4 key benefits for keeping your WordPress updated

A well-planned, well-devel­oped Word­Press site can pro­vide val­ue for years after it goes live, regard­less of whether you choose to make ongo­ing changes and improve­ments or not. It is, how­ev­er, extreme­ly impor­tant that your core code, and any plu­g­ins and themes are kept up-to-date for sev­er­al reasons.

Security

The most impor­tant rea­son to have your Word­Press updat­ed reg­u­lar­ly is to keep the code as secure as pos­si­ble. Word­Press, along with many oth­er forms of CMS (Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem), is a known tar­get for hack­ers. The Word­Press secu­ri­ty team works con­tin­u­al­ly to iden­ti­fy and fix secu­ri­ty risks and holes. These fix­es are released as offi­cial Word­Press updates. Neglect­ing them leaves your site more prone to hack­ing. Any suc­cess­ful attack will most like­ly have seri­ous impli­ca­tions on your busi­ness. As a result, it will leave you open to poten­tial­ly los­ing con­fi­den­tial client infor­ma­tion, site down­time or inap­pro­pri­ate con­tent being uploaded to your site. Any unau­tho­rised changes will obvi­ous­ly require time and mon­ey to fix.

Performance

The Word­Press core devel­op­ment team spend a great amount of time mak­ing their code faster and more effi­cient. It’s a devel­op­er thing – we always want our code to be as stream­lined as it pos­si­bly can be. Keep­ing your Word­Press updat­ed means that your site is per­form­ing as well as it can.

Features

Major releas­es of the Word­Press core code gen­er­al­ly include improved func­tion­al­i­ty and updat­ed tools, allow­ing admin­is­tra­tors to get more from their site. The core updates make the CMS quick­er and sim­pler to use, encour­ag­ing users and admin­is­tra­tors to inter­act more with the website.

Future-Proofing

Fur­ther­more, you may want more sig­nif­i­cant changes mak­ing to your site. As the core code is updat­ed, new ver­sions of plu­g­ins are released to make the most of the cen­tral frame­work. As a result, a change or addi­tion to your site may require the use of a plu­g­in that will only run on the lat­est core Word­Press code. By keep­ing your Word­Press updat­ed, you’re stay­ing ahead of the game. You are giv­ing your­self much more choice when it comes to adding fea­tures in the future. Only updat­ing on an infre­quent basis would inevitably require a much more com­plex main­te­nance pro­ce­dure to get all core and plu­g­in code up to date.

These are just the main rea­sons why Word­Press main­te­nance is impor­tant – your web­site is an essen­tial part of your busi­ness, there­fore look after it!

Mission Control

For­tu­nate­ly, pur­ple­plan­et has a solu­tion for you, which we call pur­ple­tools. We will take all the headaches of updat­ing, back­ing-up and main­tain­ing your Word­Press web­site off your hands, util­is­ing a tai­lor-made con­trol pan­el to con­stant­ly mon­i­tor and update your website.

Read more about pur­ple­tools here.