The EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) is transforming how WordPress developers approach plugin and theme development.
If you create or distribute software that people in the European Union can use, these rules apply to you—whether your software is open-source or commercial, and even if you’re not based in the EU. At CRA Compliance Suite, we help developers navigate these new requirements with automated tools that ensure your products meet all compliance standards.
Understanding the CRA Timeline and Requirements
The Cyber Resilience Act entered into force on December 10, 2024, with a phased implementation timeline that WordPress developers must understand. While the main obligations apply from December 11, 2027, critical reporting requirements take effect much earlier—from September 11, 2026. This means you have less time than you might think to achieve compliance, particularly for the mandatory notification systems for vulnerabilities and severe incidents. The September 2026 deadline specifically covers the reporting infrastructure you must have in place, including formal vulnerability disclosure processes and documented incident reporting procedures.
The days of silently patching security issues are over.
WordPress plugin and theme developers face mandatory security audits, formal vulnerability disclosure processes, and comprehensive documentation requirements. The CRA requires transparent, documented security incident handling with specific notification timeframes to regulatory authorities and affected users.
Product Classification: Where Does Your Plugin Fit?
Most WordPress plugins fall under the Default Category (No specific class / Lower Risk) where self-assessment is allowed.
The CRA categorizes digital products into risk classes, and understanding where your plugin falls determines your compliance path, costs, and regulatory burden. This means you can evaluate your own compliance without expensive third-party audits, but you must still meet all documentation, security, and vulnerability management requirements. The self-assessment path requires rigorous internal processes and comprehensive documentation that can withstand regulatory scrutiny, but it’s significantly less expensive than third-party certification routes.
However, Class I (Important Products with Digital Elements) includes higher-risk products affecting other systems and requires third-party assessment. Password managers, authentication plugins, security-critical tools, and plugins that handle sensitive payment or health data typically fall into this category. The classification determines not just your compliance costs but also your time-to-market, as third-party assessments can take months to complete.
Understanding your product’s classification early saves you time and money.
CE Marking and EU Declaration of Conformity
Before your WordPress plugin can legally be distributed in the EU market, it must display the CE marking and be accompanied by an EU Declaration of Conformity.
This is mandatory, not optional.
Failure to comply can result in your plugin being immediately removed from distribution platforms accessible to EU users. The Declaration of Conformity must contain specific elements: complete company details including legal entity name and registration information, detailed product identification (plugin name, version number, unique identifier like a UUID), all applicable EU legislation including the specific CRA articles your product complies with, the harmonized standards used for conformity assessment, the conformity assessment procedure followed (self-assessment or third-party), and your product’s risk category classification with justification. Our CRA Compliance Suite automates the generation of properly formatted Declaration of Conformity documents that meet all regulatory requirements, eliminating the risk of missing critical information or using incorrect legal language.
Key Compliance Areas for WordPress Developers
The CRA focuses on several critical areas that form the foundation of digital product security and transparency:
- Software Bill of Materials (SBOM): Every plugin must maintain a detailed, machine-readable inventory of all components and dependencies in standardized formats like CycloneDX and SPDX
- Vulnerability Management: Continuous monitoring and patching of security issues with formal, documented disclosure processes
- Secure Development Practices: Implementation of security-by-design principles throughout the development lifecycle
- Documentation Requirements: Comprehensive security documentation for users and regulatory authorities
- Incident Response: Established procedures for handling and reporting security incidents within mandated timeframes
Assess Your Current Compliance Status
Begin by conducting a comprehensive evaluation of your plugin or theme against CRA requirements to identify gaps and prioritize remediation efforts.
The CRA Compliance Suite provides automated scanning tools that perform deep analysis of your codebase, dependencies, documentation, and development processes to identify compliance gaps across all required areas. This assessment goes beyond simple code scanning to evaluate your code security posture, dependency management practices, documentation completeness and accuracy, update mechanisms and security, development workflow security, and incident response preparedness. Understanding your starting point is crucial for creating a realistic compliance roadmap and allocating resources effectively.
The assessment generates a prioritized list of findings with severity ratings.
Generate Your Software Bill of Materials
Creating a Software Bill of Materials is one of the most critical and technically complex CRA requirements.
An SBOM is a comprehensive, machine-readable inventory of every component in your software, from major frameworks down to minor utility libraries, including both direct dependencies you explicitly include and transitive dependencies (libraries that your libraries depend on). Our automated SBOM generation tool performs deep analysis of your WordPress plugin’s structure, parsing Composer manifests for PHP dependencies, npm/yarn manifests for JavaScript dependencies, and even scanning for bundled vendor code that might not appear in package managers.
The tool creates standardized documentation in both CycloneDX and SPDX formats.
This process ensures complete transparency about your product’s components and creates the data foundation needed to track potential vulnerabilities in third-party libraries throughout your product’s lifecycle. When a security vulnerability is discovered in a widely-used library, your SBOM allows you to immediately determine if your plugin is affected and respond accordingly.
Implement Continuous Vulnerability Scanning
Regular, automated vulnerability scanning is mandatory under the CRA.
The CRA Compliance Suite integrates continuous security monitoring into your development environment, CI/CD pipeline, and production systems, automatically checking your code and all dependencies against constantly updated vulnerability databases including the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), GitHub Security Advisories, and language-specific security feeds. The system performs multiple types of scanning: static analysis security testing (SAST) of your code for common vulnerability patterns, software composition analysis (SCA) of your dependencies for known CVEs, container scanning if you use containerized development or deployment, and infrastructure scanning for deployment environment vulnerabilities.
You receive immediate, actionable alerts when security issues are detected.
Alerts are categorized by severity using CVSS scoring, with detailed remediation guidance including specific version updates, configuration changes, or code modifications needed to address each vulnerability. This proactive approach helps you address vulnerabilities before they become compliance violations or security incidents.
The Cost of Non-Compliance
Non-adherence to the CRA can result in substantial fines ranging from €5,000,000 to €15,000,000, calculated as 1% to 2.5% of an operator’s total worldwide annual turnover from the previous financial year.
These penalties scale with company size and violation severity.
More immediately damaging than fines, regulatory authorities have the power to remove your plugins from WordPress.org, CodeCanyon, and other platforms accessible to EU users, effectively ending your ability to serve the European market overnight. This removal can happen with little warning once a compliance violation is identified, and reinstatement requires demonstrating full compliance—a process that can take months. For many WordPress plugin businesses, losing access to the EU market would be catastrophic.
Integration with Your Development Workflow
Our tools integrate seamlessly with popular development environments, version control systems, and CI/CD pipelines including GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Bitbucket Pipelines, Jenkins, and Travis CI.
You can automate compliance checks at every stage of development.
From pre-commit hooks that catch security issues before code is committed, through pull request checks that verify compliance before code review, to build-time scans that validate every artifact before deployment, the integration uses standard APIs and webhooks while requiring minimal configuration. This seamless integration ensures compliance becomes part of your normal development process rather than a separate burden, making security and regulatory adherence automatic.
Start Your Compliance Journey Today
The September 2026 reporting deadline and December 2027 full compliance date may seem distant, but achieving full CRA compliance requires significant planning, implementation time, and often substantial code refactoring.
Most development teams need 6-12 months to achieve full compliance.
Visit CRA Compliance Suite to access our comprehensive tools and start securing your WordPress products today. Our automated solutions simplify compliance while ensuring your plugins and themes meet all EU CRA requirements, with clear roadmaps and prioritized action items to guide your compliance journey.