WordPress is an open-source platform developed by a community of developers. With each new release, they fix bugs, add new features, improve performance and enhance existing features. If you do not update your WordPress site (and plugins), you are risking your website security and missing out on new features and improvements. If your website falls victim to a malicious attack, your entire site can get infected and you can lose everything.
Still not convinced? Let’s take a look at some of the benefits.
1. Security
Security is probably, without a doubt, the most important reason to keep your WordPress website updated.
WordPress currently powers about 25% of all websites in the world! Due to this overwhelming popularity, it’s a popular target for hackers, malicious code distributors, data thieves and people up to no good.
Since WordPress is open source, anyone can study the source code to make improvements, unfortunately evil-doers can also find its weaknesses and exploit them.
Similarly, plugins can also be studied and exploited, or even authored for the very purpose of gaining access to your site and data.
Our WordPress security service scans a vulnerability database for your plugins to alert you of any known issues.
2. New Features
WordPress releases updates on a regular basis, their major updates usually have new features and some changes to the software. When WordPress 4.0 came out, plugin installation was improved, 4.1 introduced inline image editing, and so forth.
If you search for help online, the help forum contributors usually assume you are using the latest version, so help guides may not match with what you are seeing on your outdated version.
3. More Speed, Scotty!
Developers are constantly looking to make things more efficient and fast, WordPress developers are no different. With every release of WordPress you can usually expect to have it be running faster and more efficient than before. They are constantly trying to give more warp speed, captain!
Improved page speed isn’t just something cool, it’s functional as well. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ranking is dependent on page speed, if you have a slow site your rankings can be affected.
4. Bug Fixes
Despite programmers’ best efforts, sometimes bugs find a way to slip through the cracks. This is why there are smaller updates from WordPress known as minor releases, there are the ones with x.x.x, such as 4.9.5 which fixed 28 bugs.
If you are having issues, one piece advice you will often get first is to update WordPress and all plugins to the latest version as that may resolve your issue.
5. Compatibility, or IN-compatibility
Some plugin developers, the better ones, coordinate their own updates with the major releases of WordPress to ensure they are taking advantage of the new features, or to ensure their plugins are still compatible.
When this does not happen, updating your WordPress to the latest version could “break” your existing plugins. With our Safe Update feature, we are able to recover from a broken site or incompatibility be rolling your site back to a previous backup, taken minutes before the update!
Take a look at our WordPress security and update service to learn how we can help you keep your site updated.