WordPress Core and Plugin Updates are an important part of maintaining your website. This is done to ensure your website will function at its full potential and remain secure.
Any WordPress website consists of 3 main components:
- The Core
- The Theme
- and the Plugins.
All of these components need to be up-to-date and working in synchronicity to ensure that your website is functioning to its full potential. Before we explain the importance of the WordPress Core and Plugin Updates, the Site Theme needs to be discussed. It’s important to understand how all these different components work together.
WordPress Themes Explained:
There are thousands of WordPress themes one can choose between when building your website. These themes dictate but are not limited to the overall look and feel of your website.
This is done by customizing font options, colors, sections and other visual aspects of your website. Good themes also offer the functionality to build custom layouts for the individual pages of your site.
WordPress Plugins Explained:
Another way we customize your WordPress website is with Plugins. Plugins are essentially bits of software or code that gets uploaded to expand the core functionality of your site. They enable your website to do things that it usually would not be able to do. They also enable you to alter your WordPress website in such a way that it acts and reacts exactly how you want it to.
WordPress Core Explained:
Now that you have a better understanding of what themes and plugins are, we can move on to the base of your website. Your WordPress core is what’s left of your website when you remove the theme and the plugins. It’s the most basic and simple version of your website, and its update is essential to the health of your site. Your WordPress installation contains all the essential files required for you to successfully publish and display content on your website.
WordPress Core and Plugin Updates:
The two main components that need updating and maintaining most often are the WordPress Core and Plugins. These updates should happen on a monthly basis to ensure that everything runs smoothly. Every time you update anything on your site you run the risk of compatibility issues – versions of plugins that don’t interact well with each other or contain conflicting bits of code. Small but regular update jumps are recommended to avoid major functionality conflicts later on.
Theme files are updated less regularly, every 6-12 months for a good theme, but are usually quite significant in terms of functionality and incorporating the newest technology.
Security Risks:
Keeping your site up to date is an important part of managing a site and is far too often overlooked as unnecessary admin. An up to date site not only ensures that your website is functioning at its full potential but also keeps it secure from unwanted attacks. If this is not done, you risk having your website hacked, database accessed and malicious code inserted into core files. Often these bots (automated scripts) will build back doors into your site for repeated future access.
The WordPress Update Process:
During updates, a website needs to be checked from start to finish, on desktop and mobile, to ensure that no problems have occurred. It’s best to update the core first, theme second and then each plugin individually. The website should be checked thoroughly after each update. This will make it possible to identify and fix any problems quickly and efficiently.
In summary:
In short, the risk to your business and its clients’ image, reputation and privacy far outways the cost of keeping your site up-to-date. This is a maintenance cost that should be budgeted for and discussed before taking on any web project.
Please get in touch with us regarding or monthly, quarterly or bi-annual update packages.