WordPress is open source software with a giant community of contributors and devlopers working tirelessly to improve it. This kind of development input is important to keeping WordPress fast and secure, but it also provides for many updates throughout the course of a year. Just like any piece of software, updating it is not only important but necessary to ensure a functioning, high performing website. Let’s look at the key reasons why it is critical to update WordPress, the theme, and the plugins.
Security
Security is the primary reason you should keep your WordPress site up to date; updates often feature security enhancements that prevent sites from being exploited. Since WordPress is open source, it benefits from a community of developers and security experts who are constantly testing every version of the software and properly reporting security fixes. Failing to update the latest version of WordPress can make your site an easy target for hackers and malicious code distributors. This also applies to your theme and plugins. Over time code depreciates and updates will provide patches to keep the code current. If your theme or plugin hasn’t been updated in the last six months or isn’t supported, it’s time to explore a new option.
Bug Fixes
Although every major release of WordPress goes through a rigorous testing process, sometimes smaller bugs slip through the cracks. This may or may not affect your website, but it is always a good idea to update WordPress in order to reduce any issues caused by bugs.
Speed
Web technology is constantly changing and WordPress developers are always searching for ways to make WordPress run faster and more efficiently. By keeping your WordPress site up to date you will provide not only a better user experience, but improve your site’s search engine rankings.
New Features
Every major release of WordPress includes new features tailored to improve the user experience. Past improvements include the ability to easily include embeds in text and video widgets, a redesigned plugin directory, and inline link editing via the visual post editor. Updating WordPress will only improve your ability to add new content to your site.
So, What’s Next?
Always backup database and your site before updating WordPress and don’t neglect updates. We recommend using BackUpBuddy as they have a system to make restoring seem less and painless. We are not affiliated – we just love their plugin enough to recommend it.
The longer you wait to update to the next version of WordPress, the more you put your site at risk to be exploited by hackers or experience significant issues or bugs if your site is multiple versions behind the latest release.
We offer maintenance plans to ensure all End2End Media websites are backed up and updated, and thus, secure and easy to scale over time. This is included for a year with all the sites we develop and host. For more information about our website maintenance services, please contact us today!
