A client of mine spent three months building a custom “Member Directory” plugin. They were convinced it was the next big thing. The code looked clean enough, the UI was snappy, and off it went to the official WordPress repository. Then the email from the Plugin Review Team landed: twenty-four specific violations. They came to me frustrated, sure the reviewers were just being pedantic. “Ahmad, it works on my machine, why are they breaking my heart?”
WordPress security standards are not there to make your life difficult. They are there to keep 40% of the web from collapsing. Most devs, including experienced ones, treat sanitization as a box to tick. Ten years ago I did the same thing. I figured that as long as I ran everything through sanitize_text_field() at the top of the script, I was safe. That is not how it works, and the review team knows it.
Why the WordPress security standards are changing
How plugins get handled is changing. As noted on the WordPress Make blog, David Perez and Fran Torres have stepped in as the new team reps for the Plugin Review Team. They inherited two real problems: plugin submissions have doubled, and low-quality AI-generated code is flooding the queue. If you are letting AI write your logic, you are probably failing the security check before you hit ‘submit’.
The team leans on tools like “Plugin Check” (PCP) to automate the boring parts, which frees the human reviewers to hunt for the architectural flaws automation misses. Most of what they flag comes down to data integrity. If you are not escaping on output, you are asking for trouble.
Sanitizing data on the way into the database is only half the job. What the review team wants to see is late escaping: you escape at the moment you render the HTML, every time.
// The WRONG way: Relying on early sanitization
function bbioon_display_member_bad( $id ) {
$name = get_post_meta( $id, 'member_name', true );
// We sanitized this when we saved it, so it's fine, right? Wrong.
echo '<div class="member-name">' . $name . '</div>';
}
// The RIGHT way: Late escaping
function bbioon_display_member_good( $id ) {
$name = get_post_meta( $id, 'member_name', true );
// Always escape as late as possible, specifically for the context
echo '<div class="member-name">' . esc_html( $name ) . '</div>';
}
That esc_html() call looks redundant if you already sanitized the input, but it is the only way to prove to a reviewer (and to yourself) that a stored XSS attack cannot get through when something else, another plugin for instance, writes to that database row directly.
Proactive reviews are coming
The team is moving toward “proactive reviews,” which means existing plugins get looked at, not only new submissions. If yours has been sitting in the repo for five years without a security audit, expect a surprise. AI makes it cheap to generate code that runs fine and is broken from a security angle, so these standards are only going to get tighter.
This stuff gets complicated fast. If you are tired of debugging someone else’s mess and just want your site to work, drop my team a line. We have probably seen it before.
The short version
- Escape your data at the moment of output, not just on input. That is what late escaping means, and it is the part reviewers look for.
- Run the Plugin Check tool over your own code before you submit anything to the repo.
- AI will write code that works and still skip the WordPress-specific security functions, so audit whatever it hands you.
- The Plugin Review Team keeps changing how it operates, so watch the official Make blogs for shifts in documentation and requirements.
