Keeping your WordPress website updated and all of its components too is essential to avoiding problems with stability and security. One of the most important things about WordPress is its vast community and large number or committed premium developer and developer vendors, constantly keeping their WordPress plugins and themes updates at the same time with the core of WordPress being kept up to date by the WP community.
Why is it so important to keep your WordPress up to date?
Software evolves and along with it, security and security threats also evolve with it. WordPress is a very popular CMS used by almost one forth of the internet around the world. Its popularity has great benefits but it also poses some major challenges to the administrators, hosters and developers of the platform. The benefit it obvious, due to WP being so popular, its being enhanced, it evolves and it adds functionality constantly. One of the major challenges though is to keep it secure. The more popular a software platform is, the more targeted it also is by malicious agents. So the more people attacking it, requires more and higher security measures. The only way for the WP community and developers to roll our such important updates to you, the end use, is through official updates. So applying these updates to your website is quite important!
What needs to be updated?
The WordPress core is one, this will sometimes auto-update itself but to keep it up to date to its latest version you will have to either go in and manually click some update buttons on the WP back end called WP-admin or you can leverage plugins that do this job for you like Auto Update Manager. A personal preference is to always to this manually so we can keep track of its progress and be able to roll-back a website that is being broken by such an update.
The other thing that needs updating is the the website’s theme. The theme is more important for a WordPress website than it sounds. The theme blends into the rendering process of the WP core and is very essential to how the website is loaded on your browser. Themes and plugins are the number one reason for websites being hacked, infected with malware or breaking and not loading. When building a WordPress website you have to choose a theme that is well built and well maintained, a choice which can be rather difficult and might need the expert opinion of a developer. Missing theme updates will ultimately lead to instabilities mostly caused by PHP functions used by theme not being available anymore within the PHP stack. Another problem is of course, security.
The third part of the updates target group are the website’s plugins. The story here is quite similar to the one of the theme. The plugins have to be constantly updated and supported. Freeware plugins are good but you need to be careful about them and select the ones that have high ratings and lots of installations at the same time, also checking the last update date on the WordPress plugin directory so to decide if the plugin is actively developed, supported and maintained or has been abandoned. Plugins along with themes not being updated or patched or maintained, is the number one reason for a website to break, be hacked and infected or get destabilized.
How often and how to start.
We always advise that you update your plugins, core and themes at least once per month. Through our security services, we can help you follow this timetable strictly with a fee! We can go in and update your website’s plugins, WP core and theme and also keep a backup from before the process and after the process, checking the website for stability and security during the process and pointing out problems that we might have found. It does not matter if we developed your WordPress website either, we can take on securing it, updating it and polishing it at any time due to our long experience and deep knowledge of the platform!
Its quite easy to start, just let us know what you’d like us to start with and that you’re interested and we will jump right in with the next steps and an action plan to start immediately!
