Why should you keep WordPress up to date?

Improved Security

WordPress is a popular platform and as such gets a lot of attention from hackers. However, if implemented correctly it can be very secure. Keeping your site up to date will increase your security and help prevent malicious attacks.

83% of WordPress sites hacked are out of date.

Updates to WordPress often include security patches to vulnerabilities and can help reduce the risk to your site from hackers. In many cases, when a new version or patch is released, the fixes included are explained in the release notes. Whilst this is useful to people who are implementing the updates, it can also have the unintended effect of alerting hackers of possible vulnerabilities, helping them maliciously hack out of date sites.

Get the latest new features

New Features are added to WordPress with each major release and these often make WordPress easier to use.

For example, as wordpress.org shows, in version 4.0 they included a change to the media manager that makes viewing your upload much simpler than in some of the earlier versions.

What are the risks of not updating?

By not keeping your WordPress up to date you risk leaving you site unsecured. This means that should a hacker come across your site and choose to target it, they may find a security flaw in your older version, which they can exploit.

This could lead to an obvious hack, where content on your site is changed or replaced by offensive or inappropriate content, or a more subtle form of hack, which leaves no obvious trace for you to see on your website but leaves hidden files that could potentially cause issues such as spreading viruses or spamming.

Should this happen, your site may stop working and you might have to manually take your site down to either prevent further damage to try to clean up your site.

Cleaning up a hacked site can be a large and difficult job so prevention is always better than cure.

How to update WordPress

WordPress versions 3.7 and above include a new feature that updates WordPress core automatically for minor and security updates.

When choosing to update WordPress core to the next major version, themes or plugins the process is very simple and just requires you to click ‘update’.

Why you may prefer to ask us to do it…

Yes, updating is a very simple process. Before you go ahead and do the upgrade, you should always back up all your site files and your database.

This is because you do not know the affect any update will have on your website. If the worst happened and something went wrong you can always roll back to the backup that you took and seek further help from a professional.

If you would like to speak to us about arranging WordPress updates, we would be more than happy to help you.