Not a day goes by where there doesn’t seem to be an update needed to your WordPress theme or any of the plugins you have installed to optimise your site. Though many users are vigilant in regards to keeping things up to date, others tend to be negligent to the importance and safety which can often backfire spectacularly – in fact only a few months ago there was a cross-site scripting vulnerability found in 15 WordPress plugins.
WordPress is sadly a victim of its own success. With an estimated 74.6 million sites using the CMS around the globe – accounting for over 18 percent of all websites on the net – a single security flaw can have an impact on a massive number of websites.
But this is also part of the beauty of using WordPress, as critical information like this gets shared across the community fast, meaning improvements and threats are continually being identified and made. This is one reason why the flaw with these 15 plugins were dealt with quickly, and if any users had fallen victim to the hack it would have had a knock-on effect of sabotaging all the hard work done through SEO as Google regularly de-indexes sites that have malicious code on them.
When it comes to updating WordPress it’s important to stay current with two things – the WordPress theme and any plugins you have installed. Often the biggest cause of negligence when it comes to updating plugins and themes is a fear that by clicking the update button it will cause knock-on issues. As with almost everything technological, it’s important that you have a backup before starting as often times you may find that certain plugins and changes you’ve made aren’t currently compatible with new updates.
While plugins are a great help for your site but often they are also the biggest culprit when it comes to security issues, as evidenced above. By patching security vulnerabilities and strengthening against attacks it ensues you’re constantly one step ahead of hackers.
If all of this seems like too much for you, we can offer a WordPress maintenance service to ensure your site and any transitions as a result of updates run smoothly.
