If you are new to the WordPress Content Management System (CMS) or using it for the first time, you probably would have a question: why are there update notifications in WordPress backend? In this post, we will explain to you why you should always update WordPress websites, its theme, and the various plugins you install on it – whenever there are new versions released.

WordPress is an Open Source platform which means thousands of developers from different parts of the world contribute and work together to build a great website management system for the users. They constantly and collectively work together to move WordPress forward. This means WordPress will change over time and be built stronger. Whenever the community of developers adds something to WordPress, they release it to the WordPress users in the form of updates. To take advantage of the expanded and new capabilities of WordPress, you MUST keep all your code up-to-date.

There’s no reason that a well-planned and developed WordPress website cannot keep giving value for years after it goes live – whether you choose to make ongoing changes and improvements or not. It is still very important that WordPress and any plugins and themes are kept up-to-date.

There is an article on WordPress.org on how to update your WordPress websites. It’s a great official article that gives information about how to update WordPress in general.

WordPress releases updates for the following reasons

• To improve features: New features make WordPress easier to use or more useful. Don’t wait and update two or three versions at a time. It can be detrimental to your site, and then you must learn about many new features at once.
• Update WordPress security versions for your website safety: The WordPress development team continuously works to find and mend security perils in the code structure and loopholes that hackers can take advantage of for their own personal or commercial benefits. These code adjustments are released by developers as updates. If WordPress websites are not regularly updated with these newly released fixes, you leave known security risks on your websites. It means that sooner or later your website could probably get hacked. This could result in a serious impact on your online business which can also incur a loss of confidential data like customer details or the hackers may place embarrassing content on your site to be seen by all your website visitors.
• Updates to WordPress core, plugins, and themes often increase security by patching vulnerabilities and strengthening against attacks. To reduce the risk of your site being hacked or compromised in some other way, update! Hackers and other malicious third-party developers watch the release notes. As soon as they learn of a vulnerability, they start exploiting it. So, you need to update as soon as possible to reduce the time that your site is vulnerable. New security features prevent hackers from breaking into your website and inserting malicious code. These codes can harm your site and cause it to lose the position in search engine results as well. Search engines may even remove your site from their listings or search results.
• To fix bugs: Updates to WordPress core, plugins, and themes often fix bugs that were discovered in previous versions. To get the bugs fixed, add features and functionality, please update!
• Performance: The WordPress core team and community put a lot of time and effort into making WordPress faster, efficient, and more robust. Keeping your WordPress site updated means that your site is performing at its maximum capacity.
• User experience: Most updates to WordPress make the content management system quicker, easier, and nicer to use. This can encourage you to interact with your site more.
• Future enhancements: When new WordPress versions are released, the plugin/extension developers stop supporting the older versions of WordPress. If later, you need to get your website enhanced by adding more custom features to it and using third party plugins or extensions, it might require the latest version of WordPress. By updating frequently, you keep your WordPress website updated with the small version releases and packages. If you don’t update for say a year or two, you are likely to suffer major disruption, because all of those small and minor issues that you didn’t update with – would become intertwined, making the diagnosis and fixing harder, more time-consuming and expensive.

Update WordPress plugins too

Updating your plugins is as important as updating the WordPress Content Management System (CMS), and you should do so before you update WordPress. This can prevent your plugins or site from breaking. Developers do their best to adapt to the newest versions of WordPress creating a great environment for your website to work.

Outdated plugins can be even more vulnerable to security attacks than outdated WordPress CMS versions. To update your plugins, go to the plugins panel and click Update Available. You can also do a bulk action to update the plugins or find the link under each individual plugin that says update now.

WordPress updates are a click away but always be careful

Keeping WordPress updated has never been easier, but proceed with a bit of caution. It only takes a single click to update your site, however, if something goes wrong you may end up in a bit of trouble. It is rare for an upgrade to cause issues, but when it happens it can be quite a pain. A quick backup will help protect you if anything goes wrong, but many don’t take the time to do that as well.

Updating outdated plugins is a bigger issue sometimes. Keeping core WordPress updated is more important, but those updates only come out once every month or so and they’re widely publicized. Plugins are constantly being updated, and it can be difficult to know when an update is a crucial security fix or just a small new feature being added. We spend a great deal of time researching plugins to make sure everything is good, and as a general rule, we simply keep all plugins updated as often as possible.

Things can break while updating WordPress

While updates can cause items on your website to break, a lack of updates can hurt as well. This is usually true when your website is custom made. Recently Jay Social worked with a few clients that had a variety of weird things happening on their sites. We checked their websites, took a backup, updated WordPress, and all of their plug-ins to the latest version, and their problems went away!

Let Paramount WP handle your website and update it to the latest WordPress CMS version, WordPress plugins, and WordPress themes

It is very important that you and your WordPress website stay updated. For our clients, we take care of all of the below items for a very small monthly fee under our WordPress Website Maintenance Services and care plans.

• We make timely backups of your website
• We keep your site updated with the latest version of WordPress within one business day of a new release
• We keep your theme and all of your plugins updated

We will also connect your site with Google Webmaster Tools so that we can be alerted to any other issues that may come along. We use Google Webmaster Tool services to update a fresh sitemap on Google so they’re aware of every page that is published on the site (which helps in search engine optimization). In addition, we also implement extra securities on the WordPress sites as and when required.

If you’d like us to take care of those for you, just let us know and we’ll be happy to help.

Stay updated, stay secure!