5 Reasons Why You Need to Keep Your WordPress Website Updated

May 31, 2019

Back in early April we posted a blog on The Importance of WordPress Website Maintenance, we wanted to take some time to dig deeper and provide some additional important information relating to this matter.

WordPress is an open source platform, which allows developers to extend its functionality by creating plugins and themes that easily integrate with it’s software. Since this source code is readily available to the general public, it doesn’t take long for hackers to find and exploit security vulnerabilities.

https://buildthis.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/shutterstock_1056518375-1024×1024.jpg

To counter this, the WordPress development team regularly provide security and bug fix updates. These updates are often rich with new features and added functionality, but they mostly fix bugs and security vulnerabilities within your site.

By neglecting these updates, features of your site will break or slow down. In this blog, we want to go into detail on what the BuildThis team identifies as the most important reasons to keep your website themes and plugins up-to-date.

1.) Security

Letting your WordPress website grow out of date enhances the risk of your site being hacked.

Many hacked websites end up in that position because of known and fixed vulnerabilities that already have a fix. Your plugin or WordPress installation simply needs to be updated.

Whether you’re a small business or a large corporation, your website serves as the face of your brand and the best marketing tool you have.

A hacked website can have a lasting negative impact on your users and your business. Making sure that your WordPress is up to date as well as your plugins and themes will help you to fix those vulnerabilities and help avoid being hacked.

2.) Fix Bugs

Bugs are what developers call coding errors or flaws in the system code that cause unexpected behavior.

As bugs are found, programmers want to fix them as soon as possible. When WordPress changes their code to eliminate bugs, it can often cause the Theme and Plugins to break.

Additional code is then inserted to make sure all features are communicating properly and working together to achieve their particular functionality. Neglecting to keep your WordPress, Theme and Plugins up to date increases the risk of your site breaking.

3.) Add Features and Functionality

In addition to keeping your website secure and fixing bugs within your WordPress website keeping your site updated also helps with added features and functionality.

WordPress features typically come out with new features that you will miss out on if you do not keep your site updated. Sometimes these updates can easily be seen on your site while most are in the backend providing additional flexibility for theme and plugin authors.

Making sure your site is up-to-date allows you to enjoy these new features and functionality within your WordPress theme and existing plugins.

4.) Speed

New updates often come with the ability to improve the speed of your website.

Speed is a large factor in your websites Search Engine Optimization (SEO) score. Google has indicated site speed is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages. You can read more about this factor here. Speed is an important factor in SEO and improvements in page loading times can play a huge role in reducing bounce rates and keeping your visitors engaged.

Speaking of keeping visitors engages page speed is also important to user experience. Pages with a longer load time tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page.

If there is a way to avoid losing users to your site you want to do everything you can to do so. Keeping WordPress updated will ensure that your website is receiving maximum performance benefits.

5.) Compatibility  

Programing languages continuously update and often times we see that older versions of these languages are no longer supported.

These outdated languages quickly become a hackers playground.

As codes and languages change it is important to keep your site updated with the latest technology to ensure every part of your site is being supported. This is the best way to make sure your site remains safe and is running smoothly.

Leave WordPress Updates to the Experts

Not everyone has the ability, time or energy to properly maintain their website.

Installing updates and handling other WordPress maintenance tasks is time consuming and can be overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be. With BuildThis Hosting & Support Plans,  we can do the work for you.

Let us maintain, update and take care of your website, so you can focus on what really matters.

Let’s Start a Web Design Project

Talk with a Web Strategist.