The importance of WordPress Updates, Maintenance and Management

Once you have the understanding of the ins and outs of the WordPress CMS, it is quite easy to feel confident enough to tackle things such as updating those little plugins on screen. If you have that annoying itch when you see set of wordpress updates  on your dashboard, you’re not alone, but unfortunately updating can also bring other troubles with it. When you add that to the time you spend on site trying to resolve these issues – then you need to consider whether your time should be spent here or on moving your business forward. That’s where we come in.

WordPress Updates – Updating Plugins and Themes

If you’re looking to update any theme or plugin on your site – the first port of call if to ensure you have a back up!

Conflictions can happen between plugin updates and new framework implementations and if you’re not fully equipped with debugging, then you need to ensure you can restore.

On occasion we do have prospective clients contact us after having left their updates unattended for such a long period of time. Usually this is not so long after they have clicked the “update all” button on their themes and plugins and et voila… the website breaks. This isn’t so much of an issue as its something that can be resolved pretty quickly by a developer. The big problem comes when a site hasn’t been updated regularly and the theme and plugins are both very much out of date, as the longer maintenance is left, the more chance there is for these 3rd part extensions to be compromised and a victim of attack. However, with the right security and measures in place, brute force attacks and phising spam hackers are something you can put at the back of your mind.

I think it is important to note that these issues come with all cms platforms and I have seen the same with Magento, Drupal, Joomla the list goes on. The overall message here is to ensure you are knowledgable on updates or have someone who maintains these for you – so you can concentrate on your business and making money. If you’re looking to manage the updates yourself be sure to check out our wordpress tutorial section