Why You Should Always Update WordPress
Is it safe to update your WordPress site when a new WordPress updates comes out? Is it important? What are the pros and cons of updating your WordPress. These are the usual questions we get from users and clients when a new release comes out.
WordPress is a free content management software (CMS) and powers over 30% of the web, and still growing. The reason behind people choosing WordPress because it’s an easy platform to use if you are new to web development and easy to maintain for clients. It is developed by a community of developers and with this, it is constantly being updated for bug fixing, new features, improving performance and enhance features to stay up to date with technology standards. Here are the main reasons why you need to update your WordPress to the latest release.
Source image by GigaPress
1. Security
Security is the most important reason why you should update your WordPress. Being popular, it is one of the most targeted platforms by hackers, data thieves, malicious codes, etc.
When a new update on is released, this includes the information regarding the release notes, list of fixes, vulnerability fixes and changed on the latest updates. This also gives hackers an overview and then try to exploit them, find outdated websites and try to infiltrate them. Thus making your website vulnerable if you don’t update your WordPress version.
2. Bug fixes
All software have bugs, even the most powerful websites have them. This are issues on computer program or systems that doesn’t behave the way they are intended. They can cause your site to crash, show errors, make the program stop/slow from running smoothly. These are being fixed when WordPress has new release.
3. Improve Performance and New Features
When a major release comes out, it usually comes with new features and changes on the software. From block editors, UI improvements, and making WordPress easier to use. Without the updates, you will not have a chance to use them. And the longer you are not updating your website, your website is becoming outdated and will be hard to maintain.
New releases also have improve performance. As we all know, speed is a huge factor in SEO. Without updates, your website will run slow and won’t ensure maximum performance thus dropping your traffic across the internet.
4. Compatibility
Aside from WordPress, themes and plugins are also regularly updated by their developers. Most of the time, plugin and theme developers need to align their updates with the major WordPress releases to ensure they’re taking advantage of newly available features and enhancements.
However, some websites crashes or break some of the plugins if they are not following the best practices and coding standards. That is why it is also important to use themes and plugins that are properly coded and designed.