Thinking of a New Year’s Resolution? – As with your car or your phone, regular servicing and maintenance keeps your WordPress website running smoothly so that improvements can be identified in a timely manner. WordPress is part of an open source community – which means that there are hundreds of developers worldwide constantly improving the software as the world wide web technology changes and as the needs of the users of the world wide web also shift and change.
Updating a WordPress website may feel a bit daunting – but it is very important. Here are a few good reasons for updating:
- To take advantage of any improvements
Developers are always improving and adding new features and functionality in reaction to the changing internet – without any updates, your website will miss out on any technical improvements. - Be safe, be secure
New security features prevent hackers from breaking into your website and inserting malicious code or interfering with your data. A weak site can harm your standing with search engines, who may even un-list your site. - Performance
Once of the most important improvements in the latest versions of WordPress & modern plugins is performance, especially as the main search engines, use website speed, as a ranking measurement.
Back-ups & Compatibility
The one key thing to consider while updating is compatibility. Regular back-ups of the entire site should be a default operation and any updates should only be carried out once one of these has been done.
Your website is managed by plugins best suited to your specific needs (cost, functionality, features, connectivity, etc …) This means that the plugins are developed by a variety of differing developers. In that most rare of cases updating a plugin may conflict with another. In which case it is simply a matter of rolling back the update.
