Keeping Wordpress & Plugins Up To Date

Keeping your Wordpress installation and plugins up to date is a weekly task that all website business owners should be doing.

When we speak to our clients they often do not know that they need to keep WordPress and plugins up to date. This often comes as a result of getting their website built on a budget. Quite often the people who build cheap websites have no interest in building a long term relationship with their client, they just want a quick turnaround.

Keeping your WordPress website and plugins up to date is essential for keeping your business online. It also prevents it from being hacked or developing broken design elements. It’s the first step in making sure you don’t leave yourself open to loosing your website. If you rely on your website for your business, this is something you need to have in place.

Why does WordPress need updating

WordPress is open source which means it’s constantly being updated by the developer community to enable better functionality and more features. Code often needs updating to patch vulnerabilities. As the WordPress ecosystem grows, so does the foundation it’s built on.

Put in layman’s terms, WordPress is like the foundations of your house and it facilitates the walls being built on top of it. WordPress is the same in that it facilitates plugins and pages being built on top of it. Imagine if your house foundations got updated weekly, what would happen to your walls? They would develop cracks and inconsistencies in your walls which would lead to wall paper coming off, or worse still, water being able to access the cracks and walls potentially falling down. Eventually this may lead to the whole house falling down. This is the same for your WordPress website.

Why do plugins need updating

Imagine plugins are like an extension to your house. A utility room offers a place to do your laundry and it may include a drying and washing machine. It offers extra functionality to your house to do a specific thing. Plugins are exactly this, they bolt in to your WordPress installation offering extended functionality or features.

So, imagine if you updated the connecting walls from your main house and the utility room. It may result in the door latch not having enough space to open preventing you from opening the door. It would mean that room would become inaccessible and the features no longer available for you to use.

Plugins work the same way. They need updating along with the core WordPress files so that they are compatible and work seamlessly together.

What happens if you don’t update WordPress and plugins

As we explained using the house analogy, not keeping WordPress and plugins up to date can have a serious effect on your website if not done regularly. Updating the core of your WordPress website is essential to prevent your website getting hacked and being brought offline. It can also slow your website down. If a plugin is not working right it may affect the way your website looks, leaving it hard to view on a mobile. Google ranks your website based on many factors, so if it doesn’t look right or work correctly, your visitors may leave resulting in a negative rank for your business. Worse case is that your site gets hacked. This not only stops your business from functioning online, it may leak sensitive data to hackers to use maliciously.

Does anything else need updating?

Yes, there are other things that need updating to keep all the above working smoothly. You may have heard of PHP which is the coding language that WordPress is built with. This language is also being refined and updated and new versions are being tested and released. If WordPress is the foundation of your house, consider PHP to be the cement it’s built with.

Themes and builders also need updating as they all use the same code and foundation of everything we have spoken about.

Can I update WordPress and plugins myself?

Of course you can. If you have an in depth knowledge of what to do then there is no reason why you can’t update your website yourself. The update schedule for any website is not that complicated and anyone can learn it. However, you need to have enough knowledge on what do do if something goes wrong and have a plan in place if it does. This amongst other things, is having a backup in place and knowing how to restore it.

Use a WordPress Maintenance Service

Some businesses just don’t want the hassle of keeping WordPress and plugins up to date every week. Thats fine, most just want to focus on their business and have the peace of mind that someone else is looking after their website. This is a service we provide for many clients across the UK and they use our WordPress maintenance service to make sure all the above is taken care of.

If you have any questions at all, please drop a comment or join our chat to ask us a direct question.