Red circles and lots of messages – if you’ve been into the back-end of a WordPress website, you’ve undoubtedly seen it. There are updates waiting for themes, plugins and WordPress itself. But how important is it, to keep your WordPress site up-to-date?
Answer: VERY IMPORTANT! WordPress itself is an incredibly stable and secure system, despite what you may of heard from others in the world of web development and the internet. Security issues regarding WordPress can almost always come down to one thing: third-party plugins. It is critical you keep your plugins updated on a regular basis.
Updating plugins is usually a painless task, most times you can click update and everything will continue to run as normal. But not always! It is vital that you take a backup of your site before attempting any updates. Once you have a backup, you can attempt to update plugins. If no errors occur at this stage, great – but you’re not done yet! You will need to clear the WordPress cache (if applicable), and possibly the cache on the browser you are using to test the site. Yes, you will need to test that updating the plugins has not resulted in corrupting your site. How can you tell if something went wrong? If it’s not as obvious as a ‘critical error’ message, you may just have to browse your site looking for anything that doesn’t look right. And if it doesn’t look right, that is why you have your backup.
Encountering issues with WordPress updates? Or perhaps finding the task to stressful, or tiresome to handle? Give Forerunner a call, we can solve any WordPress issues you may have. We can also put you onto a maintenance plan, thereby ensuring that your website is always up-to-date and secure.
