Do you update WordPress?
Friday, January 21st, 2022
When was the last time you updated your WordPress website?
Many people have websites that have been created for personal or business using this popular website building software. The downside is that regardless of the use or application, your website will need frequent updates.
WordPress is an open-source content management system that utilizes themes, plugins and even some custom coding to allow it to operate or function as desired.
Much like anything that has “parts” in it, it needs to be maintained and serviced. Ensuring that your website is updated can be crucial to your business. Not only are these updates important for the security of your website, but they are also important for someone browsing your website, and for the host where your website is hosted at. Updates can also affect the performance of your website and how it operates or loads. Many times, these updates not only contain security updates, but also bug fixes, and also potential additional features.
A website will get “hacked” one of a few ways including weak passwords, but also often by “holes” in software like WordPress that are built on PHP/MySQL. WordPress has a lot of moving parts so whether it is the WordPress core or a plugin, when they find a security hole they will issue a patch/update to close that ability for a hacker to access your website. If breached, it can lead to spam emails being sent, client data being accessed, or worse. The time & cost to update your WordPress site monthly is well worth it to reduce the possibility of a headache down the road with a security breach.
Many people will use automatic updates, or even plugins that will check for updates, and update your website for you. The problem or issue with this that we have seen many times is that sometimes all updates don’t go as planned. For example, we have seen a plugin update change / rearrange the way the front page was displayed. We have seen it before where if you update X plugin before B theme you get what’s called the “white screen of death” – much like the windows blue screen, except CTRL+ALT+DEL or pushing restart doesn’t fix the problem. In many cases the only way to fix the problem is by restoring from backup. Therefore we try to discourage the use of any “automatic updates” or any type of plugin that will update your site for you.
At WebLeaps, we make updates such as these mandatory when using our hosting services. Our monthly WordPress maintenance involves us backing up your entire website, then updating WordPress, plugins, the theme, and then we check to ensure that your website is working and functioning as intended. It is a service that gets rolled into the hosting cost of every one of our WordPress websites that are hosted through us. We also will perform intermittent updates when time sensitive security updates are released, making sure that your website is properly secured.
We hope you found this useful, and we also hope your company’s WordPress website has a monthly service such as this too!
