Keeping Your WordPress Site Updated and Why You Should Do It

Written By Owen Jones - Solution Specialist at Verve

As with any piece of software or firmware, it’s crucial to keep your WordPress website up to date with the most recent patches. Whether that’s the latest versions of WordPress itself, plugin updates or PHP, with an ever-increasing risk from hackers or simple bugs it’s absolutely vital to stay on top of your sites maintenance with regular updates.

Keeping WordPress up to date on your website is essential for a number of reasons;

WordPress is a wildly popular framework for building websites, accounting for over 30% of all websites on the internet. As a result it’s a prime target for hackers. To address this WordPress and the developers producing plugins regularly release security patches and fixes. Regularly applying these will ensure that your WordPress website is protected from known security risks, reducing the chance of unauthorised access, data breaches or malware.

Along with these security patches, updates also fix bugs and performance issues. By keeping everything up to date your website benefits from a more stable and reliable website experience that your users can enjoy.

Major (and minor) updates will sometimes introduce new features and improvements to the WordPress framework, this also goes for plugin and theme developers. With the latest versions you ensure that plugins, themes and other components work smoothly together, reducing any conflicts that may potentially break your website.

Updates will also often include optimisations and performance enhancements, resulting in reduced page loading times, better caching mechanisms and a better performing website overall. This provides a better user experience for your visitors.

In keeping your WordPress site up to date, this also ensures that you have access to the latest resources, documentation and support. In keeping a website up to date you’re ensuring that any support platforms are better able to help you.

It’s important to note that updates can go wrong, so it’s important to have these carried out by developers with the tools and knowledge to carry out updates in a safe and secure manner. If you’d like us to maintain your website for you, why not get in touch?