, verified, and installed securely).
Document any security-relevant design decisions.
Explain why you chose specific cryptographic libraries, how you handle sensitive data in memory, or your approach to preventing common WordPress vulnerabilities. Include risk assessments you’ve conducted, threat models you’ve created, and security testing results from penetration testing or security audits. The CRA requires comprehensive security documentation for both end users (who need to understand security features and their responsibilities) and regulatory authorities (who need to verify your compliance).
5. Implement Secure Update Mechanisms
The CRA mandates secure update delivery for all digital products.
Ensure your plugin uses HTTPS for all update communications, preventing man-in-the-middle attacks where attackers could intercept update requests and deliver malicious code. Implement digital signature verification using public-key cryptography to ensure update packages haven’t been tampered with—WordPress’s update system supports this through package signing.
Provide clear update notifications to users.
Explain what’s being updated, why the update is important (especially for security updates), and any actions they need to take. Your update mechanism should verify file integrity using cryptographic hashes before installation, comparing downloaded files against known-good checksums to detect corruption or tampering. Implement atomic updates that complete entirely or roll back completely, preventing situations where a failed update leaves the plugin in a broken state.
Include automatic rollback functionality that detects failed updates and reverts to the previous working version.
Our compliance checker validates your update mechanism against all CRA requirements and provides specific recommendations for improvements, checking HTTPS usage, signature verification, integrity checking, user notifications, rollback capabilities, and update logging. This is particularly important for plugins with automatic update capabilities, where security issues in the update mechanism could be exploited to compromise thousands of sites simultaneously.
Start Improving Your Score Today
These five quick actions address the most impactful compliance gaps we see in WordPress plugins.
Together, they typically improve compliance scores by 60-80%.
Visit CRA Compliance Suite to access all our automated tools and start strengthening your WordPress plugin compliance immediately. Our platform integrates with your existing development workflow to make compliance a continuous process rather than a one-time burden.