There are two questions we get asked regularly, “Why are there so many updates to WordPress?” and “Do I Have To Do Them?”
First of all, the fact WordPress updates, all the time, is an excellent thing. Without getting too technical, here are the reasons both WordPress itself, WordPress themes and WordPress plugins update so regularly.
Security
I am sure we do not have to tell you how persistent hackers are. Our server team has a specific department that spends ALL day EVERY day defending the server from attacks from hackers trying to get direct access. If we built your site, we will have installed our own suite of site level security plugins to compliment all our server security. Hackers try ALL WordPress websites daily and not just a few times, they often try hundreds of times a day to try to get access. If they get in, they will have one of four aims in mind:
1. Just to mess up your site
2. To steal the personal data of your clients. The fines imposed by data authorities for data breaches can literally bankrupt any small business, it is just not worth the risk.
3. To bring down our servers.
4. To send spam from your site.
As hackers find new ways to access sites and servers the programs we use are updated to fill the security holes, this is a constant cat and mouse battle.
This is where we should all be VERY thankful. If you were not using WordPress or some other script that is well maintained and updated, you would be employing security specialists and programmers at £150 plus an hour regularly just to keep your site up to date and secure.
Changes In Computer Languages
For both security reasons and improvement reasons, the webs programming languages (the background coding that runs your site) are constantly changing, evolving and improving. These programming languages are set worldwide if your site does not keep up with them, eventually, it will simply break and stop working.
Improvements
Scripts like WordPress are constantly improving themselves to give you and your users more and better functionality. Obviously, this results in regular updates to WordPress itself. As a result of these updates, all the plugins your site uses also need to be updated by whoever wrote them in order to make sure they keep working with the new version of WordPress.
Sometimes a plugin developer may stop updating a plugin, and you will need to find another plugin to do the same job.
So the answer to “Do I have to do them?” is MOST DEFINITELY YES or you will end up with at best a broken site or at worst a hacked and destroyed site. What is more, this is part of the 3001web terms of service we INSIST that ALL clients keep their sites up to date to protect the servers for EVERYONE!
Running a website is like running a car, they need regular maintenance to continue to run smoothly. The good news is that the maintenance bills are nowhere near as hefty and can be free if you learn to run upgrades yourself or are hosted on one of our fully managed hosting accounts.
If you do not host your site with us and enjoy free updates done for you, you can still take advantage of our updates service here.
