Every time we deliver a website to a client, one of our recommendations is to keep the website up-to-date (WordPress core, theme, plugins). But guess what? Almost none of our clients do so. Maybe they don’t have time to do it, they don’t think it’s a big deal or maybe they are affraid to break something.

And we understand. When you own a business, you have a lot on your plate and you should focus your attention on other, bigger things. But the online presence is very important these days. More than that, what will your customers think when they will come to your website and see it hacked? Or, even worse, what will they think if you have an online shop and their information is stolen through hacking? Most of the WordPress websites that get hacked have outdated installations.

After investing time and effort in creating a website, it would be a good idea to maintain it in a good state. If time is a big issue, you can hire someone to take care of this task.

5 reasons why keeping your WordPress website up to date is a good idea

1. Keep your WordPress website secure

We told you, in a previous article, that one of the ways to keep your website secure is to keep it up to date. Your website has three main components: the WordPress core, the theme and the plugins. Each element is, in most cases, under continuous development. The WordPress core powers many websites. When people find security issues, they flag them and then, fixes are included in the updates. So, by not keeping your WordPress core up to date, you might miss out on these fixes.

The same thing is valid for the theme and for the plugins. There are situations in which critical security issues are identified and updating your website might save it from being hacked.

A very big percentage of websites get hacked because of outdated installations. If you don’t keep your website up to date, the question is not “will the website get hacked?”, but “when will the website get hacked?”.

2. Have a better performing website

Because WordPress and it’s elements (themes, plugins) are evolving, they go through a process of continuous improvement. Since one of the main focus, these days, is speed, most theme and plugin authors try to improve the performance of their products. As you might guess, they include these improvemets in the update packs. By keeping your website up to date, you can obtain better performance and thus a better user experience.

3. A software without bugs

Even if the core, plugins and themes are tested before being released, it is common that some errors pass unnoticed. These errors (bugs) are then found and reported by the users and they get fixed through the update packages. If you notice that some plugin or theme is acting weird, the problem might be fixed when an update is made. So, by keeping your WordPress website up to date, you can make sure the software is bug free.

4. Profit from new features

As the WordPress core, themes and plugins evolve, new features get included from time to time. It’s like when WordPress introduced Gutenberg, or like when a theme got a frontend builder (Avada). If you don’t update to the latest version, you can miss out on many cool features. Some of these features might offer a better experience for the users and that would be very helpful.

5. Compatibility between the elements

Fearing that an update might break something is a legit reason. However, the more you wait and more updates get released, the bigger the chance that some incompatibilities will appear, breaking something on the site. At some point, if you don’t update your WordPress core, you will not be able to install new plugins, because they might not be compatible with older versions of WordPress.

It’s like when you need to go to the dentist, the more you wait, the bigger the problem will get. If you are affraid of breaking something with an update, there are wais to make sure everything will be OK. We will discuss this topic next.

How to update your WordPress website, without breaking it

First of all, before any major update, you should back-up your site. There are several ways to do it. Our favourite one is to export the entire website using All-in-One WP Migration. It is fast, simple and we had no issues with it.

Then, it might be a good idea to have a staging site, where you can test the updates (especially if you did not update your website for a long time). For the staging site you can either use a plugin, or you can make a duplicate of your site in a subfolder. Using a plugin is a faster way and you can use WP Staging for this. If you want to make a copy of your site, one option would be to use All-in-One WP Migration. Note that the free version has an import limit of 512 MB. If your site is bigger than this, in order to restore it, you will need a paid extension.

Before starting to update the core/plugins/theme, it would be a good idea to make a list of the most important pages on your site (that you will check after each update). Then, turn the caching off and you can start the update process. If you have several updates to make, maybe doing it one by one and testing the website would be a good idea. That way you will know if some particular update created problems.

If everything goes well on the staging site, then you can make all the updates on the actual website. Some premium plugins offers the possibility to push these updates directly to the live site. Note that making the updates on a staging site first is not necessary, especially when you update the site regularly. We use this approach when the site was not updated for a long time or we are facing a major update (like updating from WordPress 4.x to 5.x). If you want to make the updates directly on the live website, you may want to put a “Maintenance” message on the homepage. There are several plugins that you can use and one example is this one.

If problems appear after an update, you will need to either restore the back-up, or downgrade the core/plugin/theme causing the problem. To downgrade the WordPress core, you can use WP Downgrade and for the themes and plugins, you can use WP Rollback.

You should probably try the updating process one more time and maybe do it in a different order. Sometimes this may be the cause. If that still does not work, you can search the forums and, most likely, other people have the same issue and there may be a fix. If no fix is available, maybe waiting a bit longer for that particul plugin might be a solution. Or maybe try replacing that plugin with a different one.

There is one more thing we did not discuss. What if a plugin or theme you are using did not receive an update for a long time? In this case, most likely, that plugin or theme has been abandoned and nobody is working on it anymore. I would highly recommend to search for alternatives, because, at some point, the plugin or theme will cause problems.

By |Published On: November 18th, 2019|Categories: About WordPress|Tags: , , , , |

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